How to Look Ironic With Your Face and Your Voice (and Should You?)

When you start a conversation with someone, an implicit expectation is that they will tell you veridical things. And yet, in everyday life, false statements, which state things that do not conform to reality, are legion! This include lies, pretense, genuine errors, figures of speech, and fictional discourse. Sometimes false statements are blatantly false as in the case of metaphors such as "Tom's lawyer is a shark." But most often, false statements are not intrinsically false and we identify falseness because we have information about reality that allows us to conclude, for example, that Iraq does not have weapons of mass destruction, that your 10-year old niece is only pretending to be a schoolteacher, or that the chocolate is not in the blue container but actually in the red container.

How About Nonverbal Clues?

Our special interest is the situation where the speakers themselves provide nonverbal clues that their statements are false. Generally, people want their nonverbal expressions to support their words (for instance, in lying or role play), but there is an exception: when the speaker is being ironic.

Being ironic is a strange move: it consists of saying the opposite of what you think or what happens while simultaneously conveying what you really think! For example, Mark can say "As usual, you're perfectly on time" to Tom who arrives 1 hour late. How do speakers imply what they really think, in such a way that most adults will immediately understand?

To answer this question, we filmed about 100 speakers saying the sentence "Honestly, it was really great" while imagining a certain context (a day at Disneyland). For half of the speakers, the context involved saying the sentence ironically (because actually the day was a fiasco), while for the other half of the speakers, the context involved saying the sentence sincerely (because the day was a success). Importantly, we did not give them any further instructions on how to play their roles. As long as they respected the text, they could act it out in a totally free way.

Ironic Versus Sincere: What Makes The Difference?

First of all, it was very easy for observers to tell them apart: 75% of ironic speakers were recognized as "ironic" and 83% of sincere speakers as "sincere." This shows that people know how to convey these two different attitudes with nonverbal cues.

Furthermore, ironic speakers were still distinguishable from sincere speakers when there was only the image of the speakers (no sound), and when there was only the voice of the speakers (no image)!

When we compared discrimination between ironic and sincere speakers in the voice-only versus image-only conditions, accuracy was better when there was face but no voice. This is interesting because linguists and psycholinguists have talked about an “ironic” tone of voice for several decades, but concerning facial expressions, science says almost nothing! And yet, facial expressions were more reliable in guiding irony judgments than tone of voice.

By analyzing nonverbal behaviors in detail, we observed that ironic speakers differ from sincere speakers in many ways, both in the vocal channel and in the facial channel. The strongest cues were these:

  • Ironic speakers spoke more slowly and made more pauses
  • They smiled less and produced more mouth movements such as twisting the mouth or tightening the lips
  • They looked less at their addressee and produced more “eyebrow flashes” (very rapid raisings of the eyebrows)

Thus, speaking slowly, looking away, and producing eyebrow flashes and unusual mouth movements make up a repertoire of nonverbal cues that ironic speakers can use. This list is probably not exhaustive because irony can be used in many different contexts. While in our study, ironic speakers mainly conveyed disappointment, irony can also be used to convey anger, weariness, disgust, complicity, etc. There are certainly many ways to be ironic.

Now that you know some ways to sound ironic with your face and voice, the question remains: should you? Irony is a device to communicate meaning implicitly. Sometimes it is more fun not to use nonverbal cues to irony and let the other person wonder for a few seconds if you mean it or not… But then, beware of misunderstandings!


For Further Reading

Aguert, M. (2022). Paraverbal expression of verbal irony: Vocal cues matter and facial cues even more. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 46(1), 45‑70. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-021-00385-z

Colston, H. L. (2015). Using figurative language. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316226414
 

Marc Aguert is an associate professor of developmental psychology at Caen-Normandy University. His main research interest is the development of figurative language comprehension throughout childhood and adolescence.

 

How Long Does It Take to Get Over Someone? Social Media Data May Have the Answer

If you are recovering from a breakup of a cherished relationship, you may have a very important question in your mind: how long until your devastating heartache ends? People will have different answers depending on whom you ask, but it turns out that social media can give us a more substantial answer.

By analyzing people’s language changes on social media when they are going through a breakup, we can not only quantify how long the recovery period lasts, but also when the breakup process actually starts, even before the official end date. In recent research, we found that the breakup process lasts around nine months, starting from the gradual unraveling of the relationship to the official breakup date, and finally, to the uncoupling and recovery phase.

Our team identified a group of people who had posted about their breakups on Reddit. Reddit is a popular discussion website where people gather in different communities (subreddits) based on their interests. These communities can be centered around any topic under the sun, from tennis to cooking to relationship advice. Unlike some popular platforms such as Facebook or Instagram, users typically post using anonymous handles that are not tied to their real identity on Reddit. There is a subreddit called r/BreakUps that specifically caters to people seeking support during their breakup. After identifying about 6,800 users who had gone through breakups, we looked at their language up to a year before and after their breakup to understand how the process had unfolded. All analyses were conducted in the aggregate to preserve the anonymity of individual users.

