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Compensatory conspicuous communication: Low status increases jargon use
Abstract
Jargon is commonly used to efficiently communicate and signal group membership. We propose that jargon use also serves a status compensation function. We first define jargon and distinguish it from slang and technical language. Nine studies, including experiments and archival data analyses, test whether low status increases jargon use. Analyses of 64,000 dissertations found that titles produced by authors from lower-status schools included more jargon than titles from higher-status school authors. Experimental manipulations established that low status causally increases jargon use, even in live conversations. Statistical mediation and experimental-causal-chain analyses demonstrated that the low status → jargon effect is driven by increased concern with audience evaluations over conversational clarity. Additional archival and experimental evidence found that acronyms and legalese serve a similar status-compensation function as other forms of jargon (e.g., complex language). These findings establish a new driver of jargon use and demonstrate that communication, like consumption, can be both compensatory and conspicuous.
... see the case of nursing in Hills & Watson, 2011). However, from a relational point of view, studies show that the use of specialised jargon may also often index a high level of formality among peers (Brown, Anicich & Galinsky, 2020), which may not only be inappropriate for these clinical meetings but also jeopardise positive relationships in peer-peer communication. Thus, Martin seems to navigate the complexities of the preferred transactional and relational outcomes of using medical jargon when discussing patients' cases with peers by employing a mix of specialised and seemingly less specialised (yet coded) jargon to draw on the teams' both explicit and tacit medical Logos: Revista de Lingüística, Filosofía y Literatura 32 (1) knowledge as a way to acknowledge their shared expertise (Collins & Evans, 2007). ...
... The former allows him to provide precise clinical information to discuss the case, while the latter seems to be strategically used to reduce the levels of formality and, thus, index closeness to his peers. Using a mix of specialised and coded jargon in this way helps Martin to construct self and others' expert stances in a relaxed social context and to facilitate social bonding and ingroup membership based on the understanding that the meaning underlying this jargon is based on their shared medical knowledge and expertise (consider Wenger, 1998;and Brown et al., 2020). Bhatia (2004) explains that discursive knowledge (e.g. the use of technical terminology) is paramount to the development and enactment of expert stances. ...
This paper explores how a group of clinicians discursively constructs their expert stances using medical jargon as they discuss their professional practices and patients’ cases at a clinic. Guided by the discursive analytic tradition of interactional sociolinguistics, the analysis is based on naturally-occurring conversations that have been audio and video recorded during four clinical meetings in a healthcare setting in New Zealand. This paper shows that the use of medical jargon plays a vital role in constructing expert stances that address the interactional, and especially relational, needs of participants in these clinical meetings. In particular, the paper discusses the role of medical jargon in the construction of clinicians’ expert stances when building ingroup alignments, managing professional criticism and managing disagreement in peer-peer interactions. Concluding remarks offer reflections on the role of medical jargon in the construction of clinicians’ relational stance and the need to further investigate the use of specialised jargon in other contexts of peer communication.
... human) might reverse when they believe that a human decision-maker might be partial against them because of their social status within their profession. We selected respect as a form of one's social resource (Foa and Foa, 1980;Brown et al., 2020) which may make a human more partial than AI. The study thus aimed to replicate and advance findings from Study 2. ...
... We utilized a between-subject design in which we varied partiality (favorable vs. unfavorable) between subjects. People were told that they were highly respected because of their status (partial in their favor), or looked down upon (partial against them) by others within their profession (Brown et al., 2020). Specifically, we asked people to imagine a situation that could occur in everyday work life. ...
Over the coming years, AI could increasingly replace humans for making complex decisions because of the promise it holds for standardizing and debiasing decision-making procedures. Despite intense debates regarding algorithmic fairness, little research has examined how laypeople react when resource-allocation decisions are turned over to AI. We address this question by examining the role of perceived impartiality as a factor that can influence the acceptance of AI as a replacement for human decision-makers. We posit that laypeople attribute greater impartiality to AI than human decision-makers. Our investigation shows that people value impartiality in decision procedures that concern the allocation of scarce resources and that people perceive AI as more capable of impartiality than humans. Yet, paradoxically, laypeople prefer human decision-makers in allocation decisions. This preference reverses when potential human biases are made salient. The findings highlight the importance of impartiality in AI and thus hold implications for the design of policy measures.
... Slang words are a type of informal language that is seasonal (Saputra & Marlina, 2019). Usually used by certain social groups when communicating internally so as not to be understood by people who are not members of their group (Brown et al., 2020). Allan and Burridge (2006) classify five types of slang, fresh and creative, flippant, imitative, acronym, and clipping. ...
This digital ethnography study identifies the slang words used by the Balinese Generation Z in Instagram Communication. Specifically, this study identifies the slang word types and origin words. The researchers followed Allan and Burridge's types of slang words to identify the slang words. The study data were collected from the comments of the Balinese Generation Z on Instagram. The researchers selected the study samples using a purposive sampling technique and applied content analysis to analyze the collected data. This study found that the slang word types used by the Balinese Generation Z were the acronym, fresh and creative, imitative, clipping, flippant, and mixing. Acronyms are the largest in number. Fresh and creative slang words are in the second position. The fresh and creative slang words found in this study are not new. Those words are coined from the existing words by flipping the letters or reading the letters of the words from back to front. Some slang words found in this study combined clipping and mixing. Even though the mixing is not in Allan and Burridge’s types of slang words, the researchers added it since some are made of two different languages. The origin languages of slang words used by the Balinese generation Z are Indonesian, Indonesian + English, Balinese, and Thai.
... Slang words are a type of informal language that is seasonal (Saputra & Marlina, 2019). Usually used by certain social groups when communicating internally so as not to be understood by people who are not members of their group (Brown et al., 2020). Allan and Burridge (2006) classify five types of slang, fresh and creative, flippant, imitative, acronym, and clipping. ...
