From the University of Waterloo press release:<\/p>\n
\nDoublespeak<\/strong>, or the use of euphemisms to sway opinion<\/strong>, lets leaders avoid the reputational costs of lying while still bringing people around to their way of thinking<\/strong>, a new study has found.<\/p>\n
\nResearchers at the University of Waterloo found that the use of agreeable euphemistic terms biases people’s evaluations of actions to be more favourable<\/strong>. For example, replacing a disagreeable term, “torture,” with something more innocuous and semantically agreeable, like “enhanced interrogation.”<\/p>\n
“Like the much-studied phenomenon of ‘fake news,’ manipulative language can serve as a tool for misleading the public, doing so not with falsehoods but rather with the strategic use of euphemistic language,” said Alexander Walker, lead author of the study and a PhD candidate in cognitive psychology at Waterloo. “The avoidance of objectively false claims may provide the strategic user of language with plausible deniability of dishonesty<\/strong>, thus protecting them from the reputational cost associated with lying.”<\/p>\n
As part of a series of studies investigating the effectiveness, consequences and mechanisms of doublespeak in a psychological context, the researchers investigated whether the use of language characteristic of doublespeak can be used to influence peoples’ evaluations of actions.<\/p>\n
The researchers identified doublespeak as the strategic manipulation of language to influence the opinions of others by representing the truth in a manner that benefits one’s self<\/strong>. To do this, the researchers assessed whether substituting an agreeable term — for example, “working at a meat-processing plant” in place of a semantically related disagreeable term like “working at a slaughterhouse” — has an impact on how a person’s actions are interpreted.<\/p>\n
The researchers’ results confirmed that peoples’ evaluations of an action can be biased in a predictable, self-serving way when an individual employs the strategic use of more or less agreeable terms when describing an action.<\/p>\n
“Our study shows how language can be used strategically to shape peoples’ opinions of events or actions<\/strong>,” Walker said. “With a lower level of risk, individuals may be able to utilize linguistic manipulation, such as doublespeak, often without correction.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From the University of Waterloo press release: Doublespeak, or the use of euphemisms to sway opinion, lets leaders avoid the reputational costs of lying while still bringing people around to… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":28361,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[368,60],"tags":[13,25,363,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33296"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33296"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33456,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33296\/revisions\/33456"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}