Clues In Language

People’s language leaves subtle clues about their emotional and social state as they go about their daily lives. Also, people’s language patterns can go through drastic changes when they are going through a distressing life event, such as a breakup. These changes are largely unconscious but something computer-based analyses can pick up on.

After analyzing 1 million posts, we found that people’s language went through changes starting three months before they posted about their breakup, lasting about six months after the breakup. Their language became more self-focused, more personal, and showed signs of increased mental burden, which is typical of people going through a traumatic life experience. Importantly, these changes occurred even when people were posting on topics outside of their relationship, showing the deeply pervasive impact of breakups. In their real lives, these changes may have manifested in a lack of focus at work, less interest in technical tasks, and a general preoccupation with their personal lives.

What If a Person Recovers Slowly?

There were some differences between people who recovered quickly from their breakup versus those who took longer. People who had a slower recovery showed prolonged signs of increased mental burden and preoccupation, and also had more references to their ex and their shared life together. They had a difficult time untangling their identity from that of their partner and were struggling to understand why the relationship ended.

The language patterns observed in our project may help predict when people are at risk for protracted emotional distress during a stressful life event. If someone is in deep emotional distress six months or a year after their breakup, it might be a good time to seek professional help. A clinician can help uncover what remains unresolved in their mind.

What makes this work exciting to us is that never before have researchers been able to track the end of a romantic relationship across so many people in near-real time. With the public’s increased use of social media and the improvement of text analysis techniques, social psychologists have new tools to study deeply personal events such as breakups. The same techniques can be used to study things like bereavement and depression (and in fact, many researchers are doing exactly that) to provide insights to practitioners. As computer-based tools improve, increased use of text analysis in the field of social psychology is an inevitability and may provide a new understanding of the human mind.


For Further Reading

Seraj, S., Blackburn, K. G., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2021). Language left behind on social media exposes the emotional and cognitive costs of a romantic breakup. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(7), e2017154118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2017154118


Sarah Seraj is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at A Better Force, and her research uses language to understand the effect of both personal and collective upheavals on people’s well-being.

Kate Blackburn is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and her research interests explore the perceptual and behavioral processes of language used in people’s stories and social interactions online. 

Moral Echo Chambers Breed Radicalization

It has been just over a year since a group of radicalized individuals stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021. The crucial role of social media in this incident is undeniable: far-right social-media platforms, such as Gab and Parler, were used to communicate exactly which streets to take in order to avoid the police, and some posted about carrying guns into the halls of Congress. Bolstered by former President Trump, far-right groups had organized on their trusted social-media networks and invited others to their “rightful” cause. Eventually, this online activism became real-world violence.

My colleagues and I at the University of Southern California delved into social media postings to see if we could find underlying psychological clues to explain what could motivate people to use extreme and violent tactics. A close look at the history of hate crimes and radical groups, and our research, point to a common ground between them: they all have a shared moral vision, that is, adherence to a set of guiding principles that are perceived to be held by all group members. This vision then motivates individuals to use radical or violent strategies to achieve that shared moral vision. In other words, people who are embedded in morally homogeneous environments might develop dichotomous thinking (a “friend or foe” mindset) and demonstrate tunnel vision, focusing all their efforts exclusively on the destruction of the opponents for a sacred purpose.  

We studied nearly 25 million posts on Gab using advanced computer methods for recognizing language usage, and found that the more a person’s language in their posts aligned with their group’s moral values, the more prone they were to use hateful, derogatory language toward oft-targeted minoritized social groups. In other words, we find that the more people are in morally homogeneous “bubbles,” the more likely they are to resort to radical means and verbal violence against others, aiming to achieve their prejudicial vision.

Studying radicalized networks, like Gab, is particularly important in order to understand the underpinnings of radicalization. As mainstream networks such as Twitter and Facebook began to limit the activity of groups such as QAnon on their platforms, these ideologies have slowly resurfaced in other networks that allowed them to openly call for violence under the guise of “freedom of speech.” 

To make sure that our results are not limited to the idiosyncratic features of Gab, we repeated our analyses on a different social-media network called “Incels” founded for “involuntary celibates.” While at first sight Incels might seem less harmful than Gab, that may not be the case: The incel ideology has inspired multiple instances of deadly violence. Elliot Rodger, for example, killed six and injured fourteen (before killing himself) in 2014 to instigate a “War on Women” for “depriving me of sex.” By examining over 900,000 posts in this online community, we again found that Incels users who find themselves in a “bubble,” wherein their beliefs and values are strongly reinforced, are more prone to post hate speech, calling for radical acts to defend heterosexual men and violence against women. In these morally homogeneous environments, individuals feed one another’s moralized visions of the world and feel like others in their group are just like family members, a “band of brothers.”

