Study Finds Link Between Profanity and Honesty

Study Finds Link Between Profanity and Honesty
neurosciencenews.com

Source: University of Cambridge.

Writing in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science a team of researchers from the Netherlands, the UK, the USA and Hong Kong

"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 favourite 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”. The Facebook users were recruited from across the United States and their responses highlight the differing views to profanity that exist between different geographical areas. For example, those in the north-eastern states (such as Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey and New York) were more likely to swear whereas people were less likely to in the southern states (South Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi)."

Doesn't strike me as a terribly strong result.

  I wish they gave a source for the relationship between using these pronouns and telling the truth.

Here's what the paper says:

  "The honesty of the status updates written by the participants was assessed
   following the approach introduced by Newman, Pennebaker, Berry, and Richards
   (2003) using LIWC. Their analyses showed that liars use fewer first-person
   pronouns (e.g., I, me), fewer third-person pronouns (e.g., she, their), fewer
   exclusive words (e.g., but, exclude), more motion verbs (e.g., arrive, go),
   and more negative words (e.g., worried, fearful; Newman, Pennebaker, Berry, &
   Richards, 2003)."