Credits: Social Media
People are more likely to trust others who talk like them, study shows
Aristotle famously said, man is by nature a social animal. But this might mean more than it seems. Our choice of words could affect whether other people feel inclined to cooperate with us. So choose your words wisely.
The English language is bulging at the seams, and ever-growing. There are differences between British English, American English, and just about every other English on the planet. Researchers have been investigating the effects your linguistic choices could be having on how others respond to you emotionally �with fascinating results. It has more effect on relationships than you think.
Do you say holiday or vacation? Start or begin?
In English, as in any language, there are almost always multiple ways of saying the same thing. Every day, in every conversation, our brain makes countless micro-decisions about how to vocalize our thoughts.
For example, you might say I gave Selena the book or I gave the book to Selena. In the US, people tend to say vacation, while Brits say holiday.
In a recent experiment, 100 English-speaking participants described pictures for two conversation partners. The differences often tiny and, in theory, pretty much meaningless were investigated by a research team at the University of Vienna, in Austria.
They found that people are more likely to cooperate with others if they make similar linguistic choices in a conversation, according to a write-up in Science Daily.
Participants were shown images depicting situations interpersonal interactions, that sort of thing. Researchers then invited them to select one of two descriptions of what the images showed. Each description used a different grammatical construction, but essentially meant the same thing.�
Then, the players roles changed. The study participants received the descriptions their co-participants had given, and were asked to choose a partner with whom to cooperate. They chose their partners based on the expectation that they were going to take part in a game with the opportunity to win some money.
The researchers found that, as expected, our study participants chose conversation partners who spoke similarly to them and used the same grammatical construction as them,” explains Theresa Matzinger, the studys lead author.
We trust people who naturally use the same language as us
In the second stage of the experiment, participants chose partners whose language resembled their own natural language.
Matzinger drew the conclusion that a sense of belonging to the same social group based on the language people use is an important factor when people are choosing who they cooperate with.
This is relevant to many areas of everyday life. Political polarization, socioeconomic inequality and party loyalties all have an impact on the language people use. Or, to reverse it, they can also reflect linguistic differences between segments of the population.�The brain is a fascinating thing �and not always predictable.
Identity politics, wokeness and all sorts of other cultural trends come with specific pieces of language. You can infer a lot about someone from the language they use, from a break-up to a business meeting.
What this experiment shows is that, aside from the choices we make deliberately, we actually build loyalties based on language without even realizing it.�
