2 hours ago
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...telligence
EXCERPTS: There is a long-standing cultural assumption that people who talk to themselves are, at best, eccentric and, at worst, showing signs of something more concerning. It’s the kind of behavior that invites sideways glances in supermarket aisles and prompts well-meaning family members to ask if you are OK. The research, however, tells a different story.
[...] Consistently, the researchers found that those who spoke the target name out loud found it significantly faster. Speaking, it turned out, made the visual system a more efficient detector.
[...] In other words, people who use language to think appear to have a cognitive advantage on tasks that require holding information in mind. A 2023 review published in Frontiers in Psychology further mapped the range of functions served by self-talk: problem solving, self-regulation, working memory, task-switching, rehearsal, and what researchers describe as the management of higher-order cognitive processes.
[...] The assumption here is so embedded that it has become a kind of folk wisdom: People who swear frequently do so because they lack the vocabulary to express themselves any other way. It is, in this view, portrayed as a sign of laziness: a linguistic shortcut taken by people who cannot be bothered to find the right word. But this is almost precisely backwards.
The most cited challenge to this assumption comes from a series of studies ... published in 2015. [...] The researchers found a clear positive correlation: participants who scored highest on the verbal fluency test also generated the most swear words. Those with the weakest general vocabulary produced the fewest. This suggests that the same cognitive resource that gives someone access to a rich general lexicon also gives them access to a rich taboo lexicon. The vocabulary is simply larger on both ends.
[...] Research published in 2018 in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology notes that people, even those who are not personally offended by profanity, still rate swearers as less intelligent and less trustworthy than non-swearers. ... This means that the cognitive signal embedded in swearing is frequently overridden by social noise. What the research reveals is not that you should swear more, but that the habit itself—the fluency with taboo language, the ease of access to it—correlates with verbal intelligence in ways that the lay assumption completely inverts. Knowing when not to swear is, arguably, its own form of intelligence, too... (MORE - details)
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Meh. Profanity or "teen speak" is ubiquitous in the contemporary world, for all classes and slots of the so-called sapient spectrum. It's only highly formal and professional settings where the classic expectations of educated adult behavior still hold. The "shock value" purpose of defiling propriety and sacred items (both for venting stress and gratuitous hipster signaling) has shifted over from Victorian taboos to violating Woke sensitivies (the latter exerts consequences, involves the adrenaline spike of actually still flirting with danger). And acumen itself is relative. In an apocalyptic scenario, you'd want to be with the skills of rural folk and Rick Grimes' bunch rather than city-sheltered, second- or third-generation humanities scholars. The new environment would demote various sectors of intellectual elites to hapless bands of idiots.
EXCERPTS: There is a long-standing cultural assumption that people who talk to themselves are, at best, eccentric and, at worst, showing signs of something more concerning. It’s the kind of behavior that invites sideways glances in supermarket aisles and prompts well-meaning family members to ask if you are OK. The research, however, tells a different story.
[...] Consistently, the researchers found that those who spoke the target name out loud found it significantly faster. Speaking, it turned out, made the visual system a more efficient detector.
[...] In other words, people who use language to think appear to have a cognitive advantage on tasks that require holding information in mind. A 2023 review published in Frontiers in Psychology further mapped the range of functions served by self-talk: problem solving, self-regulation, working memory, task-switching, rehearsal, and what researchers describe as the management of higher-order cognitive processes.
[...] The assumption here is so embedded that it has become a kind of folk wisdom: People who swear frequently do so because they lack the vocabulary to express themselves any other way. It is, in this view, portrayed as a sign of laziness: a linguistic shortcut taken by people who cannot be bothered to find the right word. But this is almost precisely backwards.
The most cited challenge to this assumption comes from a series of studies ... published in 2015. [...] The researchers found a clear positive correlation: participants who scored highest on the verbal fluency test also generated the most swear words. Those with the weakest general vocabulary produced the fewest. This suggests that the same cognitive resource that gives someone access to a rich general lexicon also gives them access to a rich taboo lexicon. The vocabulary is simply larger on both ends.
[...] Research published in 2018 in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology notes that people, even those who are not personally offended by profanity, still rate swearers as less intelligent and less trustworthy than non-swearers. ... This means that the cognitive signal embedded in swearing is frequently overridden by social noise. What the research reveals is not that you should swear more, but that the habit itself—the fluency with taboo language, the ease of access to it—correlates with verbal intelligence in ways that the lay assumption completely inverts. Knowing when not to swear is, arguably, its own form of intelligence, too... (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Meh. Profanity or "teen speak" is ubiquitous in the contemporary world, for all classes and slots of the so-called sapient spectrum. It's only highly formal and professional settings where the classic expectations of educated adult behavior still hold. The "shock value" purpose of defiling propriety and sacred items (both for venting stress and gratuitous hipster signaling) has shifted over from Victorian taboos to violating Woke sensitivies (the latter exerts consequences, involves the adrenaline spike of actually still flirting with danger). And acumen itself is relative. In an apocalyptic scenario, you'd want to be with the skills of rural folk and Rick Grimes' bunch rather than city-sheltered, second- or third-generation humanities scholars. The new environment would demote various sectors of intellectual elites to hapless bands of idiots.