Phraseological or multi-word-pattern corpus-driven analysis of language in use has offered significant insights in recent years into how linguistic discourse can vary. This variation has been researched across genres, registers, disciplines, and native or non-native differences. However, very few studies have presented the gender-based analysis of academic research discourse within the EFL/ESL perspective. The current study explored the use of lexical bundles practiced by male and female researchers working in the EFL/ESL academic context within KSA. Corpora comprising almost 300,000 words including 68 research articles, 36 by female and 32 by male researchers were collected and run through Lancsbox 6.0 software package. The analysis was based on the frequency and structural patterns across the selected data. For the critical analysis of structural patterns, the structural taxonomy framework offered by Gezegin-Bal (2109) adapted from Biber et al. (1999) was employed. As established by the findings of the study, prepositional and noun phrases remained overwhelmingly more frequent and common in both corpora. There were no significant gender-based differences in the use of lexical bundles found which reflects that both male and female researchers practiced similar expressions in their use of the English language.
... High-status group members, such as attending physicians, may use jargon to test the knowledge of lower-status members, such as medical residents (Luks and Goldberger 2021). Jargon can even serve as "conspicuous communication," whereby lowerstatus group members use it to impress higher-status members (Brown et al. 2020). ...
Effective communication is crucial in all service contexts, but especially in clinical healthcare, given its high (sometimes life-or-death) stakes. Fine-tuned messaging and personalization are vital to improving patients’ service experiences, their understanding of and adherence to treatment and therapy, and their physical and mental health. This article aims to guide clinicians specifically, and other service providers more generally, in their communication practices, so that they ultimately improve the quality of service they deliver to patients each day. It presents a comprehensive, integrative review and develops a framework for how clinicians communicate with patients by synthesizing findings from presently disconnected literatures in services, psychology, marketing, communications, and medicine. The framework, which elucidates the communication channels (verbal, nonverbal, and listening) clinicians use to convey meaning to patients, can be adapted to other service contexts, especially professional services. An agenda for future research and implications for improving service provider communications are included.
... In addition, some forms of language that result in verbal misunderstanding do not pertain to written communication (e.g., non-native accent). Thus, we excluded articles that focused on written communication (e.g., Brown, Anicich, & Galinsky, 2020). Third, we excluded studies that examined individual differences in the use of the forms of language but did not consider their relationship to employees' work outcomes. ...
Demographic, technological, and global trends have brought the language used at the workplace to the forefront. A growing body of research reveals that language could result in misunderstanding at work, and influence employees’ performance and attitudinal outcomes. Language at work encompasses standard language (e.g., English) as well as several hybrid forms of language (non-native accents, code-switching, and jargon). We delineate how these forms of language could result in misunderstanding. We then identify relational, affective, and informational mechanisms that underlie the relationship between language-related misunderstanding and employees’ performance and attitudinal outcomes, and highlight key boundary conditions. In doing so, we uncover research gaps and identify areas for future research. We conclude with implications for theory as well as for practitioners to navigate language-related misunderstanding at work.
... Similarly, academics with higher publication and citation scores were found to use formal titles less often in their email signatures (Harmon- Jones, Schmeichel, & Harmon-Jones, 2009), and to dress more casually or in a more 'non-conforming' style (Bellezza et al. 2014). Higher status has also been linked to less jargon use: dissertations submitted to higher-ranked universities use fewer acronyms and less complex language than those from lower-ranked schools (Brown et al. 2020). ...
Much work on intellectual humility has focused on its epistemic benefits. We suggest that displaying (or failing to display) intellectual humility also has effects on how others perceive us and that, as a result, intellectual humility can serve reputation management purposes, in at least four ways: (i) Intellectual humility can be used to signal we are a good source of information; (ii) Intellectual humility can be used to signal we are competent through countersignaling; (iii) Intellectual humility can be used to make sure others do not believe we are overclaiming superiority; (iv) lack of intellectual humility (or intellectual arrogance) can be used to signal dominance. The evidence suggests that intellectual humility (or lack thereof) can have each of these effects. Seeing intellectual humility as (inter alia) a reputation management tool predicts that people will be more or less likely to display intellectual humility in some contexts. For instance, people in a position of power might stand to lose less if they fail to be intellectual humble; accordingly, evidence suggests that they tend to display less intellectual humility. In conclusion, we speculate that understanding intellectual humility as reputation management could help construct environments more conducive to displays of intellectual humility.
... Jargon is a special vocabulary used in a job context (Miller et al., 2021;Patoko & Yazdanifard, 2014). Jargon is an unusual vocabulary, complex phrases, and unclear meanings are used by some fields such as commerce, profession, or similar groups (Brown et al., 2021;Jilka et al., 2019;Pilkington et al., 2019). From those opinions, it can be concluded that jargon is a term or vocabulary owned by a group that is used when carrying out activities in their work. ...
Language is a system that mediates and types of vocalizations used by a community to communicate to understand each other. Language also has many varieties. This diversity is influenced by many factors, such as being influenced by a known place by age, gender, social status, and type of work. One variety of language is jargon. This study aims to analyze the jargon of meaning used by the people of Tenganan Village in weaving grinning. The design of this research is a qualitative descriptive design. The method used is observation and interviews. The observation method was carried out to observe the state of Tenganan village. The interview method was conducted to interview two weavers in Tenganan village to provide information regarding the jargon they use. The results showed that Tenganan Village people used fifty-six jargon to bring weaving. Based on fifty-six jargon, they are categorized into four types. The first type is jargon based on yarn processing, consisting of twenty jargon. The second type is jargon based on the weaving process, which finds three jargon. The third type is jargon based on naming tools and materials that find fifteen jargon. The fourth type is jargon based on the naming of eighteen motifs. Each jargon has a meaning that is used to facilitate communication between weavers in producing grinding weaving.
... Every individual cannot be separated from other people and desires to communicate and interact with other individuals. Along with the times, good communication and adjustment skills are needed for adolescent development, especially in education (Brown et al., 2021;Chan, 2021;Kim et al., 2012). This is because the world of education plays an essential role in shaping quality human resources and national character (Muhtar & Dallyono, 2020;Zhao et al., 2021). ...
Adolescents are required to be open and firm in expressing their opinions and thoughts to others without losing their self-confidence. However, the data shows that 3.69% still behave and speak dishonestly, 2.30% of students find it challenging to communicate. The purpose of this study is to analyze the relationship between self-concept and student assertive behavior. This study uses a quantitative ex post facto method. The total population used is 101 students. The instrument used in this research is the self-concept scale and the students' assertive behavior scale. The reliability analysis using Cronbach's Alpha formula was obtained from the assertive behavior scale of 0.864, the self-concept scale of 0.894. This figure is then consulted with the product-moment table for N=34, with a 5% significance level of 0.339. The value of the coefficient of determination R2 generated is 0.284, which means that 28.4% of assertive behavior is influenced by self-concept, while the remaining 71.6% can be influenced by other variables not examined. BK teachers should provide guidance and counseling services according to the needs of students. Students who have a high category should be given individual counseling immediately. According to the needs of students at that time.
... The results of our study support research findings (Brown et al., 2020;Tan et al., 2019) and common business wisdom (Iliff, 2015) that if writers want to be seen as confident, they should avoid using jargon with outsiders. ...
One line of prior research has focused on the effect of style on readers’ ability to comprehend or willingness to engage with a message. A separate line has illuminated the effect of errors on the impressions readers form about writers, identifying potentially serious consequences (e.g., the willingness to accept the writer as a coworker or to fund the writer’s business pitch). To date, few studies have investigated the effect of style on the impressions readers form of business writers. In this paper, we report a study of the relationship between business writer attributions and word- or sentence-level style features often emphasized by advocates of plain style. Using data from 614 respondents, we found statistically significant evidence that business writers conveyed (a) confidence by avoiding non-requisite words, jargon, and nominals and by using standard connotations and grammar, and (b) professionalism by avoiding non-requisite words and hedges and by using standard homonyms.
... Additionally, some people (including those who are more bullshit receptive) view the use of abstract or bullshit language as a signal of status, power, intelligence, and authority (Palmeira, 2015;Turpin et al., 2019Turpin et al., , 2021Wakslak et al., 2014). Consequently, many people have been found to increase their use of abstract buzzwords and jargon across a variety of contexts in which they believe it will increase their status or provide a distinct professional advantage (Brown et al 2020;Spicer, 2020;Turpin et al., 2019). Taken together, this could suggest that highly bullshit receptive people not only commit metacognitive errors by misinterpreting superficially ...
The growing prevalence of misinformation (i.e., bullshit) in society carries with it an increased need to understand the processes underlying many people’s susceptibility to falling for it. Herewe report two studies (N = 412) examining the associations between one’s ability to detect pseudo-profound bullshit, confidence in one’s bullshit detection abilities, and the metacognitive experience of evaluating potentially misleading information. We find that people with the lowest (highest) bullshit detection performance overestimate (underestimate) their detection abilities and overplace (underplace) those abilities when compared to others. Additionally, people reported using both intuitive and reflective thinking processes when evaluating misleadinginformation. Taken together, these results show that both highly bullshit-receptive and highly bullshit-resistant people are largely unaware of the extent to which they can detect bullshit and that traditional miserly processing explanations of receptivity to misleading information may beinsufficient to fully account for these effects.
Language and culture are very relatable. In culture, there must be language used by the people to communicate with each other. Jargon is special vocabulary which had by a group of community. This study targets to analyze the jargon and the meaning of the jargon which existed on jargon used by jegog musician. The research design of this research is descriptive qualitative research. The method used to collect the data is observation and interviews. This study is use four steps of data analyzing including data collection, data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing. The result of this research showed that jegog musician used forty-one jargons to communicate with each other. Based on the forty-one jargons found in this research, the jargons are categorized into five types. First, jargon in term of the naming of the instrument, which find ten jargons. The second, jargon in technique used on playing jegog which find thirteen jargons. Third, jargon in the naming of the notes, which find ten jargons. Then, jargon in the activity when doing jegog performance that finds six jargons. The last is jargon in term the naming of type of tabuh which find two jargons. The meaning of each jargon has their meaning to communicate in jegog musician group.
For a long time, economists have assumed that we were cold, self-centred, rational decision makers – so-called Homo economicus; the last few decades have shattered this view. The world we live in and the situations we face are of course rich and complex, revealing puzzling aspects of our behaviour. Optimally Irrational argues that our improved understanding of human behaviour shows that apparent 'biases' are good solutions to practical problems – that many of the 'flaws' identified by behavioural economics are actually adaptive solutions. Page delivers an ambitious overview of the literature in behavioural economics and, through the exposition of these flaws and their meaning, presents a sort of unified theory of behaviouralism, cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology. He gathers theoretical and empirical evidence about the causes of behavioural 'biases' and proposes a big picture of what the discipline means for economics.
We began this work intending to illustrate the network origins of jargon, a signal feature of team learning and the division of labor. In the process, we came to recognize the substantive importance of message timing, which we discuss as the pulse of a network. This paper describes our route to that recognition. We analyze data from a renovated classic network experiment providing empirical support for three hypotheses. The first, and most familiar from past work, is that teams moving down their learning curve to greater efficiency are prone to shared jargon. As a team moves down its learning curve, language drifts away from day-to-day speech, into jargon. The second and third hypotheses concern network correlates of the drift. With respect to network structure, teams are less likely to converge on jargon when communication is concentrated in one teammate. With respect to pulse, teams are more likely to converge on jargon when communication efforts are numerous and crowded in time. The two network predictors overlap conceptually. They both involve learning and access to information, but are distinct in their mechanism: Structure provides access. Pulse creates motivation to access. Teammates keeping up with numerous messages concentrated in time have a shared incentive to find shorthand terms (i.e., jargon) that enable faster exchange of accurate information. Network structure predicts team convergence on jargon, but pulse is a stronger predictor. Directions for new research are discussed.
Students invest time and money in post-secondary education to secure employment in their chosen field of study. In the past, choices were often constrained by the type of credential (college diploma or university bachelor’s degree). Albeit this decision criterion became blurred when colleges started offering bachelor’s degrees. Matriculating students now also decide which type of institution might best prepare them for their future employment. Students often look to course descriptions to select courses that can be reasonably expected to offer skills for career preparedness. But what happens when academia uses a different language to describe skills desired by employers? This study aims to understand whether colleges or universities offer a stronger lexical alignment between course descriptions and high-demand industry skills. It examines communication barriers arising from a potential linguistic misalignment of skills using a computer-assisted text-analysis tool to compare course curricula with online job postings. Findings support a general misalignment but show that course descriptions at colleges have a stronger linguistic overlap of skills demanded by industry. We discuss the implications of employing a dynamic technology-driven tool to improve the academic-industry alignment of skills nomenclature.
The meaning of success in conversation depends on people’s goals. Often, individuals pursue multiple goals simultaneously, such as establishing shared understanding, making a favorable impression, and persuading a conversation partner. In this article, we introduce a novel theoretical framework, the Conversational Circumplex, to classify conversational motives along two key dimensions: 1) Informational: the extent to which a speaker’s motive focuses on giving and/or receiving accurate information and 2) Relational: the extent to which a speaker’s motive focuses on building the relationship. We use the conversational circumplex to underscore the multiplicity of conversational goals that people hold, and highlight the potential for individuals to have conflicting conversational goals (both intrapersonally and interpersonally) that make successful conversation a difficult challenge.
Impression management is a fundamental aspect of social life. From self-promotion to feedback giving, from advice-seeking to networking, people frequently find themselves in situations where they need to make a positive impression on others. Despite the long-term benefits of making a favorable impression, impression-management attempts can backfire in unintended ways. In this article, I review recent research on self-presentation, social cognition, and communication to explain when and why people have misguided intuitions about their impressions on others, document common impression-management mistakes, and propose more effective strategies to minimize actor-target asymmetries in social interactions. This review provides a theoretical framework to understand the psychology of impression (mis)management, as well as the risks and rewards of different self-presentation strategies.
Power and gratitude are universal features of social life and impact a wide range of intra- and interpersonal outcomes. Drawing on the social distance theory of power, we report four studies that examine how relative power influences feelings and expressions of gratitude. An archival analysis of author acknowledgements in published academic articles ( N = 1,272) revealed that low-power authors expressed more gratitude than high-power authors. A pre-registered experiment ( N = 283) involving live conversations online found that having relatively low power caused increased feelings and expressions of gratitude after benefiting from a favor. Another pre-registered experiment ( N = 356) demonstrated that increased interpersonal orientation among lower power individuals and increased psychological entitlement among higher power individuals drove these effects. Finally, an archival analysis of conversational exchanges ( N = 136,215) among Wikipedia editors revealed that relational history moderated the effect of relative power on gratitude expression. Overall, our findings highlight when and why relative power influences feelings and expressions of gratitude.
Nowadays, linguists invariably show a great interest in the whole variety of uncodified vocabulary. Researchers view the language as a kind of “mirror” of the processes and transformations taking place in society, since it is in the language that reflects the current state and development of the human community. It is the language and all its lexical composition that most vividly reacts to what is happening in society through transformations and changes in structure and functioning. Non-standard words and expressions are now increasingly serving as means of expressing the positive emotional mood of the author of the statement, and their use in speech contributes to the optimization of communicative interaction in the context of informal interpersonal communication. In modern linguistic literature, as in society as a whole, one can observe an ambiguous attitude towards the problem of active penetration of words and expressions of uncodified vocabulary into various styles of speech, there is no unified approach to assessing the ongoing transformations in determining the place and the function of uncodified vocabulary in the linguistic and communicative space. An attempt is made in the work to identify the features of the functioning and translation of uncodified vocabulary from English into Russian.
Academia is a marketplace of ideas. Just as firms market their products with packaging and advertising, scholars market their ideas with writing. Even the best ideas will make an impact only if others understand and build upon them. Why, then, is academic writing often difficult to understand? By conducting two experiments and analyzing the text of 1640 articles in premier marketing journals, we show that scholars write unclearly in part because they forget that they know more about their research than readers, a phenomenon called “the curse of knowledge.” Knowledge, or familiarity with one’s own research, exacerbates three practices that make academic writing difficult to understand: abstraction, technical language, and passive writing. When marketing scholars know more about a research project, they use more abstract, technical, and passive writing to describe it. Articles with more abstract, technical, and passive writing are harder for readers to understand and are less likely to be cited. We call for scholars to overcome the curse of knowledge and provide two tools -- a website (writingclaritycalculator.com) and a tutorial -- to help them recognize and repair unclear writing so they can write articles that are more likely to make an impact.
quanteda is an R package providing a comprehensive workflow and toolkit for natural language processing tasks such as corpus management, tokenization, analysis, and visualization. It has extensive functions for applying dictionary analysis, exploring texts using keywords-in-context, computing document and feature similarities, and discovering multi-word expressions through collocation scoring. Based entirely on sparse operations, it provides highly efficient methods for compiling document-feature matrices and for manipulating these or using them in further quantitative analysis. Using C++ and multithreading extensively, quanteda is also considerably faster and more efficient than other R and Python ackages in processing large textual data. The package is designed for R users needing to apply natural language processing to texts, from documents to final analysis. Its capabilities match or exceed those provided in many end-user software applications, many of which are expensive and not open source. The package is therefore of great benefit to researchers, students, and other analysts with fewer financial resources. While using quanteda requires R programming knowledge, its API is designed to enable powerful, efficient analysis with a minimum of steps. By emphasizing consistent design, furthermore, quanteda lowers the barriers to learning and using NLP and quantitative text analysis even for proficient R programmers.
Formal or categorical explanation involves the use of a label to explain a property of an object or group of objects. In 4 experiments, we provide evidence that label entrenchment, the degree to which a label is accepted and used by members of the community, influences the judged quality of a categorical explanation whether or not the explanation offers substantive information about the explanandum. Experiment 1 shows that explanations using unentrenched labels are seen as less comprehensive and less natural, independent of the causal information they provide. Experiment 2 shows that these intuitions persist when the community has no additional, relevant featural information, so the label amounts to a mere name for the explanandum. Experiment 3 finds a similar effect when the unentrenched label is not widely used, but is defined by a group of experts and the recipient of the explanation is herself an expert familiar with the topic. The effect also obtains for categories that lack a coherent causal structure. Experiment 4 further demonstrates the domain generality of the entrenchment effect and provides evidence against several interpretations of the results. A majority of participants in Experiments 3 and 4 could not report the impact of entrenchment on their judgments. We argue that this reliance on community cues arose because the community often has useful information to provide about categories. The common use of labels as conduits for this communal knowledge results in reliance on community cues even when they are uninformative.
Clarity and accuracy of reporting are fundamental to the scientific process. Readability formulas can estimate how difficult a text is to read. Here, in a corpus consisting of 709,577 abstracts published between 1881 and 2015 from 123 scientific journals, we show that the readability of science is steadily decreasing. Our analyses show that this trend is indicative of a growing use of general scientific jargon. These results are concerning for scientists and for the wider public, as they impact both the reproducibility and accessibility of research findings.
Scientists are required to communicate science and research not only to other experts in the field, but also to scientists and experts from other fields, as well as to the public and policymakers. One fundamental suggestion when communicating with non-experts is to avoid professional jargon. However, because they are trained to speak with highly specialized language, avoiding jargon is difficult for scientists, and there is no standard to guide scientists in adjusting their messages. In this research project, we present the development and validation of the data produced by an up-to-date, scientist-friendly program for identifying jargon in popular written texts, based on a corpus of over 90 million words published in the BBC site during the years 2012–2015. The validation of results by the jargon identifier, the De-jargonizer, involved three mini studies: (1) comparison and correlation with existing frequency word lists in the literature; (2) a comparison with previous research on spoken language jargon use in TED transcripts of non-science lectures, TED transcripts of science lectures and transcripts of academic science lectures; and (3) a test of 5,000 pairs of published research abstracts and lay reader summaries describing the same article from the journals PLOS Computational Biology and PLOS Genetics. Validation procedures showed that the data classification of the De-jargonizer significantly correlates with existing frequency word lists, replicates similar jargon differences in previous studies on scientific versus general lectures, and identifies significant differences in jargon use between abstracts and lay summaries. As expected, more jargon was found in the academic abstracts than lay summaries; however, the percentage of jargon in the lay summaries exceeded the amount recommended for the public to understand the text. Thus, the De-jargonizer can help scientists identify problematic jargon when communicating science to non-experts, and be implemented by science communication instructors when evaluating the effectiveness and jargon use of participants in science communication workshops and programs.
Research in organizational communication has examined the structure and content of interaction, but has paid little attention to research traditions outside the organizational sciences that explore the social-psychological interconnections between relationship development and interaction. In this paper we draw upon and extend those traditions to develop a model of how communication relationships develop within organizational dyads. The proposed model examines organization-based communication relationships through a synthesis of theoretical perspectives on communication richness, relational communication, interpersonal attribution, and social expectancy. We also call upon precepts of structuration theory to embed these microlevel processes in an organizational context.
The relational outcome in the model is “interactional richness,” a dyad-level construct that assesses the extent to which communication within the dyad is high in shared meaning. Model antecedents are aspects of interaction through which communicators reciprocally define their relationships, including relational message properties, message patterns that emerge over time, and relational perceptions. We propose that these communication properties and behaviors give rise to relationship attributions. We then incorporate processes of expectancy confirmation and violation to explain how specific communication encounters lead individuals to reformulate attributions regarding the status of a given relationship. Research propositions articulate how attribution/expectancy processes mediate between relational communication behavior and relationship development outcomes. We also develop propositions addressing how relational communication behavior is influenced by macrolevel factors, including hierarchy, structure, and culture.
In a concluding section we discuss the model's potential contribution to research and practice, address its limitations, and offer recommendations for future research aimed at testing its embedded hypotheses.
In two experiments, we investigate how individuals' levels of power and status interact to determine how they are perceived by others. We find that power and status have similar, positive, effects on judged dominance. We also find that power has a negative effect on perceived warmth, but status moderates this “power penalty”: high power without status is associated with low warmth, but power with status is judged warm. Consequently, we find high status individuals, regardless of power level, are perceived positively – dominant and warm – whereas high power–low status individuals are judged most negatively — dominant and cold (Experiments 1 and 2). As a result, perceivers expect positive interactions with high status individuals, but negative interactions with high power, low status individuals (Experiment 2). These findings provide insight into power and status social judgments, and further our understanding of similarities and differences between these distinct, yet related, constructs.
Concreteness is central to theories of learning in psychology and organizational behavior. However, the literature provides many competing measures of concreteness in natural language. Indeed, researcher degrees of freedom are often large in text analysis. Here, we use concreteness as an example case for how language measures can be systematically evaluated across many studies. We compare many existing measures across datasets from several domains, including written advice, and plan-making (total N = 9,780). We find that many previous measures have surprisingly little measurement validity in our domains of interest. We also show that domain-specific machine learning models consistently outperform domain-general measures. Text analysis is increasingly common, and our work demonstrates how reproducibility and open data can improve measurement validity for high-dimensional data. We conclude with robust guidelines for measuring concreteness, along with a corresponding R package, doc2concrete, as an open-source toolkit for future research.
We experimentally investigate how jargon affects investment willingness for investors with different industry knowledge, and whether such effects vary with good or bad jargon. We find that for investors without industry knowledge, jargon decreases investment willingness because it decreases understanding. However, for investors with some but low industry knowledge, jargon increases investment willingness because it increases perceived product premium. Such effects exist whether good or bad jargon is used. Finally, investors with high industry knowledge differentiate between good and bad jargon, and reduce investment willingness only when bad jargon is used. These findings have implications for regulators, managers, and investors.
Prior advice research has focused on why people rely on (or ignore) advice and its impact on judgment accuracy. We expand the consideration of advice-seeking outcomes by investigating the interpersonal consequences of advice seekers’ decisions. Across nine studies, we show that advisors interpersonally penalize seekers who disregard their advice, and that these reactions are especially strong among expert advisors. This penalty also drives advisor reactions to a widely-recommended advice-seeking strategy: soliciting multiple advisors to leverage the wisdom of crowds. Advisors denigrate and distance themselves from seekers who they learn consulted others, an effect mediated by perceptions that their own advice will be disregarded. Underlying these effects is an asymmetry between advisors’ and seekers’ beliefs about the purpose of the advice exchange: whereas advisors believe giving advice is more about narrowing the option set by providing direction, seekers believe soliciting advice is more about widening the option set by gathering information.
Making friends is critical to well-being. We also live in a society where the display of status is ubiquitous and billions of dollars are spent on high-status consumer goods. In the present analysis, we introduce the Status Signals Paradox: When making new friends, people tend to think that displaying high-status markers of themselves (e.g., a BMW, a Tag Heuer watch) will make them more attractive to others than neutral markers (e.g., a Honda, a generic brand watch); however, from the perspective of would-be friends, individuals who display high-status markers are found to be less attractive as new friends than those with neutral status markers. Six studies provide converging evidence of the status signals paradox.
Prior research generally interprets complex language in firms’ disclosures as indicative of managerial obfuscation. However, complex language can also reflect the provision of complex information, e.g., informative technical disclosure. As a consequence, linguistic complexity commingles two latent components—obfuscation and information—that are related to information asymmetry in opposite directions. We develop a novel empirical approach to estimate these two latent components within the context of quarterly earnings conference calls. We validate our estimates of these two latent components by examining their relation to information asymmetry. Consistent with our predictions, we find that our estimate of the information component is negatively associated with information asymmetry while our estimate of the obfuscation component is positively associated with information asymmetry. Our findings suggest that future research on linguistic complexity can construct more powerful tests by separately examining these two latent components of linguistic complexity. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
The frequency of linguistic units and patterns (linguistic metrics) is specific to each language and varies depending on text complexity. In this study we investigate a number of measures that can contribute to determine text complexity/difficulty and be obtained automatically. The variables considered come primarily from counts of phonological units and patterns (e.g. word size, number of prosodic words and clitics, rare syllable types, exceptional stress patterns and rare segment classes), some of which being also informative of texts’ morphological and syntactic complexity and semantic density. We compared the linguistic metrics in a large sample of Portuguese medicine package leaflets (PL), a sample of PL from the medicines that belong to the three most consumed therapeutic groups, and two samples of more common texts (composed of journalistic and oral texts). For each indicator, oral texts, in particular texts produced by speakers with lower levels of education, showed the lowest values in a difficulty continuum, and most frequently PL showed the highest values in that continuum, indicating that PL are less readable than the other types of texts analysed.
Conversation is a fundamental human experience that is necessary to pursue intrapersonal and interpersonal goals across myriad contexts, relationships, and modes of communication. In the current research, we isolate the role of an understudied conversational behavior: question-asking. Across 3 studies of live dyadic conversations, we identify a robust and consistent relationship between question-asking and liking: people who ask more questions, particularly follow-up questions, are better liked by their conversation partners. When people are instructed to ask more questions, they are perceived as higher in responsiveness, an interpersonal construct that captures listening, understanding, validation, and care. We measure responsiveness with an attitudinal measure from previous research as well as a novel behavioral measure: the number of follow-up questions one asks. In both cases, responsiveness explains the effect of question-asking on liking. In addition to analyzing live get-to-know-you conversations online, we also studied face-to-face speed-dating conversations. We trained a natural language processing algorithm as a "follow-up question detector" that we applied to our speed-dating data (and can be applied to any text data to more deeply understand question-asking dynamics). The follow-up question rate established by the algorithm showed that speed daters who ask more follow-up questions during their dates are more likely to elicit agreement for second dates from their partners, a behavioral indicator of liking. We also find that, despite the persistent and beneficial effects of asking questions, people do not anticipate that question-asking increases interpersonal liking. (PsycINFO Database Record
Lower socioeconomic position is associated with increased risk of coronary heart disease. This robust gradient is found across levels of socioeconomic position and after controlling access to health care and traditional biological and behavioral risk factors. Thus, previous theory and research has examined the role of other, relatively static psychosocial factors (e.g., social isolation and negative emotional traits) that may account for this association. Utilizing an interpersonal perspective on psychosocial risk (Smith & Cundiff, Smith, Gallo, & Ruiz, Smith, Glazer, Ruiz, & Gallo,), this review examines the role of recurring interpersonal experiences and their physiological effects as a pathway linking socioeconomic position and coronary heart disease. Specifically, we focus on proximal interpersonal experiences that may not only explain the increased prevalence of more chronic psychosocial vulnerabilities in lower socioeconomic environments and individuals but may also link those psychosocial vulnerabilities to the momentary physiological mechanisms (i.e., stress responses) that directly contribute to coronary heart disease. Recurring experiences of reduced support and increased conflict in important personal relationships, work stress, multiple aspects of interactions with higher-status others, the effects of negative stereotypes about lower socioeconomic groups and individuals, greater use of suppressive strategies for emotion regulation and greater negative consequences for more direct and expressive social behavior, and greater engagement in perseverative cognition all plausibly combine to perpetuate psychosocial risk and produce overall greater physiological burden at lower levels of socioeconomic position.
This paper investigates the impact of a firm’s annual report readability and ambiguous tone on its borrowing costs. We find that firms with larger 10-K file sizes and a higher proportion of uncertain and weak modal words in 10-Ks have stricter loan contract terms and greater future stock price crash risk. Our results suggest that the readability and tone ambiguity of a firm’s financial disclosures are related to managerial information hoarding. Shareholders of firms with less readable and more ambiguous annual reports not only suffer from less transparent information disclosure but also bear the increased cost of external financing.
Advice taking is of growing interest to organizational scholars because it is a critical pathway for knowledge transfer and learning. Based on construal level theory, we hypothesize that high construal advisors are viewed as experts and, in turn, others are more likely to take their advice. In a field study of an online community of programmers and a laboratory experiment measuring psychological mechanisms, we find that signaling higher construal by communicating more abstractly is positively associated with expert reputation, which in turn explains others’ advice-taking behavior. Implications for research on the social consequences of construal level and novel antecedents of perceived expertise and advice taking are discussed.
Social referencing is a phenomenon of clear significance. Many studies, including those in this volume, document the importance of referencing in the lives of young children and their guardians. Even before the end of their first year, children use adults to define what is dangerous and what is delightful or, in a process similar to modeling, to develop competencies.
This chapter focuses on the ways in which people seek status in their interpersonal interactions and relationships. Our analysis conceptualizes status as the degree to which other people perceive that an individual possesses resources or personal characteristics that are important for the attainment of collective goals. That is, people have status to the degree that others perceive that they have instrumental social value. In being based on instrumental social value, status is distinguishable from interpersonal acceptance, which is based on relational value. Thus, the routes to obtaining status and respect are different from those that lead to acceptance and liking. The chapter discusses the central role that self-presentation plays in the pursuit of status, the ways in which people enhance their status through impression management, the features of social situations that moderate how people manage their public images in the pursuit of status, and the dilemma that people sometimes face in balancing their efforts to be respected and gain status with their efforts to be liked and accepted. © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014. All rights are reserved.
The rise of scientific fraud has drawn significant attention to research misconduct across disciplines. Documented cases of fraud provide an opportunity to examine whether scientists write differently when reporting on fraudulent research. In an analysis of over two million words, we evaluated 253 publications retracted for fraudulent data and compared the linguistic style of each paper to a corpus of 253 unretracted publications and 62 publications retracted for reasons other than fraud (e.g., ethics violations). Fraudulent papers were written with significantly higher levels of linguistic obfuscation, including lower readability and higher rates of jargon than unretracted and nonfraudulent papers. We also observed a positive association between obfuscation and the number of references per paper, suggesting that fraudulent authors obfuscate their reports to mask their deception by making them more costly to analyze and evaluate. This is the first large-scale analysis of fraudulent papers across authors and disciplines to reveal how changes in writing style are related to fraudulent data reporting.
We use laboratory experiments to explore merger failure due to conflicting organizational cultures. We introduce a laboratory paradigm for studying organizational culture that captures several key elements of the phenomenon. In our experiments, we allow subjects in "firms" to develop a culture, and then merge two firms. As expected, performance decreases following the merging of two laboratory firms. In addition, subjects overestimate the performance of the merged firm and attribute the decrease in performance to members of the other firm rather than to situational difficulties created by conflicting culture.
In TEFL, it is often stated that communication presupposes comprehension. The main purpose of readability studies is thus to measure the comprehensibility of a piece of writing. In this regard, different readability measures were initially devised to help educators select passages suitable for both children and adults. However, readability formulas can certainly be extremely helpful in the realm of EFL reading. They were originally designed to assess the suitability of books for students at particular grade levels or ages. Nevertheless, they can be used as basic tools in determining certain crucial EFL text-characteristics instrumental in the skill of reading and its related issues. The aim of the present paper is to familiarize the readers with the most frequently used readability formulas as well as the pros and cons views toward the use of such formulas. Of course, this part mostly illustrates studies done on readability formulas with the results obtained. The main objective of this part is to help readers to become familiar with the background of the formulas, the theory on which they stand, what they are good for and what they are not with regard to a number of studies cited in this section.
The current review evaluates the status hypothesis, which states that that the desire for status is a fundamental motive. Status is defined as the respect, admiration, and voluntary deference individuals are afforded by others. It is distinct from related constructs such as power, financial success, and social belongingness. A review of diverse literatures lent support to the status hypothesis: People's subjective well-being, self-esteem, and mental and physical health appear to depend on the level of status they are accorded by others. People engage in a wide range of goal-directed activities to manage their status, aided by myriad cognitive, behavioral, and affective processes; for example, they vigilantly monitor the status dynamics in their social environment, strive to appear socially valuable, prefer and select social environments that offer them higher status, and react strongly when their status is threatened. The desire for status also does not appear to be a mere derivative of the need to belong, as some theorists have speculated. Finally, the importance of status was observed across individuals who differed in culture, gender, age, and personality, supporting the universality of the status motive. Therefore, taken as a whole, the relevant evidence suggests that the desire for status is indeed fundamental. (PsycINFO Database Record
(c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).
Five studies explored the ways relative rank is revealed among individuals in small groups through their natural use of pronouns. In Experiment 1, four-person groups worked on a decision-making task with randomly assigned leadership status. In Studies 2 and 3, two-person groups either worked on a task or chatted informally in a get-to-know-you session. Study 4 was a naturalistic study of incoming and outgoing e-mail of 9 participants who provided information on their correspondents' relative status. The last study examined 40 letters written by soldiers in the regime of Saddam Hussein. Computerized text analyses across the five studies found that people with higher status consistently used fewer first-person singular, and more first-person plural and second-person singular pronouns. Natural language use during group interaction suggests that status is associated with attentional biases, such that higher rank is linked with other-focus whereas lower rank is linked with self-focus.
One of sociology's classic puzzles is how groups motivate their members to set aside self-interest and contribute to collective action. This article presents a solution to the problem based on status as a selective incentive motivating contribution. Contributors to collective action signal their motivation to help the group and consequently earn diverse benefits from group members - in particular, higher status - and these rewards encourage greater giving to the group in the future. In Study 1, high contributors to collective action earned higher status, exercised more interpersonal influence, were cooperated with more, and received gifts of greater value. Studies 2 and 3 replicated these findings while discounting alternative explanations. All three studies show that giving to the group mattered because it signaled an individual's motivation to help the group. Study 4 finds that participants who received status for their contributions subsequently contributed more and viewed the group more positively. These results demonstrate how the allocation of respect to contributors shapes group productivity and solidarity, offering a solution to the collective action problem.
Differences between wine experts and novices were explored in four studies in which expert and novice tasters matched descriptions written by other experts and novices to wines. Expert descriptions of wines were more successfully matched to wines when read by other expert tasters (p < .05). This result held true even when expert and novice describers were constrained to a set expert lexicon (p < .005). Experts showed superior wine discrimination in a psychophysical test (p < .05) and performed better than chance at rank ordering five red wines on the properties sweetness (p < .025), balance (p < .01), and tannin (p < .025). Novices performed better than chance on sweetness only (p < .005). The four studies taken together suggest that the greater precision that experts demonstrate in describing wines is associated with their more precise discrimination performance.
The current research examines whether direct and vicarious identification with a low-status group affects consumers' desire for objects associated with status. Experiment 1 found that individuals who belonged to and identified with a status social category associated with relatively lower status (Blacks) exhibited an enhanced desire for high-status products compared to Blacks who did not identify with their race or individuals who belonged to a social category associated with higher status (Whites). In Experiments 2 and 3, White participants led to vicariously identify through perspective taking with Blacks (Experiment 2), or a low-status occupational group (Experiment 3) exhibited an increased desire for high-status products. Experiment 4 provided meditational evidence for a status based explanation for the relationship between identification with a low-status group and a desire for high-status products. The present work makes new inroads into understanding one factor that might lead minorities to engage in greater conspicuous consumption and provides evidence that conspicuous consumption can be elicited vicariously.
Jargon, or technical language, appears in both the writing and speech of librarians in their dealings with the public. If the library patron cannot comprehend this language, the reference transaction is impeded. This study measures students' comprehension of a selection of library terms that were derived from actual reference interviezvs and library handouts. A multiplechoice test was administered to a group of freshmen. "Thinking-aloud" or protocol analyses were also run for information as to the reasoning processes used by the subjects. Given the results of this testing which show that patrons misunderstand library terms approximately half of the time, the researchers offer librarians a continuum of solutions.
This research examines how people react to nonconforming behaviors, such as entering a luxury boutique wearing gym clothes rather than an elegant outfit or wearing red sneakers in a professional setting. Nonconforming behaviors, as costly and visible signals, can act as a particular form of conspicuous consumption and lead to positive inferences of status and competence in the eyes of others. A series of studies demonstrates that people confer higher status and competence to nonconforming rather than conforming individuals. These positive inferences derived from signals of nonconformity are mediated by perceived autonomy and moderated by individual differences in need for uniqueness in the observers. An investigation of boundary conditions demonstrates that the positive inferences disappear when the observer is unfamiliar with the environment, when the nonconforming behavior is depicted as unintentional, and in the absence of expected norms and shared standards of formal conduct.
Twitter has rapidly emerged as one of the largest worldwide venues for
written communication. Thanks to the ease with which vast quantities of tweets
can be mined, Twitter has also become a source for studying modern linguistic
style. The readability of text has long provided a simple method to
characterize the complexity of language and ease that documents may be
understood by readers. In this note we use a modified version of the Flesch
Reading Ease formula, applied to a corpus of 17.4 million tweets. We find
tweets have characteristically more difficult readability scores compared to
other short format communication, such as SMS or chat. This linguistic
difference is insensitive to the presence of "hashtags" within tweets. By
utilizing geographic data provided by 2% of users, joined with "ZIP Code
Tabulation Area" (ZCTA) level education data from the U.S. Census, we find an
intriguing correlation between the average readability and the college
graduation rate within a ZCTA. This points towards a difference in either the
underlying language, or a change in the type of content being tweeted in these
areas
Three experiments were conducted to determine the psychometric properties of language in dyadic interactions. Using text-analysis, it was possible to assess the degree to which people coordinate their word use in natural conversations. In Experiments 1 (n = 130) and 2 (n = 32), college students interacted in dyadic conversations in laboratory-based private Internet chat rooms. Experiment 3 analyzed the official transcripts of the Watergate tapes involving the dyadic interactions between President Richard Nixon and his aids H. R. Haldeman, John Erlichman, & John Dean. The results of the three studies offer substantial evidence that individuals in dyadic interactions exhibit linguistic style matching (LSM) on both the conversation level as well as on a turn-by-turn level. Furthermore, LSM is unrelated to ratings of the quality of the interaction by both participants and judges. We propose that a coordination-engagement hypothesis is a better description of linguistic behaviors than the coordination-rapport hypothesis that has been proposed in the nonverbal literature.
This paper reviews studies that have been made of relation ships between a journal's readability and its prestige. After discussing the concepts of readability and prestige, and how they might be measured, the authors review ten experimental studies
(i) which have mampulated the textual difficulty of extracts from journal articles and examined their prestige ratings, or
(ii) which have calculated correlation coefficients between readability measures of journal articles and the journals' pre stige rankings.
It is concluded that, in the main, there is little evidence to support the notion held by some that prestige is inversely related to reading difficulty. In practical terms it has not been found easy to measure satisfactorily either prestige or readabil ity. It is concluded, nonetheless, that reliable methods of assessing the difficulty of journal articles could have useful applications.
Drawing on uncertainty-identity theory (Hogg, 2007) and referring to the concept of social identity complexity, we conducted two experiments to test the hypothesis that people would identify most strongly with their group if they felt both self-uncertain and that their group's identity was prominent relative to other identities, either because it was distinct from other identities or because they had few other identities. Self-uncertainty was primed in both experiments after participants had been primed to consider their group's attributes to overlap with or be distinct from the attributes of other identities of theirs (Experiment 1, N = 90) or to consider few or multiple other identities they had (Experiment 2, N = 87). As predicted, group identification was strongest under high uncertainty and when identity distinctiveness or few other identities had been primed. Implications of this research for how we conceptualize identity complexity are discussed.
Impression management, the process by which people control the impressions others form of them, plays an important role in interpersonal behavior. This article presents a 2-component model within which the literature regarding impression management is reviewed. This model conceptualizes impression management as being composed of 2 discrete processes. The 1st involves impression motivation—the degree to which people are motivated to control how others see them. Impression motivation is conceptualized as a function of 3 factors: the goal-relevance of the impressions one creates, the value of desired outcomes, and the discrepancy between current and desired images. The 2nd component involves impression construction. Five factors appear to determine the kinds of impressions people try to construct: the self-concept, desired and undesired identity images, role constraints, target's values, and current social image. The 2-component model provides coherence to the literature in the area, addresses controversial issues, and supplies a framework for future research regarding impression management.
