Swearing, insults and hate speech: the social and psychological power of taboo language

Language does much more than just convey information. It expresses emotions, establishes social connections, and even challenges norms.

Taboo language is one of its most intriguing facets. These “off limits” words – a category ranging from insults and swear words through to racial slurs and hate speech – have extraordinary power. They elicit strong emotional responses, and reveal a massive amount about a society’s values, cultural norms, and psychological processes.

The widespread use of online vulgarity has the worrying potential to escalate into more harmful forms of communication, such as hate speech: severely offensive language that targets individuals or groups based on attributes such as race, religion, or gender. Coupled with widespread online misinformation, this hateful rhetoric can have very destructive impacts in the real world.

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