Keep calm! That person cursing aloud may be honest

Washington DC, January 18

Usually, whenever people hear someone cursing out loud in public, the first thing that comes to their mind is that may be he/she is a rude or obnoxious. However, a new study finds that people who frequently curse are may be more honest.

Researchers from University of Cambridge in London published their study in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science and found people who use profanity are less likely to be associated with lying and deception.

Profanity is obscene language which, in some social settings is considered inappropriate and unacceptable and is often referred as language that contains sexual references, blasphemy or other vulgar terms.

The findings indicate that profanity can be positively associated with honesty and is often used to express unfiltered feelings and sincerity.

“The relationship between profanity and dishonesty is a tricky one. Swearing is often inappropriate, but it can also be evidence that someone is telling you their honest opinion,” said study author Dr David Stillwell.

“Just as they aren’t filtering their language to be more palatable, they’re also not filtering their views,” Stillwell explained.

The researchers set out to gauge people’s views about this sort of language in a series of questionnaires, which included interactions with social media users.

In the first questionnaire, 276 participants were asked to list their most commonly used and favourite swear words.

They were also asked to rate their reasons for using these words and then took part in a lie test to determine whether they were being truthful or simply responding in the way they thought was socially acceptable.

The study found that those who wrote down a higher number of curse words were less likely to be lying.

A second survey involved collecting data from 75,000 Facebook users from across the US to measure their use of swear words in their online social interactions.

The results indicate that those who used more profanity were also more likely to use language patterns that have been shown in previous research to be related to honesty. — ANI