SIO367: Science Says Slurs Are Bad, No Matter the Context

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:16 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 367, this time for real, unlike last time where I got ahead of myself. Sorry about that. The real 367. I'm the real Thomas Smith. I'm Thomas Smith, I don't— Oh, know. I am so excited for today's episode. Back on the show is Dr. Alan Smerbeck, who I will always call Stormy Decisis, being that back before Andrew stole opening arguments from all of us, Alan was one of the top patrons and the best questioners on that show and went by the patron name Stormy Decisis. So Alan will always be stormy in my heart, But But in your hearts, it's Dr. Alan Smerbeck, professor of psychology. And he is here tell us about some really interesting research. I realized as I edited this, how pertinent this information is to a lot of anti-woke arguments, or at least some anti-woke, anti-left arguments, to a degree that I perhaps didn't realize back when we recorded it.

0:01:10 Thomas: We're talking about slurs, and just bad words and their impact on people, and as a teaser, turns out there's actually a really good reason to use euphemisms instead of the actual words, which I think is a very important point. So, I find out why that is. This one's lot of fun, but I also should give a content note if you're someone who cares about bad words. Stormy's going to say a couple bad words at you, just be prepared for that. And not the normal bad words that I say, like some extra bad words, just some like some, like 1.5x bad word, you know, like the next tier up of bad, not the highest tier but the next tear up of bed words, is all I'll say, but it's necessary for actually, for the episode, explain to the research.

0:01:56 Thomas: Alright, I'm excited to get you over to the interview, before I do, just one more quick reminder to go check out Where There's Woke, episode 3 just came out. You know how I told you I'm never missing a fucking deadline again, ever? Yeah, had to stay up until 4 a.m. to make that happen on Monday night, and I did it, I'm never doing, I'm ever missing a deadline again, it's the perfect plan, the split is beautiful, it's amazing, it's such a good idea. So please go check out the other side of the divorce, no it's not really a divorce, it's more like if an alien splits in two, and then as two equally powerful aliens. It's more like that. So whatever the word for that is. Mitosis. But episode three digs further into the NASA James Webb naming controversy and features my amazing wife, Lydia, with some really good info on that one. So check out Where There's Woke, of course. But in the meantime, let's listen to Serious Inquiries Only and go to the interview with Dr.

0:02:47 Thomas: Alan Smerbeck, Stormy Decisis himself. Here we go. And joining us once again is Dr. Stormy Decisis. Has. How are you doing, Alan?

0:02:55 Stormy: I am Spectacular. How are you?

0:02:58 Thomas: Doing well. You've, I've got, I think, a pretty fascinating and in-depth deep dive for us. I could do the really lazy, like, newscaster intro of like, "Well, sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you, or can they?" But I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do that intro because that's tacky, do right? Or if you liked it, I'll keep, I'll keep that. I'll Do it

0:03:19 Stormy: I mean, I gotta to tell you, that's literally in my notes, so I wouldn't have, I would have been sad.

0:03:20 Thomas: Yeah But it's always been clear to me, just as a human, that I'd way rather get, like, I don't know, punched, then, you have people say really bad things about you, I feel like that damage is permanent, you can get over being punched.

0:03:37 Stormy: Bones are surprisingly good at knitting back together, whereas words can be pretty serious, so.

0:03:41 Thomas: Yeah. Then again, it's all, of course, based on context, because I can imagine getting punched for being really bad too, but let's, um, see what the science says. So you did a bit of a deep dive on, not, how much words can actually hurt you or not. I'm very, you, curious how this claim was investigated and what we're going to come away with here.

0:04:00 Stormy: So, I think there's plenty of sort of philosophical arguments about, you know, free speech or or slurs and things like that, but it's actually been investigated scientifically quite a bit. So I want to start in Poland, is a good place to start, a guy named Soral, in 2016, wrote a study called Exposure to Hate Speech Increases Prejudice Through Desensitization. And this paper has two parts. The first is a very large survey of about 1,700 people, where they gave them a list of offensive statements and said, "Hey, have you heard people around you saying things like this?" Then they said, okay, how offensive, do you think these are, and the more offensive you think they are, the more sensitive you are to hate speech, the more you think they're inoffensive, the less sensitive you, then they measure just straight up prejudice, and there's a pretty standard way we do this, where we ask, like, "Hey, would you be okay with having this kind of person as your neighbor?"

0:04:58 Thomas: Interesting.

0:05:09 Stormy: Your your doctor.

0:05:09 Thomas: Moving in next door. Yeah. Yeah. And it's always surprising how many people who think they're not racist are like, well, no, I don't want a Mexican doctor. Are you kidding me? But I'm not a racist or anything. I just, you know,

0:05:11 Stormy: Exactly.

0:05:20 Stormy: And this is a pretty direct way to measure prejudice. Some of the other studies we're going to look at are more indirect, but this is more or less just being like, yeah, man, are you creeped out by the gays? And yeah, a lot of people were like, yes, I am.

0:05:38 Thomas: What's the year on this? I always got to keep that in mind.

0:05:40 Stormy: 2016, and this is Poland, and they focused on LGBT people and Muslims their groups.

0:05:48 Thomas: Okay. In they're asking about or the groups are surveying.

0:05:52 Stormy: Yes. Yeah, no, they surveyed the general population.

0:05:53 Thomas: Okay, cool. Gotcha.

0:05:56 Stormy: So they found, not that surprisingly, that the more you hear hate speech around you, the less sensitive you are to it, and the less sensitive you are to hate speech, the more prejudice you have.

0:06:06 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, interesting. Interesting. I I, feel like that last part, you know, on one hand you're like, oh yeah, duh. But also not necessarily duh. You know, like I could have seen it come out the other way where it's like, cause they say that, you know, that that's, that's what gamers say, you know, oh, I'm not, I just say stuff is gay, but like, I don't really, I really dislike gay people, you know? And like, I could almost believe that just as somebody who grew up in a place where every other word was, you know, saying gay in a negative way, I could imagine that people could absorb that, but not actually, think like, think about what it means and could just be saying it out of ignorance, but sounds like not exactly true.

0:06:45 Stormy: Exactly. We're going to find out, it turns out that even when it's said in a a non-hateful way. It has interesting implications. But here, these were explicitly hateful statements.

