Why do we cuss? And what happens when we do. Psychologist and Curse Word Researcher Dr. Richard Stephens has spent decades trying to answer those two questions.
Dr. Stephens says that while there are many reason why we cuss, such as anger and trying to fit in, when we curse, our body and mind go through significant changes. Changes that can dull pain and even make us stronger.
In this episode of Profoundly Pointless we talk the unique psychology behind cussing, the power of different curse words and why our brains treat curse words differently than other words.
00:00 Introducing Dr. Richard Stephens
01:11 Why We Cuss
02:30 What Happens When We Cuss
03:57 Cussing and Pain Management
05:31 Cussing Makes Us Stronger
08:09 The Strongest Cuss Words
09:45 Why Some People Cuss More
12:19 Cussing and Honesty
16:39 The Best Cuss Word
Interview with Psychologist and Cuss Word Researcher Dr. Richard Stephens
Nick VinZant 0:11
Welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant. Coming up in this episode, cursing.
Dr. Richard Stephens 0:19
He who first cussed his fellow man rather than smash his head in with a brick. Laid the foundation of civilization, and then they looked at the frequency of swearing and found that the more swearing, the more honest the honesty tool found the the work to be. Presumably, the more taboo the word, the more the stronger the effect should be.
Nick VinZant 0:43
I want to thank you so much for joining us. If you get a chance, subscribe, leave us a rating or review. We really appreciate it. Really helps us out. So I want to get right to our first guest because he studies the psychology of cursing, why we swear, and what happens inside our brains and bodies when we do. This is psychologist Dr. Richard Stevens. So why do we cuss?
Dr. Richard Stephens 1:12
I found in my research that swearing can be beneficial at times. It can help us to deal with pain. It can help us summon up strength when we need it. Perhaps it will make us more courageous. We swear to. Sometimes it's funny to swear, right? Just saying "fuck" is funny. People swear because it sounds cool. It can be a bonding experience. It can be. It can be a sort of "I know you well enough that I know I can swear to you, and you'll swear back to me because we're mates, and you know it's a good way to insult people. Some people, there was a quote. What was it like? The he who first cussed his fellow man rather than smash his head in with a brick laid the foundation of civilization. Right? It's a way of violence without actual violence. There's so many reasons why we swear. If
Nick VinZant 2:01
it's such a pervasive thing throughout society, why is it still a taboo thing to do?
Dr. Richard Stephens 2:07
Its whole nature is that it's taboo, and you know, whenever you swear, you always have to be careful, don't you? Have I have I judged this situation? Like when I swore a moment ago to you, part of me was going weighing up the odds. Is this going to work? You're never sure how a swear word is going to land, and that's perhaps what helps it retain its power.
Nick VinZant 2:30
How do our brains and our bodies kind of treat swear words? Are they just another word to our brains and bodies, or do we have more of a physical, physiological reaction when we use it.
Dr. Richard Stephens 2:41
There is plenty of research, including some from my lab, showing the physiological response to swearing. It's like the stress response, like the fight-flight response. You see an increase in heart rate. You see a change in skin conductance, which is indicative of an emotional. You know, swearing is emotional language, and so that emotion lands, and we experience emotion quite often when we say or hear a swear word, and that's kind of what's picked up. There's some interesting research, sort of linking swearing with different parts of the brain and the bits than where language is normally processed. So most languages process left cortex, which is this left side, the surface of the brain here and here, but there is evidence of people with damage to these areas that have problems with normal language who retain the ability to swear. It's like it's somewhere else. There's some research showing that stereotypical language is handled in different areas, so swearing seems to be handled differently by the brain.
Nick VinZant 3:40
Why would why would it be in a different part of the brain? Like, why would our brain decide that this needs to be somewhere else? What would be the reason?
Dr. Richard Stephens 3:46
It's yes, that's a really good question. Actually, it must be this emotional aspect of swearing. It must be those those pulling it across to those emotional centers.
Nick VinZant 3:57
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but you found that swearing is linked to strength increases in pain management. How does this work?
Dr. Richard Stephens 4:04
We started off looking at swearing and pain because, from the everyday observation that quite often the first thing people do when they hurt themselves is say a swear word. It's okay, that's interesting. Why do they do that? And so we just ran very simple experiments where we used ice cold water, right? Which is put your hands in ice cold water. It's painful but not harmful. So ethically, we can we can research with that tool. People will keep their hands in the water longer repeating a swear word compared with repeating a neutral word. Okay, that's the finding. And then to explain that, we've got there's a couple of explanations in the running for this, the first one is linked to that emotionality, and it's the idea that by swearing we deliberately stress ourselves out a little bit more, and we benefit from a natural form of pain relief that's linked with stress called stress-induced analgesia. But recently, we've also. Been looking at more psychological explanations, and this is linked to disinhibition. So when we swear, well, when we're disinhibited, we swear. That's kind of one fairly obvious thing. But also, when we swear, we become a little bit more disinhibited, and so by swearing, we deliberately kind of prime a disinhibited state, and then we benefit from that because we don't hold back or we push ourselves a little bit more, and so we'll put up with pain for longer.
