For many of us, the prospect of public speaking makes us feel uncomfortable. Before an important meeting, we are afraid to lose our thoughts, to be unconvincing or misunderstood. Fear of unexpected speech errors, called “Freudian slips”, is one of them. Why do they happen and how to stop worrying when speaking out loud?
Speaking about reforming education, Ted Kennedy, then a Massachusetts senator, waved his hand with his usual passion and suddenly said the word “chest” instead of the word “best”. He, of course, made a reservation – in English the words “best” and “breast” are close in sound. A chuckle went through the audience, but the experienced speaker was not embarrassed and immediately corrected the oversight, continuing – “the best and brightest” – the best and worthy.
“Despite this ambiguous caveat, and perhaps partly because of it, Kennedy’s speech is remembered as the most successful and often quoted,” said James Pannybaker, head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas. “It became an example that speech errors do not necessarily play against us. However, as practice shows, people are afraid of the possibility of such situations during speeches and important negotiations.”
The indirect culprit of our anxiety turned out to be none other than Sigmund Freud. After the publication in 1901 of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the ideas of the father of psychoanalysis that behind an innocent slip of the tongue lies something more that breaks through the depths of the subconscious and reveals our true intention or desire, gradually gaining world fame. The term “Freudian slip” itself has long gone out of academic use and has taken root in the realities of everyday language, having acquired a clearly ironic connotation.
Reservations in our speech are almost inevitable. On average, we make one or two mistakes per thousand words.
“In fact, just one of Freud’s hypotheses has become an axiom for a huge number of people, which neuroticized humanity for a century,” says James Pannybaker. We began to attach supervaluable meaning to reservations, and after the spread of Freud’s ideas, the need for public speaking, which had always made many people anxious in one way or another, began to disturb us with greater force. Why did this happen?
“This situation was largely the result of the authoritarianism of Freud himself, who, having enormous influence and for the first time forming a psychotherapeutic community, was intolerant of dissent,” says Pannybecker. “Freud’s followers were also hard on their teacher’s point of view.”
However, at the beginning of the last century, the theory of additional connotations of reservations was criticized by the philologist Rudolf Mehringer. In one of his series of articles, “Words and Things” (“Wörter und Sachen”), Mehringer insists on a less delicate explanation: “It’s just a banana peel on the path of a sentence, an accidental rearrangement in the linguistic structure.”
“Today, a sufficient experimental and evidence base has been accumulated, confirming, rather, the point of view of the Freudian opponent,” emphasizes James Pannibaker. However, a century after some of Freud’s ideas were desacralized, the fear of saying the wrong thing at the most important moment continues to haunt us.
To err is human
Reservations in our speech are almost inevitable. On average, per thousand words, we make one or two mistakes: we choose words that are close in sound but fall out of context, or we phonetically distort those words that we have never stumbled over before. Every day, almost every one of us makes from 7 to 22 verbal reservations. Some of them, due to their ambiguity, have entered the history of oratory faux pas.
Shortly after the adultery revelations of golf star Tiger Woods, a reporter, intending to say that the athlete did not take part in the tournament due to a spinal disc injury, uttered a phonetically close slang designation for the opposite part of the male anatomy. When the leader of the al-Qaeda movement was caught and executed, one of the well-known opponents of the American president remarked: “Obama is dead. And I don’t regret it.” Of course, he wanted to name Osama. President Bush Jr. said: “We had triumphs. And there was sex … ”In fact, he tried to pronounce the word“ failures ”-“ setbacks ”, but suddenly chopped off the second syllable, which gave birth to a completely different statement.
The subconscious plays a role in our reservations, but not always in the sense in which Freud considered it.