0:06:59 Thomas: Oh, okay. Gotcha. That makes more sense then.

0:07:01 Stormy: But the more they were like, yeah, that's inoffensive, the more they were prejudiced. And the more they've been exposed to it, the more they said it's inoffensive. But Of course, this is just an observational study. So maybe assholes hang out with assholes, and that's all it's proving. So they also study where they brought about 75 people into the lab, and they told them, "We want you to review some websites and just report back on the user interface and the look of it. Does it look professional?" And some of the websites, they had put hate speech in the comments section, and some of them they didn't. So they were randomly assigned to be exposed to hate speech or not. And then they did the same thing. They said, "Hey, do you find these statements offensive?" And they did the same measure of prejudice. And they found that the people who had just seen hate speech while looking to see if a website looked nice ended up being less sensitive to it and more prejudiced.

0:07:11 Thomas: Right, right, right. Really? Just from that one thing, like not, this wasn't, because this was a randomized, I assume, there's no reason why either group, you should have expected anything out of either group going into this, but just that one act of reviewing a website and being exposed to comments made you more prejudiced and less sensitive to prejudiced statements?

0:08:13 Stormy: Yep.

0:08:32 Stormy: Exactly. So you're like, ah, you know, I've heard that kind of thing before. It's no big deal.

0:08:33 Thomas: Jeez. Wow. That's shocking.

0:08:38 Stormy: There's no evidence that this effect lasts a long time, but

0:08:42 Thomas: Right. Well, and as always, the thing I have to ask is what size of the effect is this? I don't know what that means. My ongoing complaint about all this stuff is always like, yeah, there's a correlation. There's an effect. And does that mean one person? Does that mean 100% of the people?

0:08:57 Stormy: Size is about half a standard deviation. So that's not nothing. I have to think about how I can explain this in useful terms. Uh,

0:09:07 Thomas: Well, yeah. If 100 people go to this website and see the thing, how many people are reporting more bias than they started with?

0:09:17 Stormy: On a scale of one to seven, they started by saying these were six and a half points of terrible. And the control group said it was six and half points of terrible, the experimental group said, it's about six points of terrible.

0:09:33 Thomas: Okay, so they rated it slightly lower on average. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely an effect, but I just don't know. Yeah, it is so hard to figure out what that even means.

0:09:36 Stormy: Yes. I mean, it, it not, it is not huge, but again, all they did was scroll through a a website that had hate speech on it.

0:09:48 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, right. You wouldn't expect much of an effect. The fact that there is an effect is pretty remarkable.

0:09:54 Stormy: Right. And so that is explicitly hate speech. That's saying these words or these phrases in an explicitly hateful way. But what I had started out was talking about slurs, and profanity itself is not necessarily hateful. If I say, you know, that's fucking awesome, that's profanity, but it's not hateful, yes. What was his name, The skateboarding dude who wanted to be a senator. He challenged, I think, Ted Cruz.

0:10:05 Thomas: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

0:10:19 Thomas: It's loving, if anything. Oh, you're talking about, Beto. You're talking about Beto O'Rourke. Okay. It's, sorry. Saying the skateboarding dude, is like, did, are you telling me that, uh, fucking What's His name? Yeah.

0:10:30 Stormy: Yes. Yeah. Tony Hawk? No.

0:10:36 Thomas: Tony Hawk? I was like, trying to find, did Tony Hawk do this? Did, I was going through the snowboarders, what is Stormy telling me?

0:10:36 Stormy: Yeah, conceded his campaign, he quite famously said to his campaign staff, I'm so fucking proud of you. And there, the word fucking is clearly positive. Well,

0:10:50 Thomas: Yeah, Yeah. That Was his whole, well, what happened was, after a shooting, I think, or something like that, he stood up on a desk or whatever, he liked, he loved to stand on stuff. Also, I love Beto, but, you know, there's also a lot of gimmicks about politics in general that I find funny, even, even when I agree with the people doing them, and, and, uh, respect him, but he, yeah, he stood up on something and he said, "I'm fucking sick and tired of that," you know, and so, and that was such a hit, just the fact that, like, look, look at this raw anger, finally a politician is telling it like it is, he's turning his chair around and he's sitting backwards in it and putting his baseball hat backwards or whatever, and he said, "Fuck these shootings," and so that was a huge thing. And then, from then on, like, every interview he found a way to put, put an F-word in it, which, I, you know, which is fine, but like, I just thought it was funny.

0:11:41 Stormy: That fits well with this first experiment, where they had people do a language task where they just showed them words, and you had to, for example, say, is this in lowercase or capital letters? And you were supposed to answer as fast as possible. Some of the words were neutral, like lung. Some were emotional words, like murder. And some were profanity, like shit.

0:12:07 Thomas: So It was the idea that if your brain is kind of using up brain space on, like, "Oh, this is an alarming word," it takes you slightly longer to identify if it's capitalized or something? Interesting.

0:12:18 Stormy: Actually a finding in a totally different experiment, but you're on the ball. Good guess. No, with this one, they actually didn't care about that part. What they did was afterward, they said, hey, do you remember any of the words we just showed you? And participants were three to five times more likely to remember profanity than non-profanity. Right.

0:12:33 Thomas: Right. Well, That Makes sense, yeah. So,

0:12:42 Stormy: So then this is one of my favorite studies. Separate study, they hooked people up to something that measures electrical conductance on your skin, which has something to do with how tense or agitated you are.

0:12:58 Thomas: Like lie detector, but maybe actually a good use of that technology, right?

0:13:03 Stormy: Enough to detect a single person lying, but to measure overall level of tenseness over a study where we're not sending anyone to jail, it's good.

0:13:11 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I like, just a good old-fashioned come behind someone, grab their shoulder, "Oh, you seem tense," you know, but they can't do that in a lab. I don't think that's probably, you know, they to do something more scientific than that. Yeah.

0:13:23 Stormy: No, the ethics people would have an issue with that, although the same people also did a study where they had people plunge their arms into freezing cold water, so they get away with a lot of shit.

0:13:26 Thomas: Right. Right! I've heard of that. That seems to Be like the maximum, because when they need to study like, you know, pain or discomfort, there's like a maximum allowable by the human friggin rights, whatever it is. What's that board that

0:13:45 Stormy: We call it institutional review board, and yeah, they're pretty against us torturing people, although undergraduates kind of aren't people, so we've got options.

