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Study Finds Link Between Profanity and Honesty (neurosciencenews.com)
A team of researchers from the Netherlands, the UK, the U.S. and Hong Kong report in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science that people who use profanity are less likely to be associated with lying and deception. Neuroscience News reports: Profanity is obscene language which, in some social settings is considered inappropriate and unacceptable. It often refers to language that contains sexual references, blasphemy or other vulgar terms. It's usually related to the expression of emotions such as anger, frustration or surprise. But profanity can also be used to entertain and win over audiences. As dishonesty and profanity are both considered deviant they are often viewed as evidence of low moral standards. On the other hand, profanity can be positively associated with honesty. It is often used to express unfiltered feelings and sincerity. The researchers cite the example of President-elect Donald Trump who used swear words in some of his speeches while campaigning in last year's U.S. election and was considered, by some, to be more genuine than his rivals. The international team of researchers set out to gauge people's views about this sort of language in a series of questionnaires which included interactions with social media users. In the first questionnaire 276 participants were asked to list their most commonly used and favorite swear words. They were also asked to rate their reasons for using these words and then took part in a lie test to determine whether they were being truthful or simply responding in the way they thought was socially acceptable. Those who wrote down a higher number of curse words were less likely to be lying. A second survey involved collecting data from 75,000 Facebook users to measure their use of swear words in their online social interactions. The research found that those who used more profanity were also more likely to use language patterns that have been shown in previous research to be related to honesty, such as using pronouns like "I" and "me."
Those who are less likely to hold back what they are saying are more likely to not hold back what they are thinking. Big surprise.
As dishonesty and profanity are both considered deviant they are often viewed as evidence of low moral standards.
Purported links between honesty and profanity being what they are, it seems worthy of experimentation by scientific method to determine if deviant is at all relatively rare, and thus, deviant at all.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
... because I'm honest, but I can't use profanity because my Facebook Friends are actual friends, acquaintances, family and stuff.
Twitter, using a fake name, however, is a great motherfucking outlet to compensate so I can say things like, "Fuck that pussy-grabbing baby-raping goddam whore mongering Trump and all of his goddam family."
For real.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Those who NEED to lie, defend inquiries that might REVEAL the lie by attacking with profanity. The mark is less likely to pursue that line of investigation, keeping them on track.
Push Trump's finances button and you get attacked BECAUSE HE'S HIDING STUFF THERE.
Push Trump's 'Putin' links and you get attacked, BECAUSE HE'S HIDING STUFF THERE.
"Honesty" can mean many things. Someone who has no verbal impulse control may be honest but it's not necessarily a good sign of character either. Such as when a person is drunk they are more likely to be honest because they lack the inhibition or capability of phrasing their words properly, and similarly drunk people do swear more. Honest also means one doesn't cheat or steal or take advantage of others, etc, which is not the same thing as blurting out the truth without thinking. For example, I'm sure the mugger in the alley will use quite a lot of profanity without being honest.
some people think he's honest
and
he's not honest by any measure
are not in conflict. Trump uses profanity to appear honest; and as people associate profanity with honesty they attribute "straight-forward" and "honest" to his persona (I'm not American or pro or anti Trump, just an interested outside observer). Bullshit is an art, and he's better at it than most.
Apologies for the repeated post, but I accidentally did an incorrect "cut-and-paste" right before hitting "submit," which resulted in repeating the words of much of the post several times.
Consider people who say 'darn, frick', etc.. We all know what they're saying, and they're really lying to themselves by 'editing' how they're expressing themselves.
There are various reasons people avoid profanity, but one of the primary reasons is out of politeness or concern for not offending those around them. Some might consider failure to adhere to politeness conventions to be "honesty in expression," but it could also simply be a social convention. I reflexively say "Thank you" to the toll-booth person who accepts my toll, but I'm not actually grateful to them. It's just a social convention and reflex to thank people who provide a service to you. Similarly, I walk around saying "How are you?" to people as I pass them in the hallway or whatever, but it's well-known that most people aren't seriously asking that question in more than a cursory "standard greeting" sense.