Taking Our Questions Into The Laboratory

After we uncovered these antecedents of hate speech and the calls for violence in Gab and Incels, we wanted to further understand the mechanism at play, so we designed several experiments. We asked people to imagine they have been invited to a Facebook group and that others in this community shared their moral values. In a comparison group, we told participants about the same Facebook group, but told them that few members shared their moral values. We then asked participants about their intentions to use extreme and illegal measures to protect this hypothetical group. We found that people who were led to believe that they are in a group with shared values had higher radical intentions to protect the group at any cost, even by acceptance of resorting to violent means. In another experiment, we asked U.S. participants to first choose a moral value most important to them among five values: care and compassion, fairness and justice, loyalty to the group, respect for authority, and  physical and spiritual purity. Then we led them to believe that other Americans also share their selected moral value. We also had a comparison group to whom we said that few Americans shared their selected moral value. Again, we found that people who were told that the majority of Americans shared their particular value showed increased radical intentions and they even became slightly more willing to “fight and die” for the United States and the values it stands for. This was the case regardless of what moral value people chose and whether they were liberal or conservative in their political views. We learned two important things:

  • Morality is unique in motivating extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice. Non-moral views (those about mere preference rather than principles about right and wrong) may not have the power to drive people to the edges. Therefore, diversity of moral worldviews within social networks can be considered a good next step to avoid formation of moral echo chambers.
  • Social media networks have rewired our social life, and they can give us a false image of our social world. Too much similarity in the views in our feed could give us a picture that “everyone thinks like me” and that “everyone who does not think like me is evil,” which could worsen political polarization and erode our ability to tell truth from falsehood.

Real-World Threats Of Online Radicalization

The storming of the U.S. Capitol is a good example of how online radicalization breeds physical violence: Those who were convinced that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Trump organized online using the hashtag #StoptheSteal (signaling their effort to stand up to injustice) on Gab and elsewhere, which served as a hub for organizing the insurrection.

These Trump supporters were acting because they were presumably deeply convinced that the presidential election was stolen, a moral transgression. They thought that someone needed to do something to bring order back into their country, and they thought they should “go in.” The insurrection was a demonstration of how moralization in echo chambers can lead to violence and death chants for the Vice President of the United States in Congress halls.


For Further Reading

Atari, M., Davani, A. M., Kogon, D., Kennedy, B., Ani Saxena, N., Anderson, I., & Dehghani, M. (2021). Morally homogeneous networks and radicalism. Social Psychological and Personality Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506211059329

Hoover, J., Atari, M., Davani, A. M., Kennedy, B., Portillo-Wightman, G., Yeh, L., & Dehghani, M. (2021). Investigating the role of group-based morality in extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice. Nature Communications, 12(1), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24786-2

Fiske, A. P., & Rai, T. S. (2015). Virtuous violence. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.


Mohammad Atari is a social psychologist, currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University where he studies cultural change and moral values using experimental methods and natural language processing.

 

Hidden but Widespread Gender Biases Emerge in Millions of Words


Language pervades every aspect of our daily lives. From the books we read to the TV shows we watch to the conversations we strike up on the bus home, we rely on words to communicate and share information about the world around us. Not only do we use language to share simple facts and pleasantries, we also use language to communicate social stereotypes, that is, the associations between groups (for example, men/women) and their traits or attributes (such as competence/incompetence). As a result, studying patterns of language can provide the key to unlocking how social stereotypes become shared, widespread, and pervasive in society.

But the task of looking at stereotypes in language is not as straightforward as it might initially seem. Especially today, it is rare that we would hear or read an obviously and explicitly biased statement about a social group. And yet, even seemingly innocuous phrases such as “get mommy from the kitchen” or “daddy is late at work” connote stereotypes about the roles and traits that we expect of social groups. Thus, if we dig a little deeper into the relatively hidden patterns of language, we can uncover the ways that our culture may still represent groups in biased ways.

Using Computer Science to Uncover Hidden Biases

Recent advances in computer science methods (specifically, the area of Natural Language Processing) have shown the promise of word embeddings as a potential tool to uncover hidden biases in language. Briefly, the idea behind word embeddings is that all word meaning can be represented as a “cloud” of meanings in which every word is placed according to its meaning. We place a given word (let’s say “kitchen”) in that cloud of meaning by looking at the words it co-occurs with in similar contexts (in this case, it might be “cook,” “pantry,” “mommy,” and so on). If we have millions to billions of words to analyze, we eventually arrive at an accurate picture of word meaning where words that are close in meaning (like “kitchen” and “pantry”) will be placed close together in the cloud of meaning. Once we’ve achieved that, we can then answer even more detailed questions such as whether “mommy” is placed as closer in meaning to “kitchen” or to “work.”

Using these and other tools, my colleagues and I saw the potential to provide some of the first systematic insights into a long-standing question of the social sciences: just how widespread are gender stereotypes really? Are these stereotypes truly “collective” in the sense of being present across all types of language, from conversations to books to TV shows and movies? Are stereotypes “collective” in pervading not only adults’ language but also sneaking into the very early language environments of children? Although evidence for such biases has long been documented by scholars, our computer science tools allowed us to quantify the biases at a larger scale than ever before.

