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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
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+
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...
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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.
Clinton never grabbed a woman by the pussy, nor endorsed the practice. He got laid, which is different. The problem you and Trump seem to have is that you can't tell the difference between consensual, and non-consensual, sex. They're not equivilent.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
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.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
First, I want to be clear that I don't know what Trump did here -- whether or not his actions were appropriate given the circumstances, etc. However...
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.
Wow. Setting aside the fact that groping genitals is generally considered at least a little more intimate than a kiss, there IS something about his phrasing that makes this SOUND a little different from your scenario.
Namely, Trump says "I don't even wait." Your interpretation is that he doesn't preface a kiss without some Victorian protocol saying, "Dear lady, may I be granted the favor of a kiss?" or something. Yes, I suppose it could mean that. It could also mean that Trump is implying he doesn't even "wait" for implied consent. (In the context of the quote, it sounds like he's talking about novel encounters with people he doesn't know well, rather than a sort of "date context" or something where the "implied consent" might be easier to tease out. ) But I agree that we don't have enough context to know precisely what he meant here. HOWEVER, I think the more concerning turn of phrase comes later in your quotation, namely "when you're a star they LET you do it".
That's not a phrase of implied consent. He doesn't say, "When you're a star they WANT you to do it." The implication of the phrasing is that the woman is "letting" you do something that she's at best somewhat ambivalent about. If we're only talking about a kiss, maybe that amounts to a miscue or sexual harassment. But then Trump follows it with "You can do anything" and then talking about groping genitals. Again, no mention of the woman's desire or wishes -- "You can do anything."
So, IF one chooses to take the preceding "they LET you do it" to mean the woman is giving less than strong affirmation even for a kiss, following it up with crotch grab just because "you can do anything" might be mistaken -- in this linguistic context -- as implying sexual assault.
Again, I don't know whether Trump was actually intending to say that, because he says all sorts of crap that he obviously doesn't mean literally. He also could just be bragging in the context where this statement was recorded, rather than referring to his actual practice. Or whatever.
But if you take his PHRASING literally, it seems to indicate significantly more aggressive behavior than simply failing to offer a Victorian verbal query before a kiss.