Nick VinZant 5:31
That that disinhibition. Why would we get stronger?
Dr. Richard Stephens 5:36
It's the same mechanisms, right? Well, so we we initially moved on from pain to strength, because if swearing makes you, it has like you know adrenaline and that sort of things, which we which was part of this stress-induced analgesia model, then it should make you stronger. You know, the extra the adrenaline should help you. Anyway, we ran we ran a couple of we've run several experiments looking at that, and while swearing does make you stronger. We use like a hand gripper. You grip this little device, and the more you grip it, more a little needle goes round. So we get like a sort of an objective measure of strength. And we had people on a kind of a static exercise bike, sort of measures how much power they're putting through the pedals. Anyway, both those tasks, people produce more power when they're repeating a swear word compared to the neutral word. That's the finding, but we didn't show any evidence of the psychophysiology linked to you know what we saw with swearing and pain linked to this emotional sort of stress reaction. So that was a puzzle. Actually, we found the effect, but not for the expected reason. So that's led to some more theorizing. Well, what else could be going on? And psychologically speaking, this is where disinhibition started to come in. There's a bunch of the studies from like the 1950s, or perhaps even earlier, showing various things like making a loud noise. People will do a strength task more effectively. More recently, hitting a tennis ball and measuring the speed, people will hit it harder if they grunt, linking these sort of outbursts to more strength. And these studies suggest disinhibition as an as an as a mechanism. So that's what we've been running with the last few years, trying to evidence this, and the idea is swearing makes you a bit more disinhibited. When you're disinhibited, you don't hold back. You go for it a little bit more, push yourself a bit harder, put up with the pain a little bit longer, grip that thing a little bit tighter.
Nick VinZant 7:37
When you look at the strength benefits, like how much of a strength benefit are we talking about? Say somebody could bench 200 pounds, they can bench 250 or they can bench 202
Dr. Richard Stephens 7:47
It's a it's a it's a single digit percent. It may be somewhere between five and 8% I think is the difference, but you know.
Nick VinZant 7:56
So that's like five to 10 pounds, depending on. I mean, depending on how much you're doing, that could be a significant amount of.
Dr. Richard Stephens 8:03
I think, yeah, I think in in sports terms, that's that's that's quite a decent uplift, isn't it? Yeah.
Nick VinZant 8:09
Does it seem to matter the strength of the swear word itself? Like, does the F word get you more than say in the B word or the S word?
Dr. Richard Stephens 8:17
Yeah. So this is this is kind of where we are at the moment, actually, with the research, it's it's the last few years have opened up an avenue of research. I mean, I'll tell you the story. We got we got some sponsorship from Neurofen, and they wanted to run some research with us just for sort of fun, really. And they said, "What do we make up swear words? Right? If we make up swear words, will they have the same effect? I thought, "Well, probably not. But let's see. So, so they had a PR company make up a load of swear words, and we we did this sort of exercise trying to choose between them, and then we ended up with Fouch and Twizpipe. Okay, Fouch because it had a sort of slightly emotional resonance, linking back to that emotional mechanism, and Twizpipe just because it's funny, maybe distracting. Anyway, made-up swear words, as you might have expected, have no effects in a pain study compared with "fuck. Presumably, the more taboo the word, the more the the stronger the effect should be. That's the that's the hypothesis.
Nick VinZant 9:19
Um. So we talked about so the person who is swearing is disinhibited. What happens to the person who hears it? Is there an equal psychological effect for the person who hears it? Did they become inhibited?
Dr. Richard Stephens 9:32
On the whole, I think it's a lesser effect if you hear it incidentally, unless it's obviously directed at you, and then yeah, that would be very nice.
Nick VinZant 9:40
Are you ready for some harder slash listener submitted questions?
Dr. Richard Stephens 9:44
Oh, go on then.
Nick VinZant 9:45
Is there a type of person who seems to cuss more? Like, is there a certain demographics or physiological psychological makeups that make somebody cuss more than somebody else?
Dr. Richard Stephens 9:59
One thing. One really interesting thing is quite that that might surprise you is a guy called Tony McHenry is a is a linguist based at Lancaster University and he he put out this study in the early noughties where they looked at the British National Corpus which is a like a library of examples of use of English spoken, written in the media, in you know all different kinds of contexts, and they searched that corpus for the appearance of the word "fuck, and then they analyzed, amongst other things, who was speaking it. And as you might expect, as you go up the sort of socio-economic hierarchy, the incidence of the word "foot" diminishes from like working class to like lower middle class to upper middle class. But when you get to kind of upper class, it the the prevalence rises again. So it's almost like you know people climbing the greasy pole, trying to make an impression in the class system. Watch their swearing, but once you've made it and there are no repercussions, hey, here we go again. So, yeah, interesting.
Nick VinZant 11:15
Yeah, you mind your behavior until you don't have to.
Dr. Richard Stephens 11:18
Exactly. Yeah. If
Nick VinZant 11:19
you were gonna use this strategically, how would you do it? Do you just say it once? Do you have to say it multiple times? Like, how does this kind of work?
