People who curse are more authentic, new study reveals

A new study has found that "blurting curses is positively associated with authenticity in certain situations."

“The consistent findings across the studies suggest that the positive relation between profanity and honesty is robust, and that the relationship found at the individual level indeed translates to the society level,” concludes the final paper set to be published in the journal of Psychological and Personality Science this year.



Gilad Feldman of the Department of Work and Psychology in Maastricht University in the Netherlands led an international research team who set out to measure the relationship between swearing and straightforwardness.

Swearing is usually considered as offensive and being a sign of dishonesty. But the paper explains that profanity in some cases, depending on the situation can be associated with authenticity. For example, people accused of crimes who are actually innocent are more inclined to swear during interrogations than those who are guilty and denying their crime, other studies have found.

To test their hypothesis, researchers first studied individual profanity by asking 276 individuals to report how commonly they curse, list their favorite swear words, and explain what emotions they associate with swearing (like anger, embarrassment, or anxiety). To ensure their reliability, the subjects were surveyed using a version of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, which is a standard psychological model developed in 1985. Those who made certain claims—for example that they always do whatever they said they would—were deemed liars based on this particular scale.



The next stage of the study involved analysing about 70,000 social media interactions between international participants to check the presence of profanity in status updates against other measurements of honesty online, such as frequency of use of words like 'I' or 'me' which have been shown in previous studies as a lack of forthrightness. “Profanity and honesty were found to be significantly and positively correlated, indicating that those who used more profanity were more honest in their Facebook status updates,” the researchers wrote.

The team also analysed profanity on a societal level. For this, they looked at the 2012 Integrity Analyses of 48 US states, which is a measure of transparency and accountability in state governments conducted by the Center for Public Integrity. After looking at the data and comparing it to individual swearing scores of state residents in their Facebook study, they found a correlation between frequent cursing in residents and the state’s integrity score.



“We set out to provide an empirical answer to competing views regarding the relationship between profanity and honesty,” the researchers wrote. “In three studies, at both the individual and society level, we found that a higher rate of profanity use was associated with more honesty.”

However, the researchers warned that dishonesty in the study was limited to “conscious creation of a false sense of reality” but didn’t address true ethics. This means that people who swear a lot may still commit serious crimes, but they won’t pretend that  "all’s well online".

This article originally on Quartz.