Are we being manipulated by the words we hear — and the ones we use? In this episode, marketing and psychology professor Sam Maglio unpacks the hidden signals embedded in everyday language, from why abbreviations can make you seem insincere to how tense and voice subtly shape what we believe. Listen in and how small shifts in wording influence perception, persuasion and even behaviour — and how to keep your inner psycholinguist on alert.
Are we being manipulated by the words we hear — and the ones we use? In this episode, marketing and psychology professor Sam Maglio unpacks the hidden signals embedded in everyday language, from why abbreviations can make you seem insincere to how tense and voice subtly shape what we believe. Listen in and how small shifts in wording influence perception, persuasion and even behaviour — and how to keep your inner psycholinguist on alert.
Show notes
[0:00] Ever feel like the words you hear are manipulating you? That’s because, in some cases, they are.
[0:53] Meet Sam Maglio, a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Toronto.
[2:01] When it comes to the words we use, we’re probably not being critical enough about what we’re saying.
[3:03] More often than not, what we’re saying isn’t being interpreted by the recipient in the way we mean (this is partially because we’re bad at perspective taking).
[4:56] How does capitalization influence our perception of gender?
[5:37] Abbreviations can make us seem less sincere.
[7:43] Speaking in present tense makes us more believable…
[8:50] …so does speaking in active voice.
[9:25] But speaking in passive voice can give us an air of authority.
[10:52] What does this all mean? Well, words are manipulative. This can be good; one famous study told a group of housekeepers at a hotel that they were exercising rather than working, and without making any other changes, that group lost weight.
[12:10] But it can also be used to subtly sway your ability to believe in things like climate change.
[12:36] We live in tech-bubbles that supercharge the spread of misinformation, which is bad when you think about the mere exposure effect.
[13:17] So we need a bit of self-reflection to protect ourselves from being manipulated.
[13:38] “I think part of it starts with being aware of how our psychology plays tricks on us. Our psychology makes us want to click on the clickbait, even though we might know it's not true. How many studies have you heard where people will post things or retweet things or like things, and they haven't even read the article, because if the world is on fire, then damn it, everyone needs to know that the world is on fire. Take a breath before that and like not be part of the problem, because it's very easy for a thump to turn into an echo, to turn into a chorus of all sorts of negative things.”
Megan Haynes: Ever feel like you’re being manipulated by the words you hear?
Sam Maglio: This morning, I was driving to the gym and listening to the radio, and I heard a commercial come on for Indeed. And it said, sponsor a job on Indeed, and most people would just zip right past it, but because of my day job, I couldn't help but wear my psycholinguistics guy hat when I heard it and thought, "What does sponsor mean?" And then I went to their website and looked it up, and sponsor means pay us. Indeed doesn't say use a paid posting. It says sponsor something. And so when communicators use this specific word versus that specific word, it ever so slightly changes how we feel about what they're offering.
In our own communications, when we use one word or another, we should be