A psychology experiment found that repeating a dirty word of your choice while doing push-ups on a chair improves your performance compared to repeating a neutral word. Name-calling can promote a psychological state in which an individual can exert maximum effort and overcome internal constraints. The paper was published in american psychologist.
In many situations where peak performance is required, people restrain themselves, consciously or unconsciously. This limits your chances of success. For example, people may fear public speaking and refrain from situations in which they could express ideas or seize personal or professional opportunities. Job seekers may be hesitant when negotiating salary. People who are shy may be unable to approach those they are attracted to and miss out on opportunities to form desirable romantic relationships.
Sometimes people miss out on opportunities because they think they’re not talented, unattractive, uneducated, or important enough. People also hesitate when they overthink possible negative outcomes or underestimate their ability to cope with them. Past criticism, embarrassment, failure, or unstable life experiences can lead people to expect new endeavors to end badly.
Social pressure can prevent people from taking action, especially if they worry that others will criticize, ridicule, or exclude them. Some people remain in familiar but unsatisfactory situations because they feel that familiarity is safer than change. Over time, missed opportunities can accumulate and hinder important developments in life.
Study author Richard Stevens and colleagues point out that in situations where people are restraining themselves, psychological stimulation that leads to a more “disinhibited” state of mind may produce more favorable outcomes. For example, a recent study showed that grunting can increase the power of a tennis player’s racket by 19 to 26 percent. The researchers proposed that swearing may counteract the tendency to inhibit, thereby improving physical performance.
They conducted two experiments to test this. Participants in the first experiment were 88 adults recruited from the study authors’ college campus community. The study authors asked participants to perform chair push-ups under two different conditions. The first time they repeated an expletive of their choice, and the second time they repeated a neutral word.
The chair push-up task required participants to sit on a sturdy chair and place their hands under their thighs at a 45-degree angle, fingers pointing inward. Next, raise your legs while extending your arms and support your weight with your hands for as long as possible (maximum safe limit is 60 seconds). While performing push-ups, participants were asked to repeat their chosen word every 2 seconds. Study participants also completed assessments measuring their psychological “flow,” how humorous they found the vocalizations, their self-confidence, social desirability, and how distracting they found repeating the words.
The second experiment involved 94 participants recruited in the same way as Experiment 1. The overall design was the same, but participants repeated the assigned word for 20 seconds before and during the push-up task. Additionally, this experiment included measures of bystander apathy (rating of the likelihood of helping others in different scenarios), state disinhibition (state BIS/BAS scale), and physical and cognitive anxiety. Participants also rated the novelty of the expletives and neutral words they used.
Results from the first experiment showed that when participants repeated profanity, they held chair push-ups longer. In this condition, participants also experienced increased psychological flow and distraction. They also scored high on humor and feeling freed from constraints.
Statistical analysis showed that freedom from constraints and psychological flow may mediate (explain) the association between name-calling and improved physical performance. Psychological flow is a highly focused and pleasurable state in which a person is fully immersed in a challenging but manageable activity.
The results of the second experiment confirmed the previous findings. In other words, when participants were exposed to expletives, they performed better on chair push-ups. In addition, swearing increased positive emotions and was distracting, and swearing was perceived as more novel than neutral language. Unexpectedly, swearing seemed to result in higher levels of cognitive anxiety.
The individual mediation analyzes in both experiments were somewhat mixed and statistically underpowered, so the researchers combined data from both experiments with a third study conducted previously. Analysis of this aggregated data set of 300 participants confirmed the researchers’ core theory. The idea is that by increasing your mental flow, boosting your confidence, and increasing distractions (which prevent your brain from focusing on pain and fatigue), you’re guaranteed to improve your physical performance.
“These findings suggest that swearing promotes psychological states that help maximize effort and overcome internal constraints. These effects have potential implications for athletic performance, rehabilitation, and situations requiring courage and assertiveness. As such, swearing may be a low-cost, widely available psychological intervention to help individuals ‘hold back’ when peak performance is needed,” the study authors concluded.
This study contributes to scientific understanding of the role that name-calling plays in human life. However, participants likely knew what effects the study authors were expecting. It is unlikely that they were unaware that the study authors expected name-calling to improve performance. This could have resulted in a placebo or Hawthorne effect, biasing the results. The Hawthorne effect is the tendency for people to change their behavior (e.g., try harder) simply because they know they are being observed and are aware of the possibility of the observer’s expectations.
The paper, “‘Don’t Hold Back’: National Prohibition Increases the Strength of Swearing,” was written by Richard Stephens, Harry Dowber, Christopher Richardson, and Nicholas B. Washmuth.