To study stereotype pervasiveness, we first created word embeddings from texts across seven different sources that were produced for adults or children including classic books (from the early 1900s), everyday conversations between parents and children or between two adults (recorded around the 1990s), and contemporary TV and movie transcripts (from the 2000s), ultimately totaling over 65 million words. Next, we examined the consistency and strength of gender stereotypes across these seven very different sources of language. In our first study, we tested a small set of four gender stereotypes that have been well-studied in previous work and thus might reasonably be expected to emerge in our data. These were the stereotypes associating:

  • men-work/women-home
  • men-science/women-arts
  • men-math/women-reading
  • men-bad/women-good

Stereotypes Really Are Everywhere In Our Language

Even though our seven kinds of texts differed in many ways, we found pervasive evidence for the presence of gender stereotypes. All four gender stereotypes were strong and significant. Moreover, there were no notable differences across child versus adult language, across domains of stereotypes, or even across older texts versus newer texts. To us, this consistency was especially remarkable in showing that even speech produced by children (as young as 3 years old!) and speech from parents to those young children revealed the presence of gender stereotypes that have not been documented on such a big scale at such young ages.

Having shown pervasiveness for these four well-studied stereotype topics, we next turned to gender stereotypes for more than 600 traits and 300 occupation labels. Here, we found that 76% of traits and 79% of occupations revealed meaningful associations with one gender over another, although not all were large in magnitude. The strength of gender stereotypes of occupations was stronger in older texts versus newer texts; and the strength of gender stereotypes of traits was stronger in adult texts versus child texts. And yet, we also saw continued evidence of consistency. For instance, across most of our seven different kinds of texts the occupations “nurse,” “maid,” and “teacher” were stereotyped as female, while “pilot,” “guard,” and “excavator” were stereotyped as male.

By bringing together both the unprecedented availability of massive amounts of archived naturalistic texts, and the rapid advances in computer science algorithms to systematically analyze those texts, we have shown undeniable evidence that gender stereotypes are indeed truly “collective” representations. Stereotypes are widely expressed across different language formats, age groups, and time periods. More than any individual finding, however, this work stands as a signal of the vast possibilities that lie ahead for using language to uncover the ways that biases are widely embedded in our social world.


For Further Reading

Charlesworth, T. E. S., Yang, V., Mann, T. C., Kurdi, B., & Banaji, M. R. (2021). Gender stereotypes in natural language: Word embeddings show robust consistency across child and adult language corpora of more than 65 million words. Psychological Science, 32(2), 218–240. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620963619

Caliskan, A., Bryson, J. J., & Narayanan, A. (2016). Semantics derived automatically from language corpora necessarily contain human biases. Science, 356(6334), 183–186. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aal4230


Tessa Charlesworth is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University where she studies the patterns of long-term change in social cognition.

 

When Congress Speaks (and Posts and Tweets)

Sigmund Freud, who wrote about “slips of the tongue,” was one of the first psychologists to see language as a device for exploring the human mind. He was by no means the last. Throughout the 20th century psychologists developed many coding schemes to investigate what people say in order to better understand their mental lives.

Analyzing texts was once done only by hand, and it was back-breaking work for researchers who were willing to undertake it. Nowadays, we have computer technologies that can automatically analyze mountains of words in order to detect themes and patterns. One example is the popular Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program developed by Jamie Pennebaker of the University of Texas. One of my former Ph.D. students, Joanna Sterling, and I used LIWC to quantify the ways in which liberals and conservatives use language differently.

First we looked at the use of language in nearly 25,000 English-speaking Twitter users and found that liberals and conservatives did indeed use language differently. Liberals used more benevolence language, including words and phrases such as improve, benefit, care for, assist, enhance, nurture, and lend a hand.

Conservatives, on the other hand, were more likely to use language emphasizing all of the following themes:

  • Threat, such as hurt, warning, terror, loss, and risk
  • Security, such as safety, defend, guard, protect, and shield
  • Tradition, such as family, faith, religion, custom, and foundation
  • Resistance to change, such as keep, normal, hold, continue, and prevent
  • Certainty, such as all, every, always, sure, indecision, and never
  • Power, such as big, up, God, and win
  • Anger, such as kill, fight, hate, attack, and murder
  • Anxiety, such as fear, doubt, worry, afraid, and stress
  • Negative emotion in general, such as bad, miss, problem, and wrong

Many political scientists believe that ordinary citizens take all of their ideological cues from political elites, such as members of the U.S. Congress—in other words, believing what respected authorities tell them to believe about politics. This is not our view: we believe that even among people who are not very engaged in politics there is a meaningful connection between how people think (their psychology) and what they think (i.e., their ideology). Nevertheless, the question of whether liberal and conservative members of Congress use language differently from one another—and the extent to which their language use parallels liberal and conservative members of the public—is an inherently interesting one.

Therefore, we analyzed the language used by members of the U.S. Congress on Twitter (88,874 tweets), Facebook (15,636 posts), and the floor of Congress (6,159 speeches) over the same four-month period in 2014. Of course, speeches and other forms of communication issued by legislators are often written by staffers, but they tend to be quite ideologically similar to the politicians for whom they work.

