The Honest Truth About a Dirty Mouth: What Science Says About Swearing

Why are the most honest people in team meetings usually the same ones who get told to “watch their language”?

Sounds paradoxical, doesn’t it? From childhood, we are taught that people who swear are the ones who lie, exaggerate, and hide the truth. Yet science walks in and says: nope, it’s the opposite. On average, people who regularly use profanity are less likely to lie and tend to behave more honestly—both individually and at the level of entire societies.

Let’s unpack how researchers reached that conclusion and why it actually makes sense.

In 2017, the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science published an article with a title too good not to quote in full: “Frankly, We Do Give a Damn: The Relationship Between Profanity and Honesty.” The authors were Gilad Feldman (then at Maastricht University), Huiwen Lian, Michal Kosinski (yes, the same guy who later stirred controversy with the project that claimed to predict sexual orientation from photos), and David Stillwell from Cambridge.

They ran three large-scale studies, and all three pointed in the exact same direction.

The Three Studies

• Study 1: The Social Media Analysis. This involved an analysis of roughly 75,000 Facebook profiles from the United States. People who frequently used profanity in their statuses and comments were found to be significantly less likely to use linguistic markers associated with deception and obvious lies (such as fake achievements or fabricated life stories). The correlation wasn’t weak—it was strikingly strong.
• Study 2: The Lab Experiment. Participants rolled a die in private and reported the result to the researchers. The setup was simple: higher numbers meant bigger cash rewards. This is a classic psychological setup that makes lying very tempting and easy to get away with. The results showed that those who reported swearing more in everyday life statistically cheated less when it came to reporting their scores for money.
• Study 3: The Societal View. This was perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the research. The researchers looked at entire societies, comparing government transparency and corruption indices across 48 countries and U.S. states with how often people in those places swore on social media. The result? The more profanity in everyday language, the higher the societal integrity and the lower the corruption. The “cleanest-speaking” U.S. states turned out to be the most corrupt, while the “foulest-mouthed” ones were the most transparent.

Why Does This Happen?

Here is where psychology steps in: it comes down to self-expression and authenticity.

People who allow themselves to swear are generally worse at (and significantly less interested in) wearing social masks. Swearing is the fastest way to drop the internal censor and say exactly what you think, without polish or filters. It acts as a marker of low “social desirability bias”—the tendency to present yourself as better than you actually are.

Psychologists call this trait “low self-monitoring.” Some people constantly watch how they come across: Do I sound nice? Was that too harsh? Is this appropriate? These high self-monitors are the ones more likely to tell white lies, omit inconvenient truths, or embellish stories to fit in. Others live by the philosophy of “what you see is what you get.” Their language may be rougher and less refined, but it is also inherently more truthful.

There is another cool angle: swearing often works as an emotional pressure valve. When someone lets off steam with a few choice words, they often have less need to lie to themselves or others just to maintain the artificial image of a “good person.”

Of course, this is an average tendency, not an iron law. There are certainly polite liars and crude con artists. But overall, the pattern is robust and holds across different cultures and contexts.

Interestingly, similar findings popped up in earlier, smaller studies. Back in the 1980s, researchers noticed that work teams where people openly swore tended to have higher trust and fewer backstabbing politics. It seems that when the language is raw, the intentions are often clearer.

The Bottom Line

So the next time someone gasps and says “watch your mouth!”, you can calmly reply: “I’m just being honest. Science backs me up.”

References

• Feldman, G., Lian, H., Kosinski, M., & Stillwell, D. (2017). Frankly, we do give a damn: The relationship between profanity and honesty. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 8(7), 816–826.
  https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550616681055

It’s worth a read—they even included hilarious heat maps of the most popular swear words by U.S. state. So, does this sound like you… or someone you know?