F#%k Yeah It's Persuasive, &%$#@!'s

The January issue of Inside Influence, had an interesting article by Noah Goldstein, Ph.D.

Social psychologists Cory Scherer and Brad Sagarin hypothesized that when people pepper their speech with an occasional obscenity, the audience perceives an increase in the speaker’s intensity, perceived passion and enthusiasm. Ultimately, it makes the speech more persuasive.

So did it?

To test this idea, Scherer and Sagarin had participants watch a video of a five-minute long persuasive speech. For half of the participants, the speaker used the relatively tame swear phrase “Damn it!” once during the speech. For the other half of participants, the speech was exactly the same, except the swear phrase was omitted. Once the speech was over, participants were asked about their attitudes toward the topic addressed in the speech. Consistent with predictions, the data revealed not only that the speaker was viewed as more passionate about the topic when profanity was used than when it was not, but also that the former was more persuasive than the latter.

Hell yeah it did.