Consistent with our earlier findings based on tweets sent by ordinary citizens, conservative legislators used more language pertaining to threat, risk, inhibition, power, religion, and—only on the floor of Congress—tradition and resistance to change. Liberal legislators, on the other hand, used more language pertaining to benevolence, affiliation, achievement, and—on the floor of Congress—universalism, stimulation, and hedonism.

Of course, there were also many categories of language use on which liberal and conservative elites did not differ, especially when they were on the floor of Congress. For example, there were no consistent differences in the use of long words, swear words, or language that signified anxiety, anger, self-direction, or future orientation. Overall, while there were a number of telling differences in the communication of liberal and conservative legislators, these differences were weaker and less extensive than what we found for ordinary citizens.

One day the kinds of tools that researchers have been developing to study patterns of mass and elite forms communication may help us to understand not only the ways in which leaders influence their followers (and vice versa) but also the dynamics of social movements as they are still taking shape. This is because language is one of the strongest cues to what we are thinking and feeling, as individuals, groups, and even entire societies.


For Further Reading

Barberá, P., Casas, A., Nagler, J., Egan, P. J., Bonneau, R., Jost, J. T., & Tucker, J. (2019). Who leads? Who follows? Measuring issue attention and agenda setting by legislators and the mass public using social media data. American Political Science Review, 113, 883-901. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055419000352

Jost, J. T., & Sterling, J. (2020). The language of politics: Ideological differences in congressional communication on social media and the floor of Congress. Social Influence, 15, 80-103. https://doi.org/10.1080/15534510.2020.1871403

Sterling, J., Jost, J. T., & Bonneau, R. (2020). Political psycholinguistics: A comprehensive analysis of the language habits of liberal and conservative social media users. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 118, 805–834. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000275
 

John T. Jost is a Professor of Psychology, Politics, and Data Science at New York University. He is the author of A Theory of System Justification (Harvard University Press, 2020) and Left & Right: The Psychological Significance of a Political Distinction (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Don’t Talk Behind My Back!

In everyday life, the ability to sense objects in the space around us is key to functioning and staying safe. Have you ever wondered which sense gives us the most details about our environment? We get the majority of information about what is happening around us through hearing. We hear within a 360-degree radius, while we only see within about a 120-degree radius. In addition, unlike vision, which we can “turn off” merely by closing our eyes, we are unable to block sounds out with sheer willpower.

So, in a way, hearing is a superpower.  It lets us receive crucial information about the environment. It tells us about things we cannot see at all, perhaps because they are obscured or because they are behind us.  From an evolutionary point of view, hearing is an adaptation that helps us avoid danger.

However, hearing may also be biased. Research in psychoacoustics—the field that studies the psychology of sound—has shown an auditory bias for specific sound locations. We detect sounds such as barking dogs, laughing children, or roaring engines more quickly when they occur behind us rather than in front of us. Perhaps more importantly, we experience stronger negative emotions in response to sounds that come from behind us than to sounds that come from the front. We wondered if this basic auditory bias also applies to the perception of verbal messages.

In social life, we communicate with each other mostly through speech. Because our spatial position relative to other people keeps changing, verbal messages reach us from various locations. Some messages come from the front. In face‐to‐face interactions, for example, we not only hear what the other person says, but we can see the speakers' eyes, facial expressions, and gestures.

However, sometimes we don’t face a person who is speaking to us because we need to watch what is in front of us or are physically unable to turn around. For example, a driver may hear a passenger's request while watching the road, or a teacher may hear a question from a student while she is writing on a white board. Similar things happen to mountain climbers, kayakers, soldiers, and musicians.  They all may hear important communication coming from behind them. For people with a physical disability, it might not even be possible to turn toward incoming sounds every time someone speaks to them from behind.

With these examples in mind, we explored how people evaluate verbal messages that come from behind them and whether these evaluations depend on the content of what is said. Specifically, we asked our research participants to listen to and evaluate verbal messages that were either about themselves or about another person. In both cases, the messages were presented either behind or in front of the participants.  

Our results showed a rear negativity effect.  Listeners evaluated verbal messages coming from behind them as more negative than exactly the same messages coming from in front of them. This effect occurred both for messages about the participant and about another person, but the negativity bias was stronger when the message was personally relevant to the listener rather than being about someone else.

So, what does the rear negativity effect mean? Our results suggest that people have a bias to evaluate verbal messages more negatively when they come from outside their visual field. We don’t like it when somebody literally talks behind our back, especially when they talk about us. Alfred de Musset, a French dramatist, would probably have agreed.  He observed that “The most disagreeable thing that your worst enemy says to your face does not come close to what your best friends say behind your back.” He seems to have been right.

This rear negativity bias may affect how we communicate.  For example, speakers may pay attention to their own spatial position and adjust how they communicate while behind someone. Speakers may be more careful about what they say—and how they say it—when they know the listener is  hearing them from behind.  Whether this proves to be the case or not, the rear negativity effect deserves further research attention. After all, important messages sometimes come to us from behind.


