F-Bomb-onomics

In this blog the Shrewd Samaritan will occasionally wander off topic to examine an issue tangential to economic development and globalization issues.  In this case, I’ve been reflecting on our culture’s use of the F-Bomb, yes that clever word, f_ _ k.  Let me issue a disclaimer up front: I am not a fan of the F-bomb, and the purpose of writing this is to (1) review some of motives from psychology and behavioral economics that attempt to explain why people cuss in general (and use the F-bomb in particular); and (2) attempt to nudge the F-Bomb closer toward a special class of epithets that have become widely unacceptable in nearly all mainstream conversation, such as the N-word and other slurs, principally based on their dehumanization of a particular sub-group in society.

Data show that cussing in our culture is both frequent and on the rise.  A couple of different studies in psychology find swear words in American culture to make up about 0.5% of total word usage, which seems small, but compares to only about 1.0% usage for first-personal plural pronouns, like “we” and “our.”  An Associated Press poll within the last ten years found that 64% of Americans drop the F-Bomb at least occasionally—8% drop it more than a few times a day.  Two-thirds of those responding in the poll believed that Americans swear more than they did 20 years before.  A report of the Parents Television Council, in a 2010 survey of cussing on television called Habitat for Profanity, found that instances of the bleeped or muted F-Bomb increased from 11 total in 2005 to 276 in 2010.   Overall cussing on TV increased 66% just during those five years.  A recent study published in the Atlantic, found Ohio to be the biggest cussing state.  My home state of California was up there too. Texas and Maine were way down the list; apparently cussing isn’t a red or blue-state issue.

So why do people cuss?  Linguistic psychologist Timothy Jay is the guru of modern cussing theory.  A summary of his work is found in his classics books Cursing in America and the subsequent Why We Curse, which are the go-to references for everything you ever wanted to know about cussing.   Years of intensive study on the subject has led him to believe that cussing is regulated by a series of impulses and counter-acting balances in the brain.  These neurological impulses induce a person to use a cuss word for the purpose of more efficiently communicating emotions (frustration, anger, and even elation, e.g. “F_ _ _ yeah!”).  Functionally, the shock-value of the cuss word appears to heighten the receptors of a listener, allowing the communicator to convey the extremity of an emotion when he feels that ordinary words aren’t up to the job.  Psychological factors and social factors, as seen in the diagram, both provide the individual with a menu of taboo words–which hence are candidates for producing shock value–and also regulate the use of these words (under ideal circumstances).

Jay even points to the parallels between cussing and Tourette’s Syndrome.  In the case of Tourette’s, the psychological and social-cultural forces are unable to counterbalance heightened psychological impulses such that persons suffering from Tourette’s are subject not only to sudden twitches and facial tics, but suffer from coprololia, or uncontrolled swearing (intriguingly portrayed in the PBS documentary Twitch and Shout.)

Consistent with habitual F-Bomb use would seem to reside an insecurity about whether supposed listeners are actually listening—there is a need to shock the listener to ensure one’s feelings are being communicated adequately.  An F-Bomber may be motivated by feelings of an unheard voice.  But one problem (among others) is that usage of the F-bomb, like just about everything else, begins to drift into the realm of diminishing returns.  When the F-bomb becomes the F-machine-gun, as it does with some, the shock wears off.  And often when you take out the cussing, the residual often doesn’t contain much real thought.

A second theory is that the F-bomb may also be a signaling behavior.  Spence’s seminal (2001 Nobel Prize) work on signaling theory demonstrated how an effective “signal” is transmitted from a “sender” to a “receiver” to convey that the sender is a particular “type.”  A signal is only effective if it can only be credibly sent by the “strong” type and not by the “weak” type, i.e. to signal that you are a macho guy (as opposed to a wimpy guy), you lift up the back end of a car, not a toothpick.

Thus a person may drop the F-bomb to convey that he is a type who is freed from the constraints of traditional social boundaries: a maverick, an uninhibited iconoclast, respecter of few and little.  Many seem to be attracted to this type of person, for reasons that I have never quite understood. Thus we might expect signaling for the purpose of self-identification when and where information is imperfect. The F‑bomb thus may be a signal in the sense that someone who believes in respecting traditional social boundaries (the opposite type) may not be into cussing, or in Spences’s parlance, the psychic costs of cussing are too high.

More specifically, the particular use of the word f_ _k may signal an individual’s own flippancy about sex and disrespect for the idea that it should involve any deeper meaning than personal physical gratification.  Related to the first theory, it may signal that the speaker places a subjective primacy on any emotions he happens to be experiencing at a particular time–and the psychological release from fully communicating their importance to a listener–over any of these norms.  In this way, dropping the F-bomb may communicate a “my needs come first” signal that could be advantageous to the cusser in other aspects of the relationship, particularly in future plays of a Hawk-Dove game, where both parties may want something only one can have, and each must choose between an aggressive or passive approach to the conflict.  Sending the aggressive F-Bomb signal may induce the other into choosing passive.

