Is it lying or is it just convincing?

Doublespeak, or the use of euphemisms to move opinion, allows leaders to avoid the reputational cost of lies while still bringing people to their way of thinking, a new study has found.

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have found that the use of pleasant euphemistic terms favors people’s evaluation of actions to be more favorable. For example, to replace an unpleasant term, ‘torture’, with something more harmless and semantically pleasant, such as ‘enhanced interrogation’.

“Like the much-studied phenomenon of ‘fake news’, manipulative language can serve as a tool to deceive the public and not to do so with lies, but rather with the strategic use of euphemistic language,” said Alexander Walker, lead author of the study, said. and a Ph.D. candidate in cognitive psychology at Waterloo. “The avoidance of objectively false allegations may provide the strategic user of the language with plausible denial of dishonesty, thus protecting against the reputational costs associated with lying.”

As part of a series of studies examining the effectiveness, consequences, and mechanisms of double speech in a psychological context, the researchers investigated whether the use of language that is characteristic of double speech can be used to influence people’s actions.

The researchers identified double discourse as the strategic manipulation of language to influence the opinions of others by presenting the truth in a way that benefits one. To do this, the researchers assessed whether the substitution of a pleasant term – for example ‘work at a meat processing plant’ in place of a semantically related unpleasant term such as ‘work at a slaughterhouse’, had an effect on how someone’s actions were interpreted.

The researchers’ results confirmed that evaluating people of an action in a predictable, self-serving way can be biased when an individual uses the strategic use of more or less pleasant terms when describing an action.

“Our study shows how language can be used strategically to shape people’s opinions about events or actions,” Walker said. “With a lower risk level, individuals can use linguistic manipulation, such as double speaking, without correcting it.”

The study, “Controlling the Narrative: Euphemistic Language Affects Judgments of Actions While Vermoing Perceptions of Dishonesty”, written by Waterloo’s researchers from the Faculty of Arts Walker, Jonathan Fugelsang, Martin Turpin, Ethan Meyers, Derek Koehler and Jennifer Stolz, appears in the magazine. Cognition.