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How we speak, what words we choose, influences how we are perceived by other people. Therefore, put aside dictionaries – abstruse, long words make communication very difficult. It may sound strange, but the “appear smart” strategy often works the other way around.
“How often our ideas of what impresses others are wrong,” says psychology professor Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the Anderson School of Management. To come to this conclusion, he conducted several studies, the purpose of which was to study how listeners perceive us when we use certain words and expressions in speech.
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The researchers took several essays from college students and, using certain algorithms, replaced the words with more complex and longer ones. These revised texts were then given to several respondents to read. To everyone’s surprise, readers found the authors of these texts stupid and incompetent. It is obvious that the changes in the texts, seemingly made in the direction of deepening and complicating the material, only made them worse for perception. Then the researchers did the reverse work with already different, complex, scientific texts. They replaced all professional and scientific vocabulary with simple, understandable words. Readers considered the authors intelligent and gifted people.
Daniel Oppenheimer explains this trend as follows. When a person is easy to understand, even if he talks about something by no means difficult, then he will command respect from the audience. And if you use long, incomprehensible words, then your speech will sound pompous and pretentious.
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If you use words that will make readers “stumble” and think about the meaning of some words, then part of the speech will most likely not be heard, and the statement itself, as a result, will be misunderstood.
However, the use of short words is not always correct. Sometimes a long, difficult word cannot be replaced without losing its meaning. In such cases, of course, you should not avoid it and you can safely use it. The trouble starts when people start to think that buzzwords make them smarter in the eyes of the audience, and such a strategy is clearly a losing one.
By the way, Daniel Oppenheimer continued his research on the influence of language on human behavior and came to even more surprising results. It turns out that a person whose name is difficult to pronounce is less likely to succeed, for example, in politics.1.
See more at Fast Company publications.
1 See his book Democracy Despite Itself (MIT Press, 2013) for more details.