For Further Reading

Frankowska, N., Parzuchowski, M., Wojciszke, B., Olszanowski, M., Winkielman, P. (2020). Rear negativity: Verbal messages coming from behind are perceived as more negative. European Journal of Social Psychology, 50(4), 889-902. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2649
 

Natalia Frankowska is a social psychologist at SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw, Poland who studies the perception of sounds. Recently, Natalia began new lines of research in evolutionary psychology that include pathogen avoidance and mate choices.

 

 

Does Your Self Live in Your Head—or in Your Heart?

We often have difficulty describing ourselves fully yet succinctly. This is because our personality is complex and made up of socially constructed concepts. (What is a friendly versus unfriendly person, really?) As with other abstract concepts, such as emotions, people sometimes use metaphors to describe themselves and other people. In everyday conversation, saying that someone “follows their heart” often seems clearer and more informative than saying that someone scores high on emotionality.

These metaphors replace something complex and abstract, such as an aspect of someone’s personality, with something concrete and understandable (such as a heart). Everyone knows that the heart is associated with love, compassion, intuition, and emotion, and we even have physical experiences that correspond with the heart, such as a faster heartbeat when we’re excited. Therefore, people who say they “follow their heart” give us a good sense of their personality. The metaphors we use to describe ourselves tell other people how we define ourselves, and our research shows that do reflect people’s personalities.

A few years ago, we conducted a series of studies that asked people whether they locate their sense of self in their head or their heart. Overall, 50% of our participants chose the head, and 50% chose the heart. Their answers to this question were related to a wide variety of psychological characteristics. In general, head people tend to be more logical, interpersonally cold, and have higher GPAs. In contrast, heart-people tend to be more intuitive, interpersonally warm, and literally “follow their hearts” when making moral decisions in the sense that they prefer intuitive decisions over calculated ones. Since this initial investigation, numerous studies have examined other implications of where people metaphorically locate their self. A recent study even found that it relates to whether people use more verbs (heart-people) or nouns (head-people) in everyday language.

Responses to this simple self-location question are associated with many things. In a set of studies involving over 2,575 participants from the United States and Germany, we examined whether people’s self-location was related to the degree to which they believe in God and their level of religiosity. We knew from other research that God-belief is intuitive and that people high in religiosity tend to score higher on empathic moral concern, which seems a lot like heart-people. Therefore, we expected that heart people would score higher in God-belief and religiosity. Indeed, heart-locators had a higher certainty in their belief in God and were more religious and spiritual than head people—although, of course, this does not mean that head people are atheists.

We also wanted to know which characteristics of heart people are associated with their higher religiosity and God-belief. In one study, we gave participants a set of moral dilemmas to measure their empathic moral concerns. Think of the famous trolley problem where a trolley is heading down a track to kill four people. If you flip a switch, the trolley will kill only one person. Do you flip the switch and kill one person? We found that heart people are less likely to say they would flip the switch, probably because they do not want to be responsible for that one person’s death. Furthermore, people higher in God belief also responded in this manner, which may explain why heart people believe in God more than head-people. In other words, heart people appear to believe in God more than head people partially because they are higher in empathic concern.

The other reason heart-people might believe in God more than head-people involves their intuitive nature. In a final study, we had participants indicate their self-location and their level of God-belief. Then they completed math questions for which the intuitive answer is wrong. Consider this example: A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost (in cents)? The intuitive response is 10 cents, but the correct response is 5 cents. We found that heart-people are more likely to make the intuitive response than head-people. Consistent with other studies, people who scored higher in God-belief made the intuitive response – and this may also explain why head-people score higher in God-belief. Head people and heart people seem to possess different cognitive styles that lead them to differ in many ways. 

When being literal will not communicate clearly, we sometimes describe things metaphorically. Being metaphorical packs a large amount of information into a small package. We find that whether people associate their sense of self with their head or their heart reveals a lot about their personality and reactions. From intuitive problem-solving to classic moral dilemmas, whether people see the self as residing in the head or the heart tells us a lot, including their beliefs about the existence of God.


For Further Reading

Fetterman, A. K., Juhl, J., Meier, B. P., Abeyta, A., Routledge, C. & Robinson, M. D. (2020). The path to god is through the heart: Metaphoric self-location as a predictor of religiosity. Self and Identity, 6, 650-672.
 

Adam K. Fetterman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston. His research examines a number of topics including metaphor, nostalgia, religiosity, politics, and others.

Brian P. Meier is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Gettysburg College. His research examines a number of topics including eating behavior, helping behavior, metaphors, mindfulness, the naturalness bias, and others.

Analyzing the Underlying Meanings of “Black Lives Matter” and “All Lives Matter”

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Words always matter—so much so that they sometimes represent a battleground for competing interests and ideologies. The phrase “Black Lives Matter” has become something of a cultural dividing line, like wearing a face mask or a MAGA hat.  But why? 

After all, it  is difficult to argue with the proposition that “Black Lives Matter,” just as it is difficult to argue with the common rejoinder to it,  “All Lives Matter.”  The interpretations of these phrases become problematic, however, when they are taken out of context. We cannot determine what a speaker intends to convey with an utterance without considering the context in which the statement occurs.

