It’s that time of year again—the very beginning of it. In all likelihood, this means that you recently considered a variety of potential New Year’s Resolutions, ranging from getting that promotion to losing weight to spending more time with your family. But there’s one potential resolution that, should you fulfill it, might actually make you less persuasive. What is it?
According to social psychologists Cory Scherer and Brad Sagarin, giving up swearing in the New Year could actually make you less persuasive. The researchers hypothesized that when people pepper their speech with an occasional obscenity, the audience perceives an increase in the speaker’s intensity. Moreover, this boost in the perceived passion and enthusiasm of the speaker ultimately makes the speech more persuasive.
According to social psychologists Cory Scherer and Brad Sagarin, giving up swearing in the New Year could actually make you less persuasive. The researchers hypothesized that when people pepper their speech with an occasional obscenity, the audience perceives an increase in the speaker’s intensity. Moreover, this boost in the perceived passion and enthusiasm of the speaker ultimately makes the speech more persuasive.
To test this idea, Scherer and Sagarin had participants watch a video of a five-minute long persuasive speech. For half of the participants, the speaker used the relatively tame swear phrase “Damn it!” once during the speech. For the other half of participants, the speech was exactly the same, except the swear phrase was omitted. Once the speech was over, participants were asked about their attitudes toward the topic addressed in the speech. Consistent with predictions, the data revealed not only that the speaker was viewed as more passionate about the topic when profanity was used than when it was not, but also that the former was more persuasive than the latter.
Does this mean that you should call up your clients and start filling your sales pitch with four-letter words? Of course not. First, the swear words used in this research were clearly very timid by modern standards. Second, the research also suggests that profanity is most likely to be effective when the audience is already generally in agreement with you, but you want to push them even more toward your point of view.
Still, these results should give pause to anyone considering completely abolishing profanity from their vocabulary in 2009: If you go through with it and eliminate even the tame swear words, you may find yourself breaking that very resolution—and cursing yourself out—the next time you fail to be persuasive.
Source:
Scherer, C. R., & Sagarin, B. J. (2006). Indecent influence: The positive effects of obscenity on persuasion. Social Influence, 1, 138-146.
Does this mean that you should call up your clients and start filling your sales pitch with four-letter words? Of course not. First, the swear words used in this research were clearly very timid by modern standards. Second, the research also suggests that profanity is most likely to be effective when the audience is already generally in agreement with you, but you want to push them even more toward your point of view.
Still, these results should give pause to anyone considering completely abolishing profanity from their vocabulary in 2009: If you go through with it and eliminate even the tame swear words, you may find yourself breaking that very resolution—and cursing yourself out—the next time you fail to be persuasive.
Source:
Scherer, C. R., & Sagarin, B. J. (2006). Indecent influence: The positive effects of obscenity on persuasion. Social Influence, 1, 138-146.
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