Psycholinguistic Whatnow?

On the fine line between effective communication and cynical manipulation.

“Psycholinguistics” is the study of how language and psychology interact — acquisition, perception, cognition, understanding. In the world of business, the insights described by psycholinguistics can be applied in pretty unsavory ways. But at a high level, understanding how to speak to people in language they understand and expect to hear — in ways that help them follow the argument — is hardly crass or cynical. It does have its dangers, though, that’s for sure.

Toward the end of my college career, I had the great good fortune to study with the late Dr. Janet Adelman. 

At the time, Dr. Adelman was known as an eminent, Oxford-trained Shakespearian. She was especially regarded for her groundbreaking, sometimes controversial, always insightful approach of applying the tools of feminism and psychoanalysis to Shakespeare critique. 

But I didn’t read Shakespeare with her. Better! I managed to get into her “senior seminar” on Toni Morrison. Here was a lauded scholar offering to study a living — actively writing! — author in a context usually reserved for a handful of, let’s be honest, dead white men. 

The class turned out to be critical to my own intellectual development in so many ways, and though it was over 30 years ago, it has resonated throughout my life and throughout Ars Pandemonium. 

But I bring it up here for a very specific reason: I had a bit of a brainstorm when writing the final thesis paper, a technique that I kind of thought I invented. (Spoiler: not so much.) I was pretty sure I was being clever and resourceful, but maybe it was all just cynical and manipulative.

This thesis paper was important to me. To set the scene: in this program, the “senior thesis” was critical to graduation, and was the culmination of a special small-format, in-major, seniors-only seminar class. There were many of these seminars to choose from, but I was really excited about this one and was thrilled to be accepted into it. I wanted to do whatever I could to ace this final paper.

By this point I was pretty comfortable with my textual analysis, and had gotten plenty of feedback that as a writer I was…well, competent. But this seemed like another level, and I started musing about how I could present my writing in a way that would stay true to my thinking and my voice but also strike the professor as more notably erudite. I had an idea.

Let’s zoom out. 

The Star Wars “Imperial March” doesn’t sound like “Mars” from Holst’s The Planets by accident. Composing this cue, John Williams got to have his cake and eat it too: an original piece of music that could function as a theme for the bad guys throughout the movies, terrifically hummable and memorable on its own. And at the same time, he could lean on the audience’s immediate associations with space and militarism (“Mars” is subtitled “The Bringer of War,” after all).¹

Examples like this are ubiquitous across media: art, music, film, literature, even cooking. Because every person carries around with them a lifetime’s worth of experiences and associations, all the time, and we all know it. As creative professionals, we’re constantly taking advantage of this. 

We trust that our audiences have seen a movie or a TV show at some point, so we don’t need to teach them the language of editing with every new video we make; we trust that they will have seen a drawing, heard a tune, read a book, eaten a meal — and that all those experiences are available for evocative reference, for contextual structure, whatever. We expect — we frankly require — our audiences to do some of the work. 

But, and this is important, we don’t usually know specifically what these references might be for any given individual. Could Williams be sure that everyone in the audience would be familiar with The Planets? Of course not. His music needed to stand on its own merits! But it was a pretty good bet that at least some of his audience would do at least some of the heavy lifting for him.

Great, but all of that is about the content being presented. What about the way in which it’s presented? I think…pretty similar forces are at work!

Imagine hosting an open-house for a bit of real estate you are selling: you wouldn’t blast Einstürzende Neubauten and boil cabbage while people are touring it, right? Like, even if you actually lived that way, you’d probably choose instead to…I don’t know, set out some potpourri? Maybe some fresh flowers? Quietly play some Haydn? 

Maybe the whole thing would be a little on the nose. But it’s not misleading, exactly. Nobody is going to think, upon purchasing the house, “they promised me potpourri and string concertos!” It has nothing whatsoever to do with the content — the house — as it were. Instead, it’s just about creating an environment that allows visitors to more easily associate warm feelings and good memories with the experience of the house. 