This is something of a truism in the field of pragmatics—the branch of linguistics that deals with how people use language—and is a foundational principle in many pragmatic theories of meaning:  The meaning a speaker intends to convey is often not clear-cut but must be inferred by the listener.  Experts disagree regarding how we infer what other people mean from what they say, but almost no one questions that we regularly use contextual information to figure out what other people’s utterances mean.   

The importance of context is particularly clear for understanding  words such as “him” or “here” in which listeners must draw inferences about what the speaker means.  To whom does ”him” refer?  Where is “here?” More relevant, though, is how the meaning of an utterance can be entirely context dependent. Compare, for example, the likely meaning intended by a speaker who says “It’s hard to give a good presentation” in response to the question “What did you think of my presentation?” compared  to the same utterance in response to the question “Don’t you think it’s hard to give a good presentation?”  In the former context the utterance, “It’s hard to give a good presentation,” is a criticism; in the latter, it’s a confirmation.

So, what is the context for “Black Lives Matter” and the various rejoinders to it?  The phrase seems to have originated in 2013 as a hashtag (#BlackLivesMatter) in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the shooting of Trevon Martin a year earlier.  The phrase was first used by a loosely organized, decentralized movement focused on protesting police violence against African Americans.  The context of the phrase, and the intention behind its use, was to call attention to the police killing of African Americans, in effect, a reminder that black lives matter too.

Of course, “too” was not and is not part of the phrase.  But it was clearly implied in the context in which the phrase initially occurred.  In other words, in an alternative universe in which police killings of African Americans did not occur, uttering the phrase, “Blacks Lives Matter,”  would be somewhat nonsensical, in effect, a non sequitur. But that’s not the universe we live in. And so in the context of our current world, the intended meaning of the phrase is something along the lines of “the lives of black people matter too, just as much as the lives of other people.” 

Shortly after the phrase became popular, the rebuttals “All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” began to circulate on social media.  So how should “All Lives Matter” be interpreted?  What is the intended meaning of this phrase?  In isolation, “All Lives Matter” is a truism.  Of course, all lives matter.  But this phrase did not arise in isolation and was instead a direct response to the phrase “Black Lives Matter.”  As a response to “Black Lives Matter,” the phrase functions as a corrective statement meaning something like “No, all lives matter.” But, the intention behind “Black Lives Matter” was not to say that only black lives matter, and so “All Lives Matter” is a response to an unintended meaning of that assertion. It is in this way that “All Lives Matter” is often an attempt to undermine or refute the intended meaning of “Black Lives Matter.”

The field of pragmatics teaches us that context is critical for understanding the meaning of an utterance, whether that utterance occurs in a face-to-face conversation or as a hashtag on social media. The battle of the “Black Lives Matter” phrase continues and can be seen in Vice-President Pence’s recent refusal to even say the words Black Lives Matter. Pragmatics provides us with a deeper understanding of what people are intending to communicate with their words and helps us to understand situations in which people argue about the meaning of what they say. 


For Further Reading

Holtgraves, Thomas. (2001) Language as social action: Social psychology and language use. Erlbaum

Pinker, S. (2007). The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature . New York, NY: Viking

 

Thomas Holtgraves is a professor of Psychological Science at Ball State University where he conducts research on various aspects of language use.

“Let’s Stay Safe; Please Keep Your Distance”: How to Politely Ask Other People to Maintain Social Distance

Social distancing can create many social dilemmas.  One of them is how to ask other people to keep their distance in public spaces. Asking others, especially strangers, to keep a safe distance away from you may not always be easy. In fact, such a request recently resulted in a violent altercation in which a women was attacked for asking someone  to keep their distance.   Although violent reactions may be rare, people may feel some awkwardness, if not trepidation, when  asking others to maintain a safe distance.

One of the reasons for this is that we are socialized to avoid imposing on others, especially people  we don’t know.  Normally, we aren’t supposed to go around asking—or, worse, telling—strangers to behave in certain ways, and doing so can seem rude, disrespectful, or even threatening. However, how others react to  a request depends on the way we ask. We can use several  linguistic strategies  to make requests, strategies that differ in terms of their clarity as well as their level of  rudeness or imposition.

In choosing what strategy to use, we face  a tradeoff between being clear in our request and seeming to be offensive, imposing, or threatening.  The clearer our request, the more imposing, off-putting, or threatening it may sound.  But if we try to not to come on too strong, our request may be less clear.  

For example, the least threatening request strategy is to provide some sort of hint about what you want the other person to do, hoping that the recipient will recognize the intended meaning. For example, “It’s warm in here” can function as a request to turn down the thermostat, but the other person may interpret it as a simple observation about the temperature rather than a request to turn the heat down.  In terms of social distancing, one could hint with something like “I think you might be too close to me,” but this strategy can backfire  because some people may not recognize the intended meaning. On the other hand, the most direct—and most threatening—strategy is to explicitly say “Turn down the thermostat.” With social distancing, a direct strategy would be to say something like “Keep your distance” or “Stay 6 feet away from me.”  Although the meaning is certainly clear, you risk  offending the other person. 

