As Medical Daily reports, a new, two-part study conducted by a team of international researchers from Stanford, University of Cambridge, Maastricht University, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology suggests that people who can easily let loose with a string of obscenities are likely more honest as well.
For the first part of the study, the team conducted interviews with 276 subjects from across the U.S., recruited on Amazon Mechanical Turk, to get to the bottom of both their swearing habits—namely, their favorite curse words and how often they use them—and just how honest they are by asking them about blame-placing, game-playing, and other activities that help determine trustworthiness.
For the second part, the team analyzed the status updates of nearly 75,000 Facebook users, looking for linguistic indicators of deception, such as the use of third-person pronouns and more negative words, as determined by a 2003 report published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
“The consistent findings across the studies suggest that the positive relation between profanity and honesty is robust, and that the relationship found at the individual level indeed translates to the society level,” the study concluded.
via Mental Floss