0:13:48 Thomas: Yeah. IRB? Yeah. Oh.

0:13:57 Stormy: Anyway, so what they did is they had them read words aloud, and they had the read some generic words like drum, and then had some swear words, and so when they said drum, their skin conductance didn't change. But when they said the word fuck, there was a big spike, meaning they got a little tense.

0:14:16 Thomas: Got all tingly. Yeah. Right.

0:14:19 Stormy: Even though there was no context, they weren't saying fuck you or anything, they just said the world fuck. They just read it off of a list.

0:14:27 Thomas: It makes sense, you know, we have words that we specifically have invented for that purpose. I think, like, we have words that are like, we want it to be really, like, more alarming when we say this sound. There's you know, there's something about fuck that, like, if it weren't fuck, it would be some other word. There'd be some other thing, because we want to be able to curse people out and say things that mean more in the moment.

0:14:46 Stormy: But It's not just the meaning of the word, because in the the memory study a word like murder wasn't as easy to remember as the word shit, even though murder is a much more upsetting concept than the word. My

0:14:55 Thomas: Right. Hmm. Right, but let's face it. Everyone is listening to murder podcasts all day long, making shows called like my favorite murder and stuff so that that, that doesn't, but nobody, there aren't a lot of shitting podcasts. Oh, hold Hold on. New idea. I'm in need of podcast ideas. Never

0:15:16 Stormy: Favorite. Shit. Okay, so We know that hate speech increases. And we know that swear words have a special impact. Slurs are at the intersection of hate speech and swear words. So now we want to know, do slurs cause prejudice even when they're not used in an overtly hateful way? So there are two papers by Fabio Fasolini and colleagues, and they both involved the Italian equivalent of the F slur for gay people. In one study, they gave people some words and they told them they were doing a language task. They had to say, you know, other kinds of things about each word. And some of them were exposed to the word gay, and some were exposed to the Italian equivalent of the F-slur.

0:16:07 Stormy: Then they were asked to create a fake civil budget. And importantly, they could donate, They could give some city money to an HIV-AIDS clinic, or to a clinic that was dedicated to preserving married couples' fertility. And this was in 2015, so there was definitely no gay marriage in Italy.

0:16:32 Thomas: Right. I was going to say in Italy, in terms of that kind of politics, I imagine isn't on the cutting edge. Maybe they feel like that's a pretty conservative place, but could be wrong given they, didn't they elect like another Mussolini, or no, they, I don't

0:16:39 Stormy: I'm pretty sure. Sure. Yeah, well, it was a lady fascist. So, you know, I mean, that's progress. I think we need to be, you know, investing in childcare so more women can go into fascism. But I said before, you know, in social sciences, we don't always just directly ask people, are you prejudiced? So this was an indirect way, was the thought that, hey, if you are are giving less money to HIV AIDS. And that's exactly what they found. If you had been exposed to the slur in a non-hateful way, just like, here's a word, do an example, they gave less money to AIDS and more to the fertility clinic.

0:17:04 Thomas: T-

0:17:23 Stormy: They did the same thing again, and this time they gave them a list of 20 words and asked them the to ones they associated with with homosexuals. And the words included some human-related terms, like citizen or hair, and some animal-related words, like paw or fur. And it's a measure of dehumanization. And what they found was that if you were exposed to the F-slur, you picked more animal words.

0:17:57 Thomas: Oh, okay, but why paw and fur, though? I don't, maybe I'm not understanding, is it like, how are they connected at all, to, would you associate those with anybody? I

0:18:05 Stormy: Idea is that it's, you're more dehumanizing the person you're seeing them as more animal like. I admittedly thought that was a pretty hat, I wasn't too happy with that, but their final study I really liked. They'd had them do a computer task where words flashed on the screen too quickly to consciously read, but long enough that you can, your brain kind of registered it, and it was either gay, the F slur, or they thought, hey, maybe it's just insults. So they had a third group that it was the Italian equivalent of asshole. So, they had them do that, and then they said, the next part of the experiment is you need to talk to our research assistant, who's a gay man. And they said go into this room and just set up the the chairs for the interview. And what they measured was how close they were willing to sit to it.

0:18:08 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yikes.

0:19:01 Stormy: And people who were exposed to the F slur sat further away than people who were exposed the words gay or asshole.

0:19:01 Thomas: Wow. Now we're talking about effect size. Now it's, uh, Europe, so, uh, millimeters, uh, metric system. What kind of effect size are we talking?

0:19:16 Stormy: Seven gallons.

0:19:19 Thomas: Don't think that's right, I don't believe you.

0:19:20 Stormy: No, it probably isn't. You got to give give me a second. The insult group were 108 centimeters away, whereas the asshole group and the category label group were about 98 centimeters away. So again, it's...

0:19:44 Thomas: That's pretty significant. That's actually, that's a lot. To me, that is more like significant than the like, oh, a 6.5 versus a 6 on the scale of whatever. Like that's very fascinating.

0:19:55 Stormy: The standard deviation is about 12 centimeters, so it's almost a standard deviation away, and that's just exposing them to the word that's not hate speech, so

0:20:07 Thomas: A couple of thoughts. First off, how do you measure a standard deviation? How do you determine what that is in this context? Like, is it just because you take extremes and the whatever? Is it just based on like total the data set of how far away people sat? That. Is that how you do that?

0:20:21 Stormy: What you do is you have the mean, and then you check how far each person was from the mean. Then, um, you sort of take the average of those values. So it's the average of how far people are from the means. So it tells you how spread out the scores were.

0:20:35 Thomas: Right. So that's fascinating. My other thing is this reminded me, I think this, I can't remember if this is a tweet or a story or whatever I saw, but it's something I saw. And I was like, as a parent, I instantly was like oh, that's a hundred percent, a hundred percent what I would do. And it's, have you seen the one where somebody's talking about like, oh yeah, my kid got in trouble for saying the F word. And they were like, what F like, word? Like, oh, for saying fuck. And they're like,Oh, that's fine. Oh yeah. You can say that. That's okay. Not the one. Yeah. That one's fine, not the one that actually like dehumanizes and hurts people. Like that saying fuck is fine. I no problem with that. And I would be exactly the same way. Like if, if my kid got like in trouble at school and it was like, they said the F word and I'd be like, well, okay, which one are we talking about? And I would be a lot more angry depending on which one that was.