But again, we can never be sure of the specifics. It’s entirely possible that a particular prospective buyer once performed in a German post-industrial noise-music group themselves, and thus we missed a chance to evoke warm nostalgia in that individual. Or that another shopper is deathly allergic to lilac or lavender, and the floral smell will double them over with terror and nausea. It could happen. 

Still…we play the odds, take some guesses, and we’re probably right more often than we’re wrong. Mostly, the worst-case scenario with the flowers-and-chamber-music approach will be someone who rolls their eyes at the ham-fisted technique and mocks the attempt. But they will probably still contemplate the purchase if the house itself is appealing.

But! With all that said, consider those rare cases in which we can know the specifics, when we know precisely who our audience is and they’ve literally told us what their references are. If we knew a likely buyer who was coming to tour the house loved the color blue, we’d be silly not to grab a couple blue pillows, maybe a blue bedspread, and put them out, right? 

That would probably be pretty frivolous, and not likely very effective, but I honestly don’t think it would be particularly cynical. Laying out a blue tablecloth while not disclosing the leaking gas line would be cynical. Super illegal, and very cynical. But visually supplying some blue to the environment doesn’t change the underlying house at all.  

And what about language? If we apply these same notions to the way we talk to each other, what then?

Imagine you’re finally getting to meet with a key senior executive, and they’ve just recently been interviewed in the press. You’d read the interview before the meeting, surely! If in the interview they mention that they’re exhausted by all the dumb business jargon getting thrown around, you’d know to quickly retitle the “Actionable Synergy 2.0” deck you were about to present! 

Speaking to people using language they want to hear just makes sense, if you have the opportunity to know what that language is. You put the blue out. Unless you’re an idiot, you already have the potpourri and baroque strings going; add the blue.

So what happens, getting back to my thesis paper, when the person to whom we’re presenting our work has actually published numerous books, as my professor had? Read the books! 

I went to the library and checked out every one of Dr. Adelman’s books on the shelf. I read these in addition to my whole course-load and despite the fact that they nominally had nothing to do with the class. It was a lot of extra work! But while I was generally interested in the content (she was a particularly brilliant professor, after all), I already had my analysis ready. I already had my content.

I was reading them for how they were written. 

My thinking was this: if I can understand how she presents an argument (rhetorically, linguistically, semantically), I can adopt some of this technique myself, presumably toward the benefit of my paper. 

Let’s be clear: this is not because I thought I could somehow “outsmart” this world-renowned academic. “Oh,” perhaps she would say while reading, “did I write this myself? This writing is so comfortable and familiar the argument must be right!” No, of course not. 

But I did want to make sure that I was presenting my arguments — which, importantly, I truly thought were solid in and of themselves — in the most conducive environment for them to be considered. I thought this was pretty clever of me!²

I’ll never know if my little gambit worked or not. I got good marks on the paper, I learned a lot in the class, and I even maintained some communication with the professor (I reached out when Morrison later won the Nobel Prize and we had a nice chat). 

So the whole exercise may or may not have done any good. But it didn’t backfire or poison the well, either. She wasn’t somehow offended or disgusted by my maneuver. I guess worst case was some extra workload reading insightful Shakespeare analysis. But best case, maybe my writing was honed just that extra bit for my specific audience and I did better than I would have. 

To this day, I stand behind that risk/reward calculation.

But…does this all sound like I’m working awfully hard to convince you, dear reader, that this isn’t just manipulative asshattery? Does it sound like I’m working hard to convince myself of that? Well, yeah. But bear with me.

Eventually I came to learn that there’s an entire field of study around what I was attempting to do (and thus…well, I obviously didn’t invent it): “psycholinguistics.” Psycholinguistics is, among other things, the study of how language and psychology interact.³ Due to how these insights are applied in the world of business, it’s not necessarily considered in the best light.

And it’s easy to see why. Techniques born of the understanding of psycholinguistics applied to branding and marketing might feel a little sordid, using them for sales might feel unscrupulous, and using them for more critical persuasion might actually be downright dangerous. But I don’t think the fact that they can be wielded unethically means they’re necessarily an unalloyed negative.⁴

Yes, using powerful tools of persuasion to get you to buy something you don’t want or need, especially if you don’t even realize that persuasion is happening, is, for sure, bad. But is creating an environment where you feel more comfortable actually making the decision yourself bad?  

