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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."

9 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. Death to Newspeak. by plopez · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They are not "challenges" or "opportunities", they're fucking problems. It's not "cost restructuring" it's firing people over the age of 40 because it looks good on a spreadsheet.
    In addition:
    "value proposition" -> will people pay for the shit you're selling
    "sharing economy" -> slave labor
    "Reagonomics" -> fucking laissez faire economics that failed in the 1800s and won't fucking work now
    "innovation" -> financial shell games by a bunch of thieving pig fucking bastards
    "market efficiency" -> stealing others labor
    "release 3.0" -> release 1.0 (if you're lucky) of a steaming pile of shit software that should never have been release
    "Software Engineer" -> fucking code monkey
    "Spin Meister" -> this is an interesting term. It seems to be related to the German work "spinnen" meaning to lie or tell a tall tale. In other words a fucking master liar.

    Feel free to add a few more or your favorite examples of Newspeak.

    --
    putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
  2. Non Sequitur Conclusion by dszd0g · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This study seems to be coming to a completely bogus non sequitur conclusion.

    You could use any question that people would be less than honest about. It would be like asking people how often they masturbate and then finding that people who said they masturbated more often were more honest in general. Instead of saying that people who were honest about how often they masturbate are more honest in general, the "researchers" here would conclude that people who masturbate more often are more honest...

    Any researchers that find Trump to be honest need their blood alcohol level examined during the research. A decent chunk of the country thought he was more honest than Clinton, but that is grading on quite the curve...

    --
    This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
    1. Re:Non Sequitur Conclusion by locofungus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I'm not even sure the study is that good.

      It seems there are four groups:

      People who use profanity and admit it.
      People who don't use profanity and admit it.
      People who use profanity but don't admit it.
      People who don't use profanity but claim to.

      If we make the assumption that there's nobody in the last class and the other three classes are all equal sized then people who admit to using profanity will all be honest while only half of the people who claim to not use profanity will be honest.

      In fact, I cannot see any way that the people who admit to using profanity can possibly appear less honest than the people who do on this test.

      --
      God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
    2. Re: Non Sequitur Conclusion by locofungus · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Different test. Yours is a tautology.

      My test: people who admit to using profanity are 100% truthful. People who say they don't are 50/50 truthful.

      I show that even if people who don't use profanity are 100% truthful, the claim "I don't use profanity" is a better indicator of being a liar than "I use profanity" even though the only people who lie are those who use profanity.

      Your test: people who don't use profanity are 100% truthful - but that's an axiom in my (made up) data because I exclude class 4. only 50% of the ones who do use profanity are truthful - I assign equal numbers to the three extant classes.

      --
      God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
  3. Re:Missed point by dbIII · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I find it very funny when someone says "believe me" after a huge and incredibly obvious lie. It seems to happen a lot.

    Scamming has become so wrote to them that it is literally integrated into their personalities at a fundamental level.

    They, the Bush family and a few other families lurking mostly around Washington have been at it for more than one generation. If you read a bit about Washington before the civil war you'll recognize a lot of surnames (not the Bush family but plenty of others), that's how long some of these "dynasties" have been going in the land that revolted against royalty.
    Christopher Hitchins knew Bill Clinton personally from the age of around 20 despite seeming to try to avoid him as much as possible - what he wrote on the topic provides a very interesting and very critical view from "the left".

  4. Swearing by ledow · · Score: 3, Interesting

    People who don't swear scare the fucking life out of me.

    Honestly.

    There's a difference between swearing AT someone or IN FRONT OF someone. You never swear AT a child. You can swear in front of one. (And if the parents have half a brain, they are told not to repeat it but I guarantee the primmest of young girls know all the swearwords by their teenage year if they want to use them.)

    Swearing is an expression of emotion, for the most part. There are people who put it in just because it feels big (you can spot those people even into adulthood), but mostly it expresses the scale of emotion behind what they are saying.

    Something is stupid.
    Something is FUCKING stupid.

    They are entirely different things.

    But people who deliberately DO NOT swear or - worse - do not tolerate swearing in their presence at all, they scare me. There's something repressive about that. I work in big posh schools and I guarantee you that even the most pretentious and correcting headmaster will swear at times, and the staffroom is full of expletives.

    Swearing is the emoticon of language. It provides emphasis, scale and scope to something that could otherwise be misinterpreted. And it's better to insert a swear word than actually raise your voice, I would posit.

    As such, people who swear are giving you not only their demand/request/reasoning but expressing how important it is to them too. That's honesty, alright.

  5. Re:The two seem very related... by jandersen · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    A slightly subtle point that I think both you and the OP are missing is that honesty is not quite the same as naively or spontaneously expressing whatever goes through your head. I won't provide an example, but it is fully possible to be honest and considerate at the same time, for example, just like it is possible to express even severe anger and dissatisfaction without shouting or getting into a fight.

  6. Re: Fucking bullshit ... by scamper_22 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Barring further context, grabbing them by the pussy wasn't exactly non-consensual. It's a complex term these days between explicit consent and implicit or not saying no.

    "I'm automatically attracted to beautiful [women]â"I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything ... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."

    They let him do it because he is a star.

    If you've ever kissed a girl without asking her explicitly 'can I kiss you now?' you've pretty much done what Trump has done.

  7. Re:Trump honest? by T.E.D. · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    He has spent rather a lot of time training for this in the entertainment industry (almost a decade and a half). Which reminds me of something fellow entertainer George Burns was fond of saying:

    The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that you've got it made.