0:21:23 Stormy: That's a great lead into, I've already convinced you with my brilliant arguments that slurs actually increase prejudice, but you might then be like, well, aren't they all equally bad? Like, if you call me a cracker, isn't that terrible? So my next study was by Henry et al. And what they did is, first, they gave a bunch of college students a list of various race, gender, religious, whatever groups, and they asked them to rate the group's status. Are they a high status or low status group? Then they said, said, come up with the most offensive word you can think of for this group and tell me how offensive it is. And what they found was that the higher the status was, the lower the offensiveness was.

0:21:30 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, sure. Okay. Yeah that's interesting.

0:22:10 Stormy: So the most defensive word you Can Think Of for white people is cracker, most people were like, eh, it's not that bad.

0:22:18 Thomas: Yeah it. That's interesting to think about. What comes first the cracker or the egg? You know No, I don't. Is it?

0:22:24 Stormy: They followed it up with a true experiment.

0:22:27 Thomas: Okay. And a lot of people watch that SNL skit with and Chevy Chase. Richard And Pryor. They don't watch that.

0:22:32 Stormy: For this one, what they did is they gave them, they had them read a story about a workplace incident where they overheard people using an invented slur, so they, they made up a slur, it was "crappo," which they were told I know it, it's kind of stupid sounding but they, they were told

0:22:47 Thomas: That's delightful. Okay, new term for listeners of this show. So.

0:22:53 Stormy: Crapos. Well, they said that it was for the creative designers, and that they know it means creative poser. But here's the thing. They were randomly assigned in the story to read that the creative designer's were high status, they were the highest paid, they were respected, or that they were low status. They wore grunts, they don't get much money. And what they found is that when creative designers were described as low status, people felt the word crappo was more offensive and more hurtful.

0:23:02 Thomas: Ah, okay. Okay.

0:23:26 Thomas: Yeah. It's like when you have a piece of sci-fi where they try to give you like the invented language and they're like, oh, that's a huge slur in that language. And you're like I, yeah, but not to me. So I don't, I can, I'll try to imagine it like muggle. Like, oh muggle or no, it's mudblood. That's the bad one. Mudbloods. Oh yeah.

0:23:44 Stormy: Yes.

0:23:45 Thomas: That'S bad, but it doesn't really work. That is interesting, though, because then once you get into the storytelling, you're like, well, yeah, but there's also these white supremacist wizards that are like, hey, if you're born half-blood, then you're... Then it starts to piece in. You're like. Oh, yeah. Okay. I can imagine that being an offensive term. That's interesting how that works.

0:24:02 Stormy: Well, this is, you're just really on the ball leading me to the next thing. So, okay. So you shouldn't say the N-word because we're dealing with a low status group that makes it an extremely offensive term. But what about saying mudblood? Because doesn't that do the same thing? So, in other words, like, why doesn't mudblood? In Harry Potter the humans are low status, you don't have a very strong emotional reaction to mudblood because It's not a real swear word.

0:24:35 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah.

0:24:39 Stormy: Even though they rated crap-o as more offensive when they were low status, they didn't rate it as very offensive.

0:24:46 Thomas: Crap.

0:24:48 Stormy: But we have a really cool look at that, too. So even if you're told what a word means, doesn't have the same effect if it's not actually used that way. So remember back the study where they measured electrical skin conductance? In addition to having people say the word fuck, they also had them say F-word, and then they also used the slur, and I'm to say it, cunt, and the word C-word. So they had them say those things, and they said, look, f-word means fuck. We're all clear on this. That's what you mean. But skin conductance didn't jump when they said f- word, not nearly as much as it jumped when they said fuck, and the same was true of cunt and c-word. Saying the euphemism instead of the actual word has a real difference in how it affects people, even though we all know what you mean.

0:25:31 Thomas: Interesting. Interesting.

0:25:47 Thomas: Yeah. Do you think it's a question of permission? Maybe is it just thinking about it, I wonder if it's again, it's not it's I DON'T think it'S anything magical about the words or syllables or whatever. I we have societal permission to say, yeah, the The F word, because like that's what you have to say in class when you're like, oh, he said the F word. You know, like that'S what we have societal permission to kind of say, even from from when we're kids and from when we're in school, you know, and is it just that kind of thing where it's like you feel the societal permission to say that, whereas you don't to say other worse words and with a full word.

0:26:19 Stormy: Part of what it means to know what a word is, is to know its literal definition, but part of it is also to know how it's used. So you know, Like, oopsie-daisy is not something an adult says when they make a mistake. That's something a child says. And part of knowing what fuck means is to know that it's something that if you say around children, for example, people will get mad. Whereas if you Say F Word, it has the same literal meaning, in terms of its interpretation, it's different. It.

0:26:28 Thomas: Mm hmm. Mm-hmm, mm hmm.

0:26:57 Stormy: So that's what the point is, is that N-word and the actual N- word have the same literal meaning, one of them has a very different social connotation than the other. Put another way, the N-words origin is just the word black. It's the same as like Spanish negro, just means means black, but it's an extraordinarily offensive term. Whereas the word cunt, much less offensive than the word vagina, if you look at the origin. But if you look at The Use, cunt is far more offensive.

0:27:35 Thomas: And obviously, cultural context matters, too.

0:27:38 Stormy: That's what the cultural context is the offense. That's exactly why it's offensive.

0:27:41 Thomas: Right. Yeah. I suppose. I should rephrase it. Cultural context is virtually everything, I guess, when it comes to that. If I read a word in a book, you that's in a different language that's actually a horrible slur, but I don't even know what it means, that's nothing to me. Yeah, it's all It's all about The context.

0:27:53 Stormy: There's actually studies on that where they have people reading words in their second language and you don't react nearly as much to it. Vagina comes from the Latin for sheath or scabbard. In other words, the thing you put a sword in. So the word vagina in its origins means like dick glove. It it means the thing you put a penis in. That's much more offensive.

0:28:10 Thomas: Okay.

0:28:19 Thomas: But Dick glove should be, that should also be an insult for like something. I don't know what, but like, dick, what's fucking dick glove over, look at this dick glove over here.