Are all of these people "lying" or not being "honest"? Or are they simply falling social convention, which also dictates that profanity is inappropriate in various social situations?
My distinction here is not a minor one, because desirability to adhere to social convention is actually arguably what this study measured, rather than "honesty" or whatever. There were three different components to this study. All have some problems.
(1) The first used Amazon Mechanical Turk to get people to answer a bunch of personality questions. There was no actual assessment of whether people were ACTUALLY lying. instead, they were given a series of questions "using the Lie subscale of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Revised short scale," However, despite its name, this test isn't actually used to determine whether people are prone to lie in general! This subscale is used, as the study notes, for social desirability responding.
That is, in the context of a personality test, this set of questions is used to fish out the people who are likely choosing answers based a little more on their "idealized" personality traits or what they might think would be "likeable," rather than being more realistic in their responses. Rather than a sort of "lie detector" test, it's more a test of how much a person wants to represent themselves as socially desirable. It has questions like, "If you say you will do something, do you always keep your promise no matter how inconvenient it might be?" If you answer "yes," the test assumes you to be a LIAR. But of course it has no way of knowing whether you are lying -- it rather assumes if you have more idealistic norms about social behavior that you're more likely to less realistic in your own self-reporting for personality questions.
Anyhow, this is a TERRIBLE proxy for "dishonesty" generally. It basically is measuring how close people want to try to adhere to social norms. And avoiding profanity in many situations is also trying to adhere to social norms. So it's basically a tautology that they found a correlation in the first study.
(2) Okay, on to the next one. Here, again, they didn't actually determine whether people were telling falsehoods. Rather, they looked at a bunch of Facebook messages and statistically analyzed how many times people used 1st and 3rd person pronouns, motion verbs, and anxiety words. They claim that this is a good way to tell how "honest" people are. Except the study they use as a benchmark to calibrate the frequency of these linguistic categories (this study) involved people giving detailed responses to prompts, both telling the truth and lying. The average words for the samples varied from 124 words for one category (people expressing a position on abortion while videotaped) up to 529 words (were people expressed an opinio
There is some sense in that, in that online one can be honest in relative safety. The downside is that an awful lot of people think that because they can shout down people with obscenities there must be some value in what they're saying.
Personally I like the intermediate level of posting under a fixed username. It becomes a bit of an alternate persona rather than a license to act as an asshole. The alternate persona also has a reputation it cares about.
For example, I'm sure the mugger in the alley will use quite a lot of profanity without being honest.
That mugger is likely more honest than the suited banker that manipulated the system in his own favor, causing millions to lose their homes.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
People who don't swear scare the fucking life out of me.
I don't, except in circumstances where I'm deliberately trying to shock, or at least surprise. It's not a matter of "repression", it's that profanity is not part of my vocabulary. You assume that people who don't swear are "repressing" or "censoring" themselves, but that assumption presumes that they actually do swear in their internal dialogue, but then don't say it out loud. But I don't use profanity in my internal dialogue, either, though I suppose I have some stand-in words (dang, etc.) which fill more or less the same purpose.
To put it another way, a good friend of mine like to say "If you don't scream FUCK when you hit your thumb with a hammer, your head will explode." My response is "When I hit my thumb with a hammer, I'm in way too much pain to go to the effort of remembering to scream FUCK." He's assuming that the curse word will be naturally present and that if you don't scream it it's because you're holding it back. For me, the curse word just isn't there, so what happens when I hit my thumb is a wordless howl of pain. No repression involved, and my head remains intact.
In addition, I think profanity is generally counterproductive. Rather than saying that something is "fucking stupid", why not spend two more seconds thinking, and articulate why it's stupid, or what about it is stupid? Your phrase accomplishes exactly nothing other than to make people understand that you're angry. It conveys no other information and does nothing to rectify the stupidity. Also, it's pretty common that when people bother to think about what exactly it is that's making them mad, they discover that, in fact, it's not stupid and that they just hadn't thought the whole situation through.
Finally, I find that the fact that I hardly ever use profanity makes it a really powerful tool on the rare occasions I do choose to use it. Those who use it constantly have basically nowhere to go when the situation deserves a really strong statement.
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