This article warns against overstating the representativity of empirical studies with generic terms..This use of generic language covers a wide range of categories referring for instance to classes of individuals (women, children, adults), concepts (social exclusion, statistical learning), or the cerebral activity by referring to the brain or the human orbitofrontal cortex (example of a generic sentence provided by the authors: “Juvenile male offenders are deficient in emotion processing”). The authors present the 4 studies they conducted to measure on the one hand the frequency of generic language in reporting results in a corpus of psychology articles (only in titles, highlights and abstracts), and on the other hand to examine their contexts of use, and how lay readers interpret such statements.

They show the ubiquity of generic language in their corpus (nearly 90% of articles included generics in the summary of the findings), with sentences coded as generics being even more frequent in shorter elements (titles and highlights) than in abstracts. They reveal the overwhelming tendency to draw large lessons from limited samples. They also demonstrate that participants were sensitive to generic language and judged findings expressed with sentences coded as generic as more important (and sometimes more generalizable and conclusive) than those expressed with nongeneric language.

The authors insist that generics have important semantic implications as scientists who favor bolder claims may lose precision and could contribute (even unintentionally) to spreading misinformation, because their findings are presented as universal and broadly true regardless of time and place, ignoring variability and exceptions. The use of generics may be unintentional, reflecting the way generalizations are usually expressed in natural language; it may result from editorial policies requiring more condensed formats or incentive to communicate to a wider audience in an accessible and concise manner. It may also be intentional as a consequence of the pressure to publish or get fundings.

Although the authors do not explicitly mention “hype”, we nonetheless believe that generic language contributes to it, because of the lack of nuance and variability it conveys, leading readers to generalize broadly from limited results and imagine exaggerated conclusions.