0:28:30 Stormy: Guess is that if it were an insult, it would be an insult for women calling them promiscuous.

0:28:37 Thomas: That's not as fun. Most insults are fun when I imagine them being directed at like some douchey, white, rich dude. But that's my cultural context of what I who I want to be insulted.

0:28:46 Stormy: Well there's, I didn't pull up this study, but there's some really good studies on what insults people use. Insults for women tend to call them ugly, promiscous, emotional, or stupid. Insults for men tend to call them feminine gay. Or So the worst thing that you can call a man is a woman. So that's horrible. Another piece of evidence that the actual sound of the word and not just its meaning is part of it comes from, you would know this, Bobby Knight, the basketball coach, so They took some undergrads and had them watch, uh, Bobby Knight just screaming profanity at people, and they either bleeped it or didn't, but obviously you can still tell what he's saying.

0:29:03 Thomas: Right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay. Mm-hmm.

0:29:34 Stormy: The viewers liked it more when it was bleep'd and they found it less offensive, offensive. They said this is less offensive content even though they knew exactly what was being said, so

0:29:41 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, it's delightful. That'S why I like the bleep. You know, we used to have the clown horn. And I like saying clown horn, like, oh, this clown horn and clown horn is funnier to say than like you bleeping bleep. But hearing the bleep is just, there's something about it that I find pleasing in a way. Something about like, Oh, that's such a bad, like all you fucking fight. Replacing that with bleep, is just satisfying to the brain. And I don't know why.

0:30:13 Stormy: Saying a euphemism or saying bleep really does have a different effect than actually saying the slur, so the Evidence is pretty strong that even if your intentions are good, even if it's in a neutral, non-hateful context, it's better to use a euphemism than to say the slur.

0:30:22 Thomas: Yeah. Wow.

0:30:38 Thomas: Yeah, that's really interesting, because there's actually quite a bit of debate on that, you know, for a while, I think the debate is over, but like, for a minute I think there was like reasonable debate on, like, well, if it's a news story and you're just talking about, like, someone called someone the N-word, like, well, you're just covering it as the news, why can't you, I think for a while there was the approach of like, yeah, you're not, you're not calling anyone that, so like you can report on it. But like, I wonder if it's data like this that goes to show, like, no, even just saying it, even if you're not using it a bad way, just being exposed to it and exposing others to it is harmful. And so it's actually better to just use either the N word or a euphemism of some kind or something other than saying the actual word. Does that seem to be what the science is telling us?

0:31:22 Stormy: Yeah, so we found that just seeing hate speech while you're scrolling through a website had an effect, but then they also found that just seeing or hearing the F-slur for gay people, even in a non-haitful context, made you want to back away from them and give them less money. So it does appear that using euphemisms for slurs has a real and meaningful effect on prejudice.

0:31:43 Thomas: Yeah.

0:31:53 Thomas: That's, I mean, that's really cool. I don't think I ever knew. I mean, I feel like I've known about some of this data, you know, anecdotally, but I didn't know that that was pretty well demonstrated. And that's really good to know. Like that's, that's really useful information, you know, because, like, I, there's times when obviously people are bad faith and they're trying to be bad faith. And there's other times when people like me, who maybe grew up conservative and have made kind of a transition to being progressive, progressive, are on their journey of trying to learn things and trying to grow. And I think there's probably plenty of reasonable people who are like, I don't understand why we're afraid of words. Why are we afraid of these words? Why don't you just say them? If you're just covering an objective standpoint. And it's really nice to have the scientific data say, no, it's actually still harmful.

0:32:40 Thomas: And It's not about being scared. It's about mitigating harm and not wanting to to do unnecessary harm for no reason. And that's really useful to know.

0:32:51 Stormy: Yeah, like, I still hear today a lot of people wanting to use the R slur for people with intellectual disability, and they'll say, well, it literally means slow, and they are slow in their cognitive development. But

0:32:56 Thomas: Right? I used to think that. I absolutely used to thank that back in the day.

0:33:06 Stormy: That's the same argument as the N-word literally means black. All that matters is how it's used, and that's how we hear it.

0:33:11 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah, I mean, all I keep thinking about with this though is how harmful... quote-unquote gamer words, like they'll actually say, use that as a euphemism. I don't know if it's joking or not, but like, there, there are people, and it's obviously for the most part, a lot of white dudes online who think like it's fine to use these slurs when you're gaming because you're just trying to say the extreme thing, you know, and you're trying to whatever, whatever. But for all kinds of reasons, it's like, yeah, but it's not exactly fair since, as you've already demonstrated, as the science demonstrates, certain words are harmful to certain people. And certain people don't really have a word that's very harmful to them. You know, like even if you come up with your best shot, it is cracker. That doesn't do anything for me. I don't even understand why that's a slur. Maybe it's because I'm too young, but that's just a, a word that I've heard.

0:34:05 Thomas: The only, that's actually kind of funny. The only frame of reference I personally have for the word cracker is people using it as like, well, but isn't that offensive for white people? That's the only, I don't, okay, I guess, is it? I don't know. I've never heard it used except for the very purpose of saying, oh yeah, but what if you call a white person a cracker? Given the fact that that's the exposure I have at all to that word, it's no wonder that that's not really harmful, like it just, it must not be, you know, it's like the old meme of like the, you know, fucking CNN or whatever it is that's doing a debate, which word, or maybe it's Fox News actually, which word is more harmful, cracker or, and then it's blanked out the N-word, you know, the, the obvious response is, hmm, I think it's the one that you didn't even want to publish on the screen.

0:34:14 Stormy: Yeah.

0:34:50 Stormy: Have a paper from 2019 by Felmley and colleagues that analyzed 2.9 million tweets over a week, and they found that there was 419,000 sexist slurs per day. So I think that's that gaming language. And focused on cunt, slut, and whore. So those four words were in 2019, 419,000 uses per day.

0:35:08 Thomas: Oof. Yeah. Yeah.

0:35:23 Thomas: There's certain words that, uh, society is more comfortable using as insults for people, you know.

0:35:28 Stormy: And what they found was that when additional, the additional words that were most commonly associated with them were negative comments on appearance, intellect, promiscuity, emotionality, or age. So like ugly, stupid, promiscuous, crazy, or old.

0:35:50 Thomas: Just, think, look, it's, in some ways obviously it's, it's amazing and great and good to have these studies, like, of course, like it's great to demonstrate, but like on the other hand, it's so fucking obvious, you know, if, if I have something I'm self-conscious about, you and I'll like, I'll be open, I'm subconscious about my scoliosis, and if somebody says something to me like, ah, looking at a hunchback over there, that's gonna really hurt, hurt me a lot more than if you just are jokingly saying it for somebody, or for somebody who doesn't actually, you know, like you're making a joke, but they don't actually have any back issues of any kind.

That's not anything to them. You know, it's so clear that there's not this neutral kind ground that we're all on and bad words about us hurt us equally because we're all, you just have to find the right bad words.

No, it's like, well, for whatever reason, whether it's societal, whether it's socioeconomic, whatever it is, people who are in any sort of more vulnerable state or, or whatever, being them being reminded of that is just going to be more harmful than a privileged person being called something when they're not, you know, like it's just when a privileged person being, being reminded of what?

0:35:57 Stormy: Think.

0:36:55 Thomas: That they're privileged, like that's supposed to be like as insulting, you know, it's, it's just so intuitive? I think it's so obvious on an intuitive sense. You know, it's again, I'm not saying it's great to have the data. These are good studies. But like, again, I feel like just common sense and common like courtesy almost could tell you this very thing.

0:37:12 Stormy: You are drastically overestimating commonality of common sense.

0:37:18 Thomas: Yeah. This stuff just speaking, and again, this is me just pontificating, but. As a white kid who kind of came from this perspective or from people who had this perspective, I think. I think it's a result of guilty conscience. You know, I think that as white people in this society have become more, have been forced to become more aware of, you know, systemic injustice, all these kind of things, people don't like being told that they're, they might be benefiting or they might be hurting people or they, you Know, they just don't Like it. And I think there's... there's sort of a a grasping at straws to find ways that like, well, okay, but it's just as bad It's like, no, that's sorry. You're just trying to emotionally feel better about a thing. That's not real.

0:37:55 Stormy: I didn't find this particular study, but I feel pretty confident predicting what would happen. If we did a study where we randomly assigned people to say, read aloud from Huck Finn, in which they say the N-word, or read aloud a passage where it's not used, and then we asked them to rate how much they approve of a policy banning users in a social media site who use the N-word. My guess is the ones who just read aloud from Huck Finn with the N-word would be more opposed, for exactly the reason you just said, because to agree to it would be to be like, well, I just did a bad thing, even though in that context, you would be just obeying the examiner.

0:38:43 Thomas: Okay. Interesting. I see what you're saying. Yeah. You'd be invested in emotionally not feeling like you just did a bad thing. Yeah, that is interesting. Yeah bet that is true. True. I bet there's got to be equivalent studies just on that very mechanism, kind of regardless of the language thing. Just the idea of like, even if you were told by the instructions of the study to do a thing and then later told that thing is bad, I bet you'd have a knee jerk reaction to defend it more than if you hadn't. Even though you're not really at fault, like you were just, you know, you were doing kind of what you were told for the study. That's fascinating. There's got To be other examples of that, I imagine.

0:38:51 Stormy: Exactly.

0:39:19 Stormy: Yeah, there's a ton of them. Just in general, the more you identify with group that you are potentially defending or are potentially being attacked, The more that's going to affect your perceptions. Interceptions, this, don'tt want to go too crazy with this particular study, because I don't have it pulled up for the details, but there was a study of mothers of either a college-aged daughter or a college-age son, and the mothers of college-age daughters tended to support, um, stronger, stronger anti-sexual assault policies than the mothers of college-age sons, because You can imagine your daughter being a victim, don't want to imagine your son being a perpetrator, right?

0:39:29 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Mm hmm, Right. Yeah. Yeah, even though, like, on paper, it should just be like, oh, yeah, I care, especially, I have a kid that age, boy, I should care about all kids that age. You know, maybe my son could be a victim, but, like the context is, you, you know, the stats and you you you, know what's more likely. That's interesting.

0:40:20 Stormy: Just a fun fact that I love to share with people, which is in the United States and in most of the world, profanity consists of slurs, religious content, sex content, and gross body stuff like feces. But there are some exceptions. The Germans swear with animals a lot. So in the United States, if you call someone a worm, that's bad, but it's not swearing.

0:40:45 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, that doesn't work for us. That's so funny.

0:40:49 Stormy: But in German, pig dog is a terrible swear. And the Dutch swear with diseases.

0:40:49 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. That is so funny, okay?

0:40:58 Stormy: So they'll just be like, tuberculosis.

0:41:00 Thomas: I love this. This is the funniest content to me because it's like, it's so cultural and it's funny to think about. Because yeah, in other cultures, I know like being a dog is like, that's always, oh, you lie with the dogs. And it's like, yeah, no, I mean, we're pretty cool. We're into pets in this country. Like we we dress

0:41:17 Stormy: Would love to lie down with some dogs and just hang out with dogs.

0:41:18 Thomas: Yeah we dress up our pets and like

0:41:20 Stormy: Dogs.

0:41:20 Thomas: Tuxedos and crap. Like you think we care if we lie with dogs, you kidding me? It's so funny, but I love it. It's like, it's an indication of of that culture and like what's, you know, what's important to that culture, what's not important to that. I think that stuff is so fascinating.

0:41:33 Stormy: Sociologist Tom Rouette suspects that the Dutch propensity to swear with diseases originates with Calvinism. So in Calvinism, a very strong notion that God rewards you when you have good actions or you're faithful. And so if you're sick, then you must have done something bad. And even though most people don't currently hold that belief that that That sort of led them towards stigmatizing disease to some extent.

0:42:04 Thomas: That makes me think of a question. Hypothesis, do you think Americans now, I brought, this is probably true everywhere. But like, do you think maybe to a statistically significant degree, maybe, which I've learned maybe, I don't know, half standard deviation. Do you think we would insult people based on being poor more than other cultures, maybe? Because like of our, you know, capitalistic kind of hellscape fucking society, everything's money talks and all that stuff. I wonder if like insults about being poor are worse here, maybe, or mean more to us than someplace where they have like, you know, a social safety net and they're like, yeah, okay, that's fine. I don't have a lot of money.

0:42:38 Stormy: I would think that to the extent that someone holds a very bootstraps kind of belief that blames poor people for their poverty, that things like dirty poor or ratchet is a word that younger people

0:42:48 Thomas: Yeah. That's a little after my time.

0:42:56 Stormy: Use. I don't not – I've – never been in an age where I've heard the use of it, but my students use it sometimes. That means, like, poor in kind of a gross way.

0:42:57 Thomas: Yeah. Ah, okay. Okay. We're going to be such boomers. I'll be the boomer here. It's fine. Does it come from wretched or nurse ratchet? Or neither? What is the origin of that?

0:43:19 Stormy: I don't know. I know it is – that when my students spell it, they spell it R-A-C-H-E-T. So I don't think it comes from wretched.

0:43:21 Thomas: Help a boomer out. Ratchet, well, now, I don't want to know. Yeah, I would think it's wretched, but I also feel like when I say the word, um, does that slur come from the word wretched? I'm a hundred thousand years old. Like, just saying that sentence, I aged to 200 years. So I was embarrassed to even say it.

0:43:46 Stormy: Well, I think the origins are fascinating. Like I told you, the origin of vagina is dick glove. But I said the origin of cunt is much less offensive. It comes from Hindu a goddess, Kunti. Yeah. So in

0:44:00 Thomas: Weird. I don' know why the hell that is. I mean, words are so random, you know? Yeah.

0:44:02 Stormy: Its origin, it's a much more more positive word. It comes from a goddess. But of course, we find it a much more negative. Exactly.

0:44:07 Thomas: But that doesn't matter. Yeah. None of that matters extent where, to shoot, should we follow our own advice? Should I bleep you saying that in this context because it wasn't really necessary in that context? What do you think?

0:44:20 Stormy: Because it can be a slur when it is naming a person. It can also be an offensive sexual term, but not a slurs if you're talking about someone's body, at least in a way they want to be talked about. Whereas the n-word at least can't be used by white people in a non-offensive way.

0:44:37 Thomas: Right. Yeah, not really. And you know what? Why I'm take the risk?

0:44:43 Stormy: Um, No.

0:44:47 Thomas: There are white people in our society who seem to like really care about that. Like, no, I should be able to use that. I've never understood why anyone would care. Why any white person would be like dying to use it. I, well, okay. Maybe I do understand why, but that's, they don't want to say that.

0:45:02 Stormy: No, I, it's like that's really of all the things to worry about. Not being able to say I, most of those people, maybe they should focus on learning how to say I love you, son, because I think at this point that's going to be more valuable to of them in their lives.

0:45:06 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, well I mentioned I play Rocket League. That tends to be the game I play the most because I can kind of, everything I do is in some way related ADHD, to, I'm kind of realizing late in life here, and I can play Rocket League and I don't have to focus on it because it's like my brain has figured, it's sort of like driving. My brain has figured out how to do it without consciously thinking. So that means I can listen to books.

I can think I can do every other thing. So I spent a lot of time just kind of playing this game like as it's almost like my fidget spinner, like it's a thing I'm doing so that I can think about other things and process stuff and listen to stuff. And but even just trying to play it, you know, for funsies, you cannot not be exposed to all kinds of racist garbage.

Like it's, it's, even if people aren't doing it in the chat, like I've turned, you, you know, I'll turn the chat off, but sometimes that's frustrating because like, sometimes you need the chat a little bit, you know?

0:46:06 Thomas: And so, but even if I turn the cat off, then people make these team names that are fucking horrible, racist Crap or homophobic. It's pretty much racist and homophobia are the main two things that I witnessed. Like, like it's, it's actually kind of interesting. There isn't as much, like there's, I'm not saying people aren't sexist or anything, but like, that's not the go-to seem to be from my experience, uh, racist stuff for sure, like n-word related stuff, other stuff and homophobic stuff for sure, um, not so much misogynist stuff, I'm realizing in real time, that's, I don't know why that is.

0:46:11 Stormy: Well, most homophobic content has some misogynistic elements.

0:46:40 Thomas: Right. Good point. Good point.

0:46:41 Stormy: So if you're saying to someone, you're an F-slur, to some extent what you're saying is you're a man taking the role that I assume a woman should take.

0:46:41 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's an important clarification, yeah.

0:46:55 Stormy: That's, I, what said before, that that the worst thing you can call a man is a woman, that most of the most negative terms that are used for men and not for women are calling them gay, and there's an assumed effeminacy, like I've been saying the F slur, meaning, um, the particular term, but then the, the lesser-used term, fairy, again, implies effeminacy.

0:47:00 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Mm, 100.

0:47:22 Stormy: So the homophobia very, very tightly tied to sexism.

0:47:26 Thomas: 100. I fully accept that correction, that that's absolutely accurate. I first, I was going to say my negative thing. Well, I'll finish my negative thinking. Then I can end on a little bit of optimism because what I think of is, on one hand, I can't wait to maybe play video games with my kids. I like video games. I think it's a cool thing. I hope they play them. I help they have fun.

On the other hand, that's one of my biggest fears and something we talk about on Dear Old Dads more. So definitely check out that show if you'd like. But that's my biggest, like one of the, you know what I'm not afraid of at all is my son anybody, any of my kids being like, "Dad, I'm gay." I'll be like, "Sweet. Hi, gay. Hi, gay. Hey, I can't wait to say hi gay. When they say that, uh, because it's going to be the best, but, that's, I know I'm not worried about that at all. You know, I'm definitely worried about is if I see them playing a video game and I see him saying like, Oh, you, you know, F word that I actually care about or any, like any of those things.

0:48:04 Stormy: Exactly.

0:48:24 Thomas: Like Just because I know myself, I'm so worried about being able to manage how disappointed I will be in them in a way that doesn't, like, compromise our relationship. Like, that's how will be for me. Like, I am so scared of that. So, it fucking sucks. And I think that it's all –

0:48:41 Stormy: I mean, the evidence suggests that even if they're not saying it, if they are hearing it, it is influencing them. Even if they just look at someone's username and it's number 27, the evidence suggests that that is having – it's desensitizing them, making them less sensitive to whether something is hateful, and that is ultimately increasing prejudice. It is. So it's not an idle fear.

0:48:46 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

0:49:07 Thomas: – no, not at all. But I do think that you can be I think we can inoculate our kids to a certain extent from this. You know, I think that that's another theme on Dear Old Dads is I don't I can't tell how much stuff is like, oh, no matter how hard you try, you might get a kid that's just a racist. I don't think that's really true. I think there's some things where that might be true. Like you might, you know, no amount of how hard hard You try, You might have a kid That has certain mental health challenges, even even if you think like, Oh, that must be because I'm a bad parent. Like, no, that could just be, you Know, their brains, their brain. But certain stuff, I think there's just so many parents out there who either are racist or just don't care or aren't engaged. And my I would hope that that's more the reason this proliferates than, you know, it proliferating in the face of someone actually a parent actually trying to do something about it.

0:49:52 Thomas: That's what I have to tell myself, because I feel like with the proper, you empathy taught to my kids and sort of inoculation to these terrible ideas and with the improper perspective about how hurtful these things are. Yeah, they're going to see it. But I think, they'll be part of that standard deviation that 6.5 or that six who didn't change their answer. You know, like I feel like there's plenty of room for that. There's plenty room for for, I hope, raising kids who are like, oh, that's disgusting. Fuck you. That's not going to desensitize me, you know?

0:50:20 Stormy: I think the evidence is that it will have an effect whether you want it to or not. But what your goal should be is to make them so anti-racist that when they're exposed to a little bit and they get a little desensitized, they're still solidly anti-acid. That's

0:50:38 Thomas: Correct me if I've missed something. But if the average offensiveness of a thing went from 6 to 6.5, you know, over a group of people, I think it's very fair to say that, no, it's not inevitable that this affects every single person.

0:50:50 Stormy: Over a single exposure in the laboratory. I'm saying that if your kid is playing, you World of Warcraft or whatever, young people do these days Yeah.

0:50:53 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Oh, jeez. Now you're a boomer. Yeah, that's not...

0:51:01 Stormy: And they see but

0:51:01 Thomas: People my age play World of Warcraft. I'm like the youngest person on World of Worldcraft.

0:51:06 Stormy: If they see, you know, profanity, or not profanities, they see slurs in people's usernames, they are going to be a bit desensitized to it. What you're saying is that there are active things parents can do to limit the effect on their kids because it's not realistic to keep your kids away from that entirely. What I'm saying is the important thing to remember is that in some contexts where the exposure is extreme, inoculating them against it might not be enough. If your kid is spending time in a grossly toxic game, even if they're not saying the words, if everyone around them is shouting hate speech, it's probably having an effect, even if the effect is small.

0:51:45 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that could be true. But I also think, we're children are exposed or anybody's exposed to a strong message the other day, does that 6.5 turn into a 7? You know, and I feel like, what are our lives but a bunch of those things all the time? And I think it's reasonable to hope that you could provide enough in the other side of the ledger to make up for some of these bad effects, don't you think?

0:52:13 Stormy: I don't have that data available. I don't have the study in front of me, but there have been studies that look at bystander intervention. So when somebody says, hey, you shouldn't have said That's really awful. That has a pretty profound effect.

0:52:22 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Mm-huh. Yeah.

0:52:29 Stormy: So people speaking up in the platform is very effective.

0:52:34 Thomas: Yeah. That's a good point. I'm going to make sure I do that every time. I was trying to end on an optimistic note, which is, historically, and maybe still true, all the of men tend to be like feminizing, as you're saying, I think we can hope that over time, the prominent insults on men are more like stuff like asshole and douchebag. Although wait, douche bag, that's an interesting one. How do we rate that one? Because that is technically a feminine like thing, right? I mean, But like, I still feel like it's good, solid insult based on someone just being shitty.

0:53:04 Stormy: Yeah, I mean, it does, you know, a douche is literally some kind of thing used to wash a vagina. So it suggests that you're gross, just like vaginas are gross.

0:53:15 Stormy: But again, it matters how it's used more than what it literally means. And at this point, I very rarely see the word douche used in any actual reference to vaginas. Hell,

0:53:18 Thomas: Damn it. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, good. I guess it cuts both ways. The fact that like, oh, well, the C word has a nice origin. That doesn't matter. And maybe the fact that this has a guess, I guess the origin would be like, oh, yeah, because women, if they're unclean, the bag the that thing like, yeah, OK, I guess that probably is the origin. That sounds kind of sexist. But I'm hoping in a positive sense that the word is more purely just used to describe a piece of shit dude who's bad because they're a piece of shit, dude, and having nothing to do with femininity. That's my hope. I'm look, I'm I'm hopping for a brighter future. Stormy, can we can we unite? Can we join hands and start calling rich white men douchebags and change the world? Will you join me?

0:54:07 Stormy: Yeah, the Russians have a swear word that's mouse fucker, which I really like.

0:54:14 Thomas: Kinds of, that hits a lot of areas too, because I imagine there must be like a penis size insult to component to that.

0:54:18 Stormy: Exactly, because you're a fucker and you're small, all.

0:54:21 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, wow. Those Russians, they know how to bring their misogynistic insults. Well, I want to give you the chance to, you know, maybe toss out a a little plug for any anything you would like to plug. Hint, hint.

0:54:21 Stormy: Yeah. Yep. Yeah, so I want to do a little section, an offbeat act of kindness. Since I've got a little bit of a bullhorn, I'd like to use it to give listeners ideas about a good, positive thing They can do that's a little less obvious. So your assignment this week is to sign up for the National Bone Marrow Registry. Go to bethematch.org and enter some basic information. If you qualify as a possible donor, they'll send you a cheek swab kit through the mail. You rub a Q-tip on your mouth and send it back, which, let's be honest, there's a few of you have weird kinks and wanted to do that anyway, and then you're on the registry and they'll contact you if you can save a life. It's like being a very lazy Spider-Man.

0:54:44 Thomas: I love it.

0:55:16 Thomas: I will put it in the show notes. I I love this idea of a easy thing that we can do to improve the world, to make things better. Bone marrow registry. That's fantastic. Thanks so much, Dr. Alan Smerbeck. Stormy Decisus to me always. Such a pleasure. Thanks for coming on.

0:55:31 Stormy: Thanks for having me.