The Relationship Between Profanity and Honesty (2017) | Hacker News Reader

The Relationship Between Profanity and Honesty (2017)

gsb.stanford.edu

134 pointshappy-go-lucky48 comments

"These two forms of norm-violating behavior share common causes, and are often considered to be positively related."

Why do the authors assume dishonesty is "norm-violating"?

It seems logical that some forms of dishonesty are norm-conforming and some forms are norm violating. In any case, whether dishonesty actually violates norms should itself be tested rather than assumed (the paper's body actually notes some forms of dishonesty coming from social pressure but the heading is still there).

I mean, I might say that the dishonest statement "everyone aspires to honesty and honesty is what we value" is one socially acceptable kind of dishonesty. But that's my idiosyncratic point of view.

Yeah - the elephant in the room is that full honesty is essentially a social disability. The social expectation is to learn how to lie on your own at appropriate times.

I have a mild stammer. I struggle sometimes with certain sounds, I can never order lasagne without stammering.

Oddly enough if I swear I can have the fucking lasagne whenever I want.

I wonder if this "workaround" would stop working if people around you found it acceptable for you to swear when ordering lasagna.

Interesting thought - is it the personal transgression or the social that makes it effective?

Surely it would depend on whether the speaker thought it was acceptable or not?

Maybe. No idea. Even if people started to accept the swearing maybe the speakers knowledge that he has a special exception allowing him to say these words and it's okay would be enough. Or maybe he still considers it bad to swear even if other people thinks it's okay. It's not like brains always act in some predefined logical way.

I think it’s more to do with my ability to produce certain sounds that various swear words make easier. It’s not that I’ve any major hang up about swearing. The mental hang up is elsewhere, such as feeling anxious ordering food.

I usually workaround either by just pointing at the tray and say something like ‘I’ll have the pasta’ or ‘same again please’ if the person before me orders the same. If ordering off a menu I just stammer through it.

Oddly enough I stammer more with service staff than with peers or superiors (where swearing is not always an option). While there definitely some issue around making certain sounds aided by the swearing there is also a psychological aspect I imagine.

iirc this is the story behind Samuel L. Jackson's trademark profanity. He had a stutter, but by using 'motherfucker' as punctuation, he could bypass it.

It's also part of The King's Speech, about George VI's stammer.

That's a plot point of The Kings Speech, is it not?

Not making light of your stammer but that's incredibly charming.

I wonder whether that effect should be normalized against a profanity baseline for the given person.

i.e. I find it somewhat plausible that in an individual, swearing more than usual is positively correlated with being more honest than usual. I find it less plausible that people who swear a lot in general are more honest than people who don't.

I can see it.

The purpose of swearing, as it applies to primates, is suggested to be an additional channel of communication indicating types of danger (can't find the paper to link to, damnit). This includes a general "unknown" danger, as opposed to a directional danger from the ground or air. So the dispense of social norms (saying fuck a lot) to be more communicative is somewhat antithetical to sociopathic mimicry behavior, where you want to be more social nomative to achieve your predatory/anti-social goals.

The baseline of how much swearing is customary varies by context (social class, profession, etc). It appears e.g. that swearing is quite common in Wall Street trading culture — not an environment known for a particular commitment to honesty.

A lot of journalists are swearing lately, including in high profile places like NYT and The Guardian, and especially on Twitter. I suspect it's because they realized (consciously or not) that it increases credibility.

And yet when the freshman Congresswoman Rashida Talib said "we'll impeach the motherfucker" everyone lost their shit and MSNBC/CNN and any other left leaning news network dropped their shit to jump on the bandwagon of harassing her.

Positive coverage in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/04/democrats-co...

Positive coverage in Vox: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/4/18168157/ra...

I think there's a difference between swearing at inanimate things for emphasis, and swearing as in calling someone a name, which is personal abuse and shouldn't ever be tolerated no matter who it's targeted at.

> and MSNBC/CNN and any other left leaning news network dropped their shit to jump on the bandwagon of harassing her.

How was the the coverage of the right leaning news sites?

Really really negative coverage, but that's obvious.

The same coverage they gave Donald Trump's.

I suggest they're just trying to increase their signal to noise ratio, part of an arms race made de-facto I think by the new President.

The New Yorkification of Twitter.

At the same time, they demand less swearing for everyone but themselves. They have "civility" rules for their comments and also use their bully pulpit to demand social media also censor "uncivil" speech everywhere. They attack Trump for being crude while they themselves are crude. They demand "hate speech" be banned while they themselves partake in "hate speech". They accuse others of being anti-science, while they themselves reject science. Twitter has really pulled the veil from the ivory tower that was media. It just shows that these people can be just as hypocritical, biased and vicious as everyone else. But they demand special treatment, which is also what everyone wants. Journalists are human beings after all.

>They have "civility" rules for their comments and also use their bully pulpit to demand social media also censor "uncivil" speech everywhere. They attack Trump for being crude while they themselves are crude. They demand "hate speech" be banned while they themselves partake in "hate speech". They accuse others of being anti-science, while they themselves reject science.

Well, as they say, that escalated quickly. Can you give an example of what you mean?

I don't want to get into specifics because I don't think criticizing individual journalists is allowed here. Especially journalists from establishment media.

So how about a nytimes opinion on the matter?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/opinion/covington-twitter...

If you've followed the news to any degree or any of the controversies in the past few years, you'd realize there is incredible bias and agenda. Whether it is jussie smollet, covington, trump, campus rape crisis, etc. And hate can be doled out if to the right enemy. You can mock climate science denial while rejecting biology and gender. I don't see any objectivity or fairness or decency in media organizations today - left or right. Just politics and agenda. But that's just me and maybe my bias is clouding my judgment. Though I'm not sure who or what I am biased towards...

Twitter? That is what it is, and anything goes.

As for the rest, I find it refreshing that the NYT and Guardian are "bleeping" fewer quotes. I don't think the paper itself should start working blue, but if someone swears in an interview, you should print what they said.

EDIT: Oh, I hadn't read that particular article. It doesn't bother me much, but profanity is a crutch. I'm fine with it in day-to-day conversation and blog posts, but a professional writer using it in an opinion piece is lazy.

I wasn't talking about them "bleeping" quotes, but about the journalists themselves swearing in opinion pieces.

> Is there, I wonder, a more appropriate phrase than “fuck off”? I don’t want to swear unnecessarily but, historically, people have found the expression useful. It’s certainly earned its place in common usage. And I have to ask myself, if we don’t tell Theresa May to fuck off, what on earth are we saving it for?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/07/theres...

I guess it depends on your definition of "journalist", but the author of the piece you linked definitely wouldn't call himself one. He's a comedian, actor, TV writer, etc. and for the Guardian he writes humorous columns.

Submitted to http://lolmythesis.com/ as Swearing is caring.

Profanity is honest in the sense that is show your emotional state but it doesn't tell if you are right or wrong.

Additionally, it often doesn't help to engage conversation with people having an opposing view point.

An interesting followup would be looking at whether this is consistent across different reasons for using or not using profanity. For example, does the correlation hold if you separate people who don't use profanity due to personal moral conviction and people who abstain due to social norms?

Well this is good news, my six year old is a very honest kid.

For those who don't want to click on the link:

> There are two conflicting perspectives regarding the relationship between profanity and dishonesty. These two forms of norm-violating behavior share common causes, and are often considered to be positively related. On the other hand, however, profanity is often used to express one’s genuine feelings, and could therefore be negatively related to dishonesty. In three studies, we explored the relationship between profanity and honesty. We examined profanity and honesty first with profanity behavior and lying on a scale in the lab (Study 1; N = 276), then with a linguistic analysis of real-life social interactions on Facebook (Study 2; N = 73,789), and finally with profanity and integrity indexes for the aggregate level of U.S. states (Study 3; N = 50 states). We found a consistent positive relationship between profanity and honesty; profanity was associated with less lying and deception at the individual level, and with higher integrity at the society level.

> ... a linguistic analysis of real-life social interactions on Facebook ...

How can they tell if people are being dishonest on Facebook?

yeah, agreed. I would have thought it would be on the recipient/observer to report if they thought it was a a truthy or falsey statement, but the snippet above does not say that.

Even if the researchers fact check Facebook posts and found them to be untrue, that still wouldn't conclusively point to dishonesty because the message poster might believe in the falsehood. It's not a lie if you believe it.

> 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). The explanation was that dishonest people subconsciously try to (1) dissociate themselves from the lie and therefore refrain from referring to themselves, (2) prefer concrete over abstract language when referring to others (using someone’s name instead of “he” or “she”), (3) are likely to feel discomfort by lying and therefore express more negative feelings, and (4) require more mental resources to obscure the lie and therefore end up using less cognitively demanding language, which is characterized by a lower frequency of exclusive words and a higher frequency of motion verbs. Equation and usage rates in this study are summarized in Table 2.

> Newman et al. (2003) achieved up to 67% accuracy when detecting lies, which was significantly higher than the 52% near-chance accuracy achieved by human judges. Their approach has been successfully applied to behavioral data (Slatcher et al., 2007) and to Facebook status updates (Feldman, Chao, Farh, & Bardi, 2015). Other studies have since found support for these LIWC dimensions as being indicative of lying and dishonesty (Bond & Lee, 2005; Hancock, Curry, Goorha, & Woodworth, 2007; see meta-analyses by DePaulo et al., 2003 and Hauch, Masip, Blandón-Gitlin, & Sporer, 2012).

So it's all purely from linguistic analysis of the status updates. Seems like a stretch to me but I wouldn't doubt the overall result is true.

Thank you for finding the details of the methodology. I find this unconvincing. 67% accuracy, while better than a coin flip, is still pretty low. 1/3rd of their data points on the relationship between dishonesty and profanity on Facebook are wrong by their own admission.

> real-life social interactions on Facebook

oxymoron

> profanity and dishonesty. These two forms of norm-violating behavior

This implies that honesty is the "norm". I disagree. IMO social etiquette dictates a tremendous amount of "everyday dishonesty" "white micro-lies", and even just not engaging in those (i.e. not "being actively honest", but already just "not being actively dishonest") breaks social norms in a noticeable way.

Completely agree. Working in a corporate environment, people tend to shy away from any type of negativity or conflict, at all. Being blunt and direct is viewed negatively. I have been told by mentors that I'm too direct and to the point as a critique, which is something I didn't know was even possible.

It's incredible. But I have had to train myself to add "fluff" and language to "soften" what I am trying to communicate.

Did you see this as a failing on your part - you just didn't notice how the majority of the humans around you operate - or a failing on the part of those other humans?

I see it as a failure on my part, certainly not everyone else. That would be unreasonable. My personal preferred mode of communication is direct and to the point, but I guess most people are not like that.

> I have had to train myself to add "fluff"

You could have quit and became a waiter. You made the choice to add fluff.

Honesty maybe but not truth:

"This fucking statement is not fucking true".

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