Most of us have a pretty clear image of what a “smart person” looks like: someone with good habits who always speaks clearly, is calm, and chooses his words extremely carefully. The charm of this humble, quiet man who has it all figured out before he speaks is very alluring. But psychological research continues to undermine this image.
Over the past decade, researchers studying language, cognition, and speech processing have identified several behaviors that are associated with higher cognitive abilities but are often mistaken for their opposites. Two of the most striking involve the habit of silently apologizing that many intelligent people may have practiced throughout their lives.
While neither is going to win you friends at a black-tie dinner, both are backed by a growing and reliable body of peer-reviewed research. Here’s a breakdown of the two.
Habit 1: Talk to yourself out loud
There’s a long-standing cultural assumption that people who talk to themselves are at best eccentric and, at worst, displaying some of the more concerning signs. This behavior will raise eyebrows in the supermarket aisle and prompt well-meaning family members to ask if you’re okay. However, this study tells a different story.
Once in 2012 study By Gary Lupyan and Daniel Swingley Posted in quarterly journal of experimental psychologyparticipants were asked to search for a common object—such as a banana—among images of other objects. Some participants were asked to repeat the object’s name aloud while searching. Others, on the contrary, remained silent.
The researchers consistently found that those who said the target’s name out loud detected it significantly faster. It turns out that speaking makes the visual system a more efficient detector. Lupian and Swinley describe this as the label feedback hypothesis: the idea that verbal labels not only describe the world but also actively shape the way we perceive it.
When you embody an idea into spoken language, you use both your language production system and your auditory processing system. The words you speak become a perceptual cue—a cue that adjusts attention, focuses attention, and improves focus. Start your brain Looks for what it looks for.
In other words, people who think verbally appear to have a cognitive advantage in tasks that require retaining information. 2023 review Posted in Frontiers in Psychology The functional scope of self-talk is further delineated: problem solving, self-regulation, working memory, task switching, rehearsal, and management of what the researchers describe as higher-order cognitive processes.
The authors conclude that self-talk is present in a large part of conscious experience and serves a very wide range of psychological functions. This research cumulatively shows that self-talk is not an expression of thoughts. It is the externalization of your thoughts: they become more poignant and effective through expression.
Others believe that habits that lack self-control are a form of cognitive efficiency, neurologically speaking. People who do this naturally may have found that it is one of the most reliable ways to get their thinking on track without any formal guidance.
Habit 2: Swearing
The assumption here is so ingrained that it has become a kind of folk wisdom: People who often swear This is done because they lack the vocabulary to express themselves in other ways. From this point of view, it has been described as a sign of laziness: a linguistic shortcut taken by people who are too lazy to look for the right word. But this is almost entirely backwards.
The most common challenge to this assumption comes from series of studies By Christine Jay and Timothy Jay Published in Journal language science In 2015, participants took a standard verbal fluency task in which they had to say as many words as they could in one minute that started with a specific letter. They then took a taboo fluency task that required them to list as many swear words as they could in the same time frame.
The researchers found a clear positive correlation: Participants who scored highest on a verbal fluency test also produced the most profanity. Those with the weakest general vocabulary produced the least results. This suggests that the same cognitive resources that expose someone to a rich set of general words also expose them to a rich set of taboo words. Vocabulary is larger at both ends.
The more interesting question is why this relationship exists. Jay has been studying swear words for more than forty years and believes that taboo words have a specific and irreplaceable function in the dictionary. They carry an emotional precision that ordinary words cannot reliably convey.
This is because of the use of bad words brilliantly – Knowing when a precisely placed curse word has more power than a carefully constructed sentence – Requires reading social context, understanding register and making nuanced language judgments. These are not skills that someone with a limited vocabulary can master. They are the skills of people with complex skills.
The study itself raises an important caveat. Research Published in 2018 Journal of Language and Social Psychology points out that people, even those who are not personally offended by swearing, still view swearers as less intelligent and less trustworthy than non-swearers.
The perception gap is real and persistent. This means that the cognitive signals contained in swear words are often obscured by social noise. What the research reveals is not that you should swear more, but that the habits themselves—fluency with taboo language, ease of using taboo language—are correlated with verbal intelligence in exactly the opposite way that laypeople might assume. Arguably, knowing when not to swear is also a form of wisdom.
Why These Habits Predict Intelligence
There is something structurally interesting about both habits. On the surface, they look like failures of self-regulation: the inability to keep your thoughts to yourself and the inability to get certain words out of your mouth.
However, studies describe exactly the opposite: they reflect a natural tendency to use language as a cognitive tool, to use it precisely and fluently, to make the most of the lexical system, rather than to securely control it.
In reality, intelligence rarely reveals itself. It often comes in weirder, more inconvenient ways. It can manifest as a person speaking his or her mind in the cereal aisle, or a colleague saying just the right word in a meeting that changes the temperature of the room. The habit you were told to suppress may deserve more attention.
Wisdom is often hidden in plain sight. Do you know how your habits shape your habits? Take scientifically based self-awareness outcome questionnaire Find out.