Instead of these two extreme strategies, research suggests that the optimal strategy, at least in most Western cultures, is to seek a middle ground and use some form of what is termed “positive politeness.” Positive politeness is relatively direct but simultaneously emphasizes solidarity, or closeness, with the other person.  And it can be combined with more direct forms of requests to create an optimal message frame. 

Consider the statement, “Let’s be safe! Please keep your distance.”  The positive politeness component, “Let’s be safe,” emphasizes a mutual goal rather than just your own  individual desire.  So, rather than requesting the other person to do something that you want, you are asserting a mutual goal—let’s both be safe. Including  the direct statement,  “Keep your distance,” combined with the politeness marker, “Please,” then makes your request  clear, but in a polite way.

So, combining positive politeness with a direct request provides an optimal balance between maximizing clarity and minimizing offensiveness to the other person.  Give positive politeness a try the next time that stranger gets too close.


For Further Reading

Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson (1987). Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Holtgraves, Thomas. (2001) Language as social action: Social psychology and language use. Erlbaum


Thomas Holtgraves is a professor of Psychological Science at Ball State University where he conducts research on various aspects of language use.

The Persuasive Power of “You”

Imagine that you just arrived in a foreign country. The first thing you do is sit down at a café and order a coffee. When it comes time to pay the bill, however, you’re unsure of the right way to pay. Do you ask the waiter for the check? Wait for him to bring it to you? Or are you supposed to go up to the cashier?

Turning to two people at the next table, you ask: “How do you pay the bill around here?”

One person replies, “I go to the cashier and ask for the bill.”

The other says, “You ask the waiter for the bill.”

Whose response would you have more confidence in?

As you may have noticed, the two speakers used different pronouns in their replies. One used the first-person pronoun “I;” the other used the second-person pronoun “you”—not to refer to you personally but rather to refer to people in general (known as “generic-you”). Though it may seem unlikely, across a series of experiments, my co-authors and I found that this subtle shift in language has genuine persuasive force, affecting people’s judgments of the right way to do things.

Norms tell us what behaviors are common, appropriate, or valued in a given context. People are extremely sensitive to norms and often conform to the behaviors of the people around them, especially when they are unsure of what to do. Although people learn norms in many ways, my collaborators and I were interested in whether a subtle linguistic cue such as generic-you could transmit norms indirectly.

We tested this idea across five experiments with 800 adult participants. In all of our studies, people were told to imagine that they were visiting a distant planet where people did things very differently than they do on Earth, which ensured that participants were unfamiliar with the norms about how to behave and needed to figure them out. Participants then read several scenarios in which behaviors were expressed either with first-person pronouns, such as “I” or “me,” or with generic-you. We also took care to ensure that the “you” would be interpreted as referring to people in general rather than to the participant. (Fortunately, most people do interpret “you” in this context as generic). After reading each scenario, participants rated the extent to which the behavior that was described reflected the right way to do things on the foreign planet.

Across all of our experiments, participants judged behaviors that were expressed with the generic-you to reflect the correct way to do things more than behaviors expressed using either first-person pronouns, such as “I,” or third-person singular pronouns, such as “he” or “she”. These differences between the effects of generic-you and other pronouns occurred even when participants were told that all of the people in the foreign land were highly knowledgeable about the norms.  This finding suggests  that the generic-you may increase people’s confidence in what the norms are even when they have no reason to doubt the reliability of information expressed from a first-person perspective.

Two takeaways stand out to us from this research.

First, generic-you goes beyond its literal meaning (“people in general”) to suggest a call to action indicating what a person should do, as when hearing “You ask the waiter for the bill” leads us to ask the waiter. We refer to this powerful yet implicit message as normative force. Second, it is notable that people were swayed more by the generic usage of “you” than by personal endorsements (which use “I” language), given that personal endorsements are also a powerful route to persuasion.

These findings also raise several interesting questions for future research. One question involves the degree to which this process operates outside of people’s conscious awareness. When we asked participants what they were thinking as they rated whether the behaviors reflected the right way to do things, most participants did not mention relying on the pronouns “I” or “you” to make their judgments. Instead they said they “went with their gut” or “focused on what seemed plausible.” Future research should examine the extent to which these linguistic cues operate without people thinking consciously about them.  

We’d also like to know whether these effects generalize to different languages and cultures. Every language has a way to refer to people in general, but how they do so varies. Perhaps in countries where social norms tightly dictate behavior, people may be even more sensitive to linguistic cues that refer to people in general.

Finally, an important question for future research is whether generic-you also has persuasive force in other domains. For example, could generic-you influence people’s judgments, attitudes, and even behavior when it comes to health behaviors, civic engagement, or sustainability practices? And might subtle linguistic cues that express norms, such as generic-you, provide a more effective way to persuade people compared to more explicit interventions that can, at times, backfire? We look forward to research that examines these questions. 


For Further Reading

Orvell, A., Kross, E., & Gelman, S. A. (2019). “You” and “I” in a foreign land: The persuasive force of generic-you. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology85, 103869.

 

Ariana Orvell is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan working with Ethan Kross and Susan Gelman. She will become an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Bryn Mawr College in the fall.