Slashdot Mirror
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.
A lot of Slashdotters are really honest folks. Good to know. ðY
in computer science the application of expletives has also been scientifically correlated. For example:
Ruby Programming: profanity causes Ruby to slowly reveal itself as nothing more than an elaborate and desparate cry for help. It is in fact not a programming language at all.
Git: A bell curve of profanity and blasphemy can pinpoint the exact number of phrases required to successfully identify the team member who broke the build.
iptables: cannot be run without profanity and is in fact compiled into the code itself
Email: while its long been understood that profanity is a critical component of all email infrastructure, it may be curious to know that science has found Exchange servers in particular often default to routing mail based on the deafening curses against god almighty uttered by the admin.
Good people go to bed earlier.
No fucking kidding.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Simply saying "some people think he's honest" is not an objective measure of honesty.
In trump's case he regularly says the opposite of what he says the week month years before, so he's not honest by any measure. Google [trump contradicts trump] and you'll get so so many examples.
I did a financial check on his election declaration and found none of the numbers matched real accounts released elsewhere. And often the lies are screaming fraud (e.g. He claims Scottish golf course makes millions in profit, has $300 million investment, yet UK accounts show its loss making and has half that investment. Investors money is siphoned off to HQ, borrowing on many projects is 120%+ of the assets best assessed value and income isn't able to pay the interest). I even ran a few revPar numbers to estimate/test the plausibility of the accounts he's hiding and many were 10x exaggerated. This is Madoff level fraud.
Then there's the Pee memos.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3259984-Trump-Intelligence-Allegations.html
e.g. p15, 10th August 2016, "Kremlin engaging with several high profile US players, including STEIN, PAGE and (former DIA Director Michael Flynn) and funding their recent visits to Moscow.
Who is Michael Flynn? In August he was a nobody, yet Putin was grooming him. Trump didn't pick Michael Flynn until November 18th, months *after* that date. How would Kremlin know Trump would pick Flynn if Kremlin wasn't involved in the picking?
Time says Trump is a liar. Either because he himself says the opposite later, or because it reveals actions that could not be explained by Trump being honest. Like the Kremlin picking a pro-Kremlin General 3 months before Trump picks him.
Replying to my own thread with an example. You can objectively determine Trump is a liar, simply by comparing the incompatible numbers claimed in multiple places:
http://therealdeal.com/la/2016/11/04/property-tax-appeals-may-show-trumps-financial-disclosures-to-be-overstated/
"At 40 Wall Street, for example, Trump wrote in his book “Never Give Up” that the building makes approximately $20 million a year in rent and was worth $500 million in 2008, the year the book was published....On financial disclosure forms filed with the Federal Election Commission, the Republican presidential candidate listed the property’s income at more than $5 million, the highest category on the form....But the forms he filed with the city Tax Commission to appeal 40 Wall Street’s property taxes show that after mortgage payments and other costs, the building’s cash flow in 2014 was $104,000. During the previous three years, in the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis, it had negative cash flow of $5.5 million."
Now you might say "well he made a mistake" or "his understanding of the numbers has improved....", or the latest numbers not yet revealed show a total turnaounrd etc. but this is the norm with Trump numbers. They're all made up.
I notice that when I crunch fraud numbers, the fraudsters always use a simple multiplier, and the real numbers concealed as best possible. These two factors suggest the fraud is deliberate. The combination of concealment of real numbers, and the fraudulant public numbers always being a multiplier of the real numbers. Mistakes are random, you're as likely to find an overestimate as an underestimate in mistakes. Not so with fraud.
I think it's difficult for fraudsters to keep track of the lies they've told, so they use the real numbers adjusted by a simple multipler. Usually it's a x10 or x100, x1000 or x2 to keep it simple to convert in their head from real to fraud number.
And to hide the truth they hide the real numbers (like not revealing your tax returns in an election).
Trump exhibits both traits, suggesting he's aware of his fraud.
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+
"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.
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.
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's sudden grabbing and there's fondling after a breathy "Happy Birthday Mr President".
One is a crime due to lack of consent and the other is between consenting adults.
It's only the land of the nipple at the superbowl and places under Sharia law where I'd have to explain the difference between sexual assault and sex to someone over 15.
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.
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.