Dr. Richard Stephens 11:28
That's a good question. So, in our in our research, we we we do in the strength stuff. We have people repeat repeat the word for 10 seconds before, let's say, doing the grip task, or repeating the word for I think it was a minute during the part of the cycling task where we measured power, because yeah, it's going to wear off after a while, isn't it? These you know, and we have this is research that you know it's so much hasn't been done, but understanding the timelines of these things is you know we don't have a good understanding of that. How long, if you swear for 10 seconds, how long can you expect that to last for before it's worn off, and you need to do it again. These are questions we don't really have answers to at the moment, but these are the things we've done that are successful. Are either swearing while you're doing a task for up to about two to three minutes, or swearing in preparation for a task for between 10 and 20 seconds. Is
Nick VinZant 12:19
there any truth to the idea that people who cuss more are more honest?
Dr. Richard Stephens 12:24
There's there is research on that, not in my lab, but there is research on that. There's the idea. Let me see. Like, what was the the research was analyzing what people have put on Facebook and kind of running it through a language analysis for likely honesty of what was being said. Don't ask me how they do that. And then they looked at the frequency of swearing and found that the more swearing, the more honest the honesty tool found the the work to be. And the theory there is that when someone swears, they're in unfiltered mode. Yeah, you're seeing the real, authentic person.
Nick VinZant 13:07
What are you currently working on now? Like, what's what's kind of the future of this research?
Dr. Richard Stephens 13:12
Yeah, so a couple couple of interesting things. Like I was saying about in the during the earlier part about this idea of is is the tabooness of the word linked to its strength and power, and in in you know in research there's the idea of a dose response effect. If you get a bigger dose, do you see a bigger response? So it's very much that sort of idea. We've ran a couple of studies this year. So an an interesting thing. Well, I think is interesting. You see, I think swearing is actually a double taboo, because if you take the word "fuck, the meaning of the word is taboo, but "fuck" is a kind of an extra taboo on top of the meaning, because you could talk. There's there's less taboo words to talk about sexual intercourse, so "fuck" it's both the word and the semantics add up to a double taboo. So we ran a study where we had a neutral word, a single taboo, which was the word sex, and double taboo fuck. And we looked at how people, you know, how long people will hold their hands in the ice water under those conditions, and we are seeing that dose response effect. But we tried to go one step further. It's it's funny actually. I'll tell you what we did. This is all unpublished, by the way. This is this is this is what this is what's on the desktop at the moment. So we tried to. So you get some words, you get a mild swear word that has a strong meaning, and vice versa. You get a a word that's a strong swear. Well, this is what we sort of can we think of examples, and we did think of examples of this. So I don't know. I don't know. I'll I'll test you, maybe test your listeners. A swear word that's a strong word with a mild meaning.
Nick VinZant 15:05
Maybe bitch.
Dr. Richard Stephens 15:07
That's the one.
Nick VinZant 15:07
That's a strong. That's is that the one right? Like it's strong word, but it doesn't mean that. Literally means
Dr. Richard Stephens 15:13
a female dog.
Nick VinZant 15:15
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Richard Stephens 15:16
Which is not in and of itself taboo. So we ran a study with four conditions: neutral word, fuck, and then in between we tried to manipulate. So the other word we chose, which is a word that's a mild word but a strong taboo meaning, was not. We I wish we'd use crap now. I'll tell you, but we we used the word bugger. Don't know how well that translates into the U.S. booger, but you know it's quite a mild word these days. You know your granny would say booger, and no one would bat an eyelid because she couldn't find you know something in the house. Yeah. But the meaning of the word booger. But this is the funny thing: when we tested it out, what what what are what are the current sort of 18 to 20 year olds, Gen Gen Z, right? Gen Z.
Nick VinZant 16:05
Yeah, whatever the kids of today are.
Dr. Richard Stephens 16:08
Don't know what bugger means. The word has lost its meaning. It's been forgotten in popular culture. So that was so. In the end, that turned out to be a bad a bad choice, so we need to rerun that study. Unfortunately,
Nick VinZant 16:23
it didn't work out. Yeah, this booger over there. Like when I think of booger, it's just
Dr. Richard Stephens 16:29
yeah. No, it's different. You know, so that's different. Where this is b u g g e r.
Nick VinZant 16:34
W i bugger here, which this anal sex.
Dr. Richard Stephens 16:37
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nick VinZant 16:39
In your opinion, what's the best cuss word?
Dr. Richard Stephens 16:41
If the theory is the more taboo, the stronger the effect, then the you know go for the the big taboo if you want a big effect. But you know you do have to think about the social situation when you deploy a swear word. So you know it's nuanced. Do I don't really have a you know I'm just I just use the same swear words as everybody else when I get frustrated or when I'm looking for a boost when I'm riding my bike up a big hill, you know. Fuck.
Nick VinZant 17:09
I want to thank Dr. Stevens so much for joining us. If you want to connect with him, we have linked to him on our social media sites. We're Profoundly Pointless on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, and we've also included his information in the episode description. Coming up in our next episode, we're gonna look beyond the psychology of cursing and explore curse words themselves, where they come from, how they were developed, and some unique ones you may never have even heard of.