Swearing makes you more intelligent! Or does it?

 

By Asen Andonov

For the purpose of the second assignment, I found an online article published in the website of Huffpost Canada Living, and claiming that people who swear are more intelligent and have a richer vocabulary than those who do not.

What immediately draws one’s attention is the overgeneralized-sounding title “Intelligent People Use More Swear Words, according to Study”. It is obvious that the author tries to convince his reader of the trustworthiness of her claims by using a standard cliché in the popular science journalism “according to study”. Of course, the sole purpose is to make the reader ‘trust’ her arguments and embrace her idea. I personally consider any sort of over-generalizations such as this, suspicious in terms of scientific validity. Thus, following the four-move strategy of Caulfiled (2012), I traced back the original scientific article, read it and compared its claims to those of the popular science one.

Before proceeding with the analysis, I find it useful to provide a short summary of the popular science article and its structure. It begins with a direct statement that people who swear are more intelligent and have access to a richer vocabulary. It then continues with a citation from the scientific article which is taken from the first paragraph of the General Discussion part skipping the discussion of the limitation of the research. Finally, the popular science article continues with a short summary of two of the three studies reported in the article where it seems that the second study summary is described wrongly. Lastly, the article jumps to another conclusion stated in the article which seems to be entirely incomplete.

Since this popular science article (PSA onward) is claiming to propose some truths, I first decided to investigate the network of sources and citations the article was using.

“Researchers at Marist College in New York say a big vocabulary of curse words is a sign of higher rhetorical skill, and those that can name the most swear words in one minute tend to have a greater overall vocabulary.”

Interestingly, the PSA does not provide any direct reference to the original article. The author is only using the name of the College that has conducted the research, namely Marist College in New York, and one hyper link which is supposed to lead the reader to the article but surprisingly, it redirects her to another, similarly suspicious PSA. More misleadingly, the author suggests the reader to watch some video to “learn more about this fascinating study”. I checked the video but it was not much different than the article itself. Again, no reference was provided. Finally, in order to locate the article, one should click on a third hyperlink which then redirects the reader to the original article, conducted by Jay and Jay (2015). The article is published in a prestigious online journal, Language Science.

Back to the title, the PSA claims a direct causation between knowledge of swear words and intelligence. In the article however, the researchers distinguish between different types of taboo words such as slurs, animal-related and swear words. This remains unclear in the PSA and somehow implies a direct relationship between swear words and taboo words. Yet, in the conclusion, the researchers of the science article propose a more detailed categorization of taboo words for future research. Despite this fact, even in the article, the term ‘taboo words’ remain rather ambiguous because nowhere do Jay and Jay (2015) indicate what a taboo word might actually be.

The next major flow in the PSA was the reported studies. The science article provides details on three studies, the third one being a trial to replicate the first two. The PSA reports findings from the first two only. Though the first study is reported correctly, the second one remains incorrect. In the science article the researchers explain that two groups were tested under three conditions dictated by a prompt (1. Write as many words as you can on this page that begin with the letter A, 2. Write down as many CURSE WORDS or SWEAR WORDS as you can on this page, 3. Write down as many ANIMALS as you can on this page), whereas the PSA gives information for the first prompt only. The PSA further focus on the recall ability of the participants directing the attention of the reader to the fact cursing people possessed richer vocabulary since in one minute they were able to recall 533 taboo words.

“In the first experiment, the researchers gathered 43 participants (30 of whom were women), who had to come up with as many swear words and animal names as possible in one minute. They ended up coming up with 533 taboo words, including lesser-known words such as ass pirate.”

This is obviously an exaggeration since in the original article only suggests a ‘strong’ positive correlation meaning nothing than the statistically higher chances of reporting a p that is significant. This however does not necessarily lead to stronger causality between the recall of swear words and vocabulary richness and hardly, intelligence.

Furthermore, the PSA article ends up with another statement linked to personality by using the somehow ambiguous word “connected” thus suggesting that curse word fluency is related to different personality traits such as neuroticism or openness. In fact, in the scientific article the researchers demonstrate a positive correlation only that was found in lab settings rather than real life situations. This was not mentioned in the PSA though leaving the impression this holds true in all situations.

“The study also found that curse word fluency was connected to traits of neuroticism and openness, and that there was no major difference in results between men and women. “

Knowing that much of the research conducted nowadays is relying on questionable research practices to be able to publish their findings (Simmons, J., Nelson, L., & Simonsohn, U., 2011) I decided to further inspect the scientific article from a closer perspective and question the validity of its findings.

First of all, the small sample sizes, their level of homogeneity (females vs males), and the sampling methodology are definitely problematic. All participants were students who were ‘recruited’ meaning the sample was highly unrepresentative therefore, no generalizations were allowed. Furthermore, the first two studies had less than 50 participants most of whom were women. Despite this fact, the researchers claim there are no differences between the taboo language of men and women. The PSA, without assuming those flaws, is directly citing claims from the scientific article and is taking them as pure truth and often, out of context.

Another major flaw is the standardized tests that are used to test the vocabulary’s knowledge of the participants. They rather demonstrate the long term recall and the overall speed of recalling words. This automatically ignores people with disabilities such as dyslexics who are proven to be often highly intelligent though their recall ability might be lower.

Overall, the aim of the scientific research is to provide an account for the overall fluency of language and that taboo words, which are of different kinds, and suggest they might be related to the richness of vocabulary. The researchers also provide a framework for future research calling for a more precise categorization of taboo words to further contribute to the field of linguistics and psychology.

On the contrary, the purpose of the PSA is to suggest that unlike popular belief, swearing people are actually better language users. In my opinion, the article fails to accurately describe the scientific findings of the research by ignoring the original context and falsely generalizing the scientific findings.

 

References:

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/09/27/swear-words-intelligence_n_12213206.html

http://thefreethoughtproject.com/studies-swear-messy-intelligence/

Jay, K. L., & Jay, T. B. (2015). Taboo word fluency and knowledge of slurs and general pejoratives: deconstructing the poverty-of-vocabulary myth. Language Sciences, 52, 251-259. doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2014.12.003

Simmons, J., Nelson, L., & Simonsohn, U. (2011). False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant. PsycEXTRA Dataset. doi:10.1037/e519702015-014

Caulfield, M. (2017). Web literacy for student fact checkers. Pressbooks. Retrieved from https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/front-matter/web-strategies-for-student-fact-checkers/.