In Manager Judo I wrote about the dangers and pitfalls of the practice of active and empathic listening — and that despite those dangers and pitfalls, I still consider thoughtful, sincere, utilization of those powerful tools a net positive, and worth the risk.

Using the tools and techniques of psycholinguistics to better understand communication and persuasion is very similar.

Look, every conversation is, to some degree, a negotiation to land upon a common vocabulary and semantic approach that both parties can work within. We’re always doing it; it’s more or less how communication works! 

Throwing vocabulary at someone that they don’t understand simply isn’t communication. Perhaps I can improve my precision with specialized words, but if the person to whom I’m speaking doesn’t know what those words mean, all that precision is useless anyway. It’s like cussing up a storm to someone who doesn’t swear — it’s unlikely to further their engagement with my argument. 

Let’s get it right down to ground level: if I need to communicate to an underperforming team member why I’m frustrated with their work and how they need to improve, wouldn’t it be better to use vocabulary they are comfortable with? Wouldn't it be advisable to structure the argument using syntax that fits with their own thought processing and concept structures? 

If I know these things, how they think and speak — and, again, of course, that can be a big “if” — why wouldn’t I use them? 

Well, there are a couple reasons. 

Clumsily applied this approach can be deeply inauthentic and insincere. I have a voice and a point of view. If I’m constantly switching it up to cajole the individual to whom I’m currently speaking, that’s hardly authentic of me. 

Similarly, if I’m so drawn to the allure of this approach that I attempt it even when I don’t know the specifics of the person I’m speaking to and I just make some broad assumptions and go to town, that can be terribly minimizing, condescending, and even, at the extreme, offensive and non-inclusive.

From “talking down” to someone, all the way to utilizing slang or euphemism popular amongst a group to which one don’t belong (and worse, maybe incorrectly assume the other party does belong), trying to force this approach can cause far more problems than it solves.

But look, incorrectly utilizing any tool can have negative consequences. The question always comes down to whether the risks are worth rewards. 

Psycholinguistics provides powerful insights to understand and shape language-based interactions. It can be easy — and sometimes it’s incredibly alluring — to use this understanding toward disingenuous, manipulative, even cynical ends: Don’t pay attention to the flooded basement, look at my blue throw pillows! Don’t mind that I misinterpreted some key textual evidence, look how many times I used the word “insofar”! 

Of course, all that’s the very definition of cynicism. 

But I really believe that if the underlying sentiments are sincere and authentic, there’s nothing wrong with using all the tools at your disposal to express them convincingly.

Verdict: not cynical! Right? What do you think?

1. Yes, yes, I know, also Chopin’s funeral march. Same type of evocative resonances, I’d argue. Also, didn’t I just do a Star Wars reference in Scapegoat? I need newer material.

2. All these years later, with one exception, I don’t really remember specifically what I took from this. That one exception, though, is that I remember discovering Dr. Adelman made extensive —and I mean extensive — use of the grammatical figure “insofar as.” This wasn’t exotic to me, but neither did I use it much at the time. I started incorporating it, and it’s quite useful. It has a nice rhythm and feel and since it’s not used in idiomatic conversation much, it’s striking. But it also forces a reader to keep more than one idea in their mind at the same time, which can be very helpful in a complex argument. Now, insofar as none of this has anything to do with this essay, I’ll move on.

3. It’s also interested in language acquisition, and fascinatingly, in second language acquisition. Great rabbit hole stuff, this.

4. Talk about rabbit hole! Here’s a PhD dissertation from 1981 examining linguistic persuasion methods used in sales: “A formal model of the psycholinguistics of the sales interaction shall be presented, along with rationale for its effectiveness.” However! This paper relies on the work of Bandler and Grinder, from the mid-’70’s, which was later discredited. That school of thought, falling under psycholinguistics generally, is called neuro-linguistic programming, and is widely considered pseudoscience (Wikipedia’s entry on this is withering). Except, well, the article mentioned above about sales was published just last year on the practice and techniques of neuro-linguistic programming. This is the stuff of great internet rabbit holes.