“A Viennese psychotherapist would most likely place the American president on a couch and ask about his childhood and relationship with his wife,” says Harry Dell, a cognitive psychologist and professor of linguistics and psychology at the University of Illinois. – It is very likely that he would have suggested: the words “triumph” and “mistakes”, lined up in one row, turned out to be a trigger for the emergence of an unconscious association with sex. For this is how Freud demonstrates the essence of his analysis in Psychopathology. However, modern studies of speech, by demonstrating exactly how the brain translates thoughts into words, prove that in such cases the father of psychoanalysis was clearly mistaken.
Dell argues that slips of the tongue are a useful phenomenon, as they show the exceptional human ability to operate with language. Sounds, words and concepts are connected in our brain in three chains – semantic, lexical and phonological, and speech arises due to their interaction. But from time to time these chains collide. The result is a speech reservation.
At the same time, the speech production system, making mistakes, does not stop and immediately launches new words. Let them fall into a false context or sound wrong, but these errors do not close the very possibility of communication for us, because our speech continues. Dell calls this a manifestation of speech flexibility and proof of the agility and vast functionality of the brain.
Sometimes the signal of sound that we need in a sentence a little later is activated in our brain too early and replaces the necessary one. The result is slips of the tongue called “preemptive errors.”
Among them, Ted Kennedy’s reservation – “breast and brightest” – where the word “best” (best), due to the sound similarity of the neighboring word, turned into the word “breast” (chest). In Bush’s textbook phrase “sex” instead of “setbacks” (failures), the sound “ks” broke away from the necessary word and was articulated too early.
Preemptive errors include slips of the tongue related to Obama and Tiger Woods. In the latter case, the S sound was dropped from the disk word, as the final sound was activated too early. And the resulting word turned into a comical symbol of the athlete’s sex adventures, which received wide publicity at that moment.
At the same time, one cannot but admit that some errors sound suspicious, hinting at the speaker’s hidden thoughts or intentions. “Our brain activates the last impression we received,” explains Harry Dell. – If you are having lunch with a colleague and paid close attention to his watch, then it is them, instead of a knife, that you can suddenly ask the waiter for. Such errors can by no means be recognized as classical “Freudian blunders”, since they do not reveal deeply repressed and hidden desires. However, they are certainly related to something that somehow attracted our attention.
“The subconscious plays a role in our reservations, but not always in the way that Freud saw it,” says Daniel Wegner, Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard. Wegner is the author of the famous polar bear experiment, in which a group of subjects were asked not to think about this animal. When later people talked about something that came to their mind, the forbidden beast constantly broke into speech.
A group of psychologists led by Michael Motley at the University of California conducted a number of similar experiments. In the course of the study, one of the groups of men was represented by an assistant, a young and sexually attractive woman. Another group worked with an elderly professor.
“We specifically seated the assistant so that the girl’s knees were at the level of the subjects’ eyes,” says Motley. At first, the participants read to themselves words that sounded similar. From time to time we asked one of them to say the word aloud. The men who were in the room with the girl made an order of magnitude more sexually tinged slips of the tongue than those who were in the room with the professor.”
By how actively the “I” appears in the speech of your counterpart, one can partly conclude that he is sincere.
In another experiment by Michael Motley, participants were told about the dangers of electric current beforehand, and as a result, more errors related to this topic were recorded. “The nature of reservations depended directly on the ‘attention stimulus’,” Motley argues. – But is there a repressed motive in this, about which Freud wrote? Yes, these reservations were unconscious, while the men were fully aware that they liked the woman. Some even asked her out on a date.”
Motley believes that the participants in the experiment tried to suppress thoughts of both sex and the electric current and answer only the immediate question, but their efforts were nullified in large part because of this internal prohibition.
In addition to reservations, there are other speech errors that we make in conversation. “And they, rather than “Freudian slips”, are more likely to betray the speaker, says James Pannybaker. – For example, how often the interlocutor uses the personal pronoun “I” can tell a lot about him. We use this pronoun every 16 words on average, and women pronounce it more than men. By how actively “I” appears in the speech of your counterpart, one can partly conclude that he is sincere. Liars tend to avoid this pronoun.”
Some omissions may also appear in other stylistic features of speech. Former FBI agent Jack Schafer advises paying attention to the unexpected appearance of numerous introductory words and adverbs in a conversation. “They unconsciously fill in information gaps,” Schafer says. In his opinion, the best way to mislead is to speak the pure truth, only omitting that part of the information that they do not want to devote to a partner. However, such episodes left behind the scenes are filled with textual bridges between hidden information and that which the interlocutor thinks about, but does not say.
“If the partner has a motive to keep something back, pay attention to the sudden escapade “then, in fact, in this way, in other words.” This is very likely to indicate attempts to omit part of the story, ”says Schafer.
What to do?
Fear of slips of the tongue is a special case of a common fear of public speaking. “People are afraid of appearing unconvincing or ridiculous,” says Gestalt therapist Maria Lekareva-Bozenenkova. “And the best medicine is to allow yourself to be funny. For example, some therapists in training often ask people to say a serious text while standing on one leg or pointing their nose at each other. Get to know each other in a group, clinging to the little finger. It not only liberates, but also helps to learn to see the fun in yourself and others and treat it with warmth.
We also worry that at the most inopportune moment, parasitic words will begin to creep into speech, even if we usually speak quite competently. “Before a responsible meeting with investors, I told a close colleague a funny story about my little son singing “pyry-pyry,” says Irina. – When it was my turn to speak, instead of the words “and so on” I suddenly uttered a piece of this nonsense. I forced myself to pretend not to be embarrassed and continue on. Then, burning with shame, I asked the same colleague how ridiculous I looked. She assured me: the tension of the meeting was so great that completely different things remained in my memory.
Maria Lekareva-Bozenenkova calls such a reaction to her own reservation the most successful: “In a situation of excitement, words related to another reality of our “I” can break through. It’s not me – a participant in the meeting, but I – a teenager at the blackboard, I – reciting poetry on a stool, or I – defuse the conflict in the family with the help of cute nonsense. Thus, any word can slip into speech. It is worth either immediately laughing it off, or as if nothing had happened, move through the text.
Calling the interlocutor by someone else’s name, while his own is well known to you, is another common reservation. This happens, as a rule, in two cases: a person is not very interesting or, on the contrary, superimportant. In the first case, it is worth motivating yourself for more personal attention to it.
Listeners pay more attention to mistakes if they are not interested in the story.
“You can search in your memory for some emotionally colored situation related to him,” suggests Maria Lekareva-Bozenenkova. “Perhaps once he made a witty joke or told something about his hobbies. You can observe what gestures during a conversation are characteristic of your counterpart, and fix them in your imagination. In the case of the over-significance of contact, it makes sense to present a person in the realities of his private life. Imagine if he likes coffee or tea, if he can have a dog. By removing his image from the official, impersonal context, we ourselves manage to get out of the most tense point of view on the situation.”
So what is it that causes us to negotiate, allowing our internal monitors to miss errors? “There are two main provocateurs,” says Daniel Wegner. – The first is the thought that we forbid ourselves. The second is the stress factor. Speech errors increase if we are interrupted or unexpectedly limited in speaking time.
Among other reasons, researchers cite alcohol, fatigue, and multitasking. The rapid pace of speech also encourages slips of the tongue. “The faster we speak, the more likely it is that the signal of the previous word is still activated and, therefore, there is a risk of“ tripping ”, Wegner says.
He advises those who make a reservation not to stop – this will increase the likelihood that the mistake will go unnoticed or instantly forgotten. Wegner also notes that listeners pay more attention to mistakes if they are not interested in the story. Conversely, if you managed to capture the attention, then they will not embarrass the interlocutor. Returning to the topic of his own research about the bear, the psychologist joked: “Perhaps the polar bear mentioned out of place will remain in someone’s memory. But let’s not forget – this is still a very rare breed.