
The Relationship Between Profanity and Honesty (2017) - happy-go-lucky
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/frankly-we-do-give-damn-relationship-between-profanity-honesty
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joe_the_user
_" 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.

~~~
Nasrudith
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.

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knolan
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.

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

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benj111
Surely it would depend on whether the speaker thought it was acceptable or
not?

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Ettvatre
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.

~~~
knolan
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.

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microtherion
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.

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reallydude
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.

~~~
microtherion
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.

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781
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.

~~~
computerex
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.

~~~
denzil_correa
> 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?

~~~
computerex
Really really negative coverage, but that's obvious.

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contingencies
Submitted to [http://lolmythesis.com/](http://lolmythesis.com/) as _Swearing
is caring._

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Rexxar
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.

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harimau777
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?

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

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0_gravitas
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.

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

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

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throwaway287391
> 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.

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asaph
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.

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eternalban
Honesty maybe but not truth:

"This fucking statement is not fucking true".