A third possible explanation for habitual cussing is an externality argument: maybe people just drop the F-Bomb because others around them do.  There is a rich literature now in behavioral economics on imitation and peer effects: we imitate others sometimes for instrumental reasons (like when we need to use the same programming language), for informational reasons (you’ve got to see this movie…), and for pure conformity reasons (human beings don’t want to feel isolated from the group), maybe because in prior days that meant being left out where the wild things are.  Pure conformity is the most likely candidate of the three.  For example, those who join the military often find that their cussing rate increases substantially simply because it’s all around them.

The question of which of these theories dominates is unclear, but behavioral economists could probably dream up a set of experiments that one could run to distinguish between the competing hypotheses.  Perhaps to test the insecurity/unheard voice theory, an experiment could randomly assign subjects to repeated readings of Jen Sincero’s new bestseller You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life.  Then one could ascertain if a drop in rate of F-bomb usage followed among the treated (relative to baseline usage).  A randomly assigned treatment in which an experimenter repeatedly affirms a subject’s irreverent qualities in monitored conversation ought to reduce F-Bomb droppings if signaling theory holds, since it renders signaling unnecessary.  Higher F-Bomb usage among a group of subjects randomly invited to join a gang of sailors at a bar compared to a control group invited to a missionary potluck would support a peer effects theory.

Why should we care about the F-Bomb anyway?  I have become convinced that issues of respect and social justice subtly lie behind many of the “traditional values” that secularists often relegate to mere prudery among the religious, and chastise accordingly.  Crossing these boundaries often involve violations of human dignity that go beyond merely breaking some arbitrary social taboo.

I find this to be particularly true in the arena of certain swear words, norms about sexual relationships, and so forth.  For example, today there seems to be a strong differentiation between words that appear to violate the dignity of a particular group in society and the other cuss words.  Thankfully, there are few Hollywood producers alive today who try to get a laugh in a movie with a racial slur.  Yet not long ago in the South, a negative reaction to use of the N-word was considered a prudery.  The change is due to a social consciousness that has emerged in which we associate these slurs with an affront to human dignity.  Because of that, they’re not funny anymore.

The F-Bomb shouldn’t be funny anymore either.  At its root, it is exceptionally degrading to women.  Common usage of the F-bomb paints a picture of sex as anything but a loving act between two committed adults, but rather as a casual, thoughtless, loveless encounter arguably bordering on rape.    There are few words that are more callous to the welfare of women, who always suffer the most when sex is detached from commitment.

Why does this asymmetry exist between the genders? Biologists will remind us that simply to reproduce their genes, males have a biological incentive to mate with as many females as possible and nothing biologically prevents us from doing so.   Women, on the other hand, can only have (normally) one offspring at a time.  Thus in the reproduction of her genes, the female incentive is for high quality offspring, as opposed to high quantity for the male.  What is obvious from every study on the topic (e.g. see Blankenhorn’s Fatherless in America) is that the welfare and quality of the child is overwhelmingly influenced by the commitment and nurture of the male partner.  Even when birth control is used, these biological incentives remain in our respective psyches: Women tend to value the emotional and relational aspect of sex relatively more than men; they are degraded by the kind of loveless encounter insinuated by the F-Bomb.  In short, the F-Bomb is a word–propagated mostly by men–that implies a sexual domination of women for the purposes of short-term male sexual gratification.

There are good reasons lying behind why, for example, the Bible (and virtually every other religious tradition) strongly opposes this callous view of sex:  A society that is full of “f_ _ _ _ _ g” is a society full of degraded women sexually exploited by men, abandoned by loveless partners, raising children alone, left holding the bag.  And when a village is left to raise a child, the data shows that it represents a serious collective action problem.

The F-Bomb’s implicit affirmation of the casual sexual act degrades women as sex objects in a similar way that the N-word degrades African Americans in its association with slavery.  Hearing a woman dropping the F-Bomb is as sad as hearing an African American use the N-word, a kind of tragic self-disrespect.  Sex without a publically stated commitment of the male to the female is associated with just about every social ill one can think of: suicide, teen violence, drug use, single-parent children, female depression, the list is nearly endless.  Yet some people who would openly chastise another for using a racial slur have no problem carelessly dropping an F-Bomb here and there.  We have to wake up and think about what we are saying.

As a society we really need to drop the F-Bomb…hopefully as soon as possible.

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