Abstract concepts and expertise: the case of institutional concepts

Recent views recognize that abstract concepts encompass a variety of exemplars, each relying on different dimensions, including not only sensorimotor but also inner, linguistic, and social experiences. How these dimensions characterize types of abstract concepts, and whether their weight varies across contexts and individuals remains an open question. We investigated the role of linguistic and social situations in the processing of institutional concepts, such as justice, by individuals with different levels of expertise. In a priming study, legal experts and non-experts were asked to respond to target words (go-trials) consisting of different kinds of abstract (institutional, theoretical) and concrete concepts (food, tools) and to ignore filler words (no-go trials). The verbal stimuli were primed by pictures depicting social-action, linguistic-social, linguistic-textual situations, and a control condition. As predicted, critical priming modulated performance on abstract concepts, likely due to their highly context-dependent meaning. Interestingly, we found that the processing of institutional concepts was selectively facilitated by social action prime, suggesting that this situational content may be integrated to support their representation. Crucially, the dialogic context, the linguistic social prime, affected more non-experts than law-experts, who tended to frame institutional concepts as shared idea for regulating social practices. Our results show that linguistic and social inputs become differently salient for institutional concepts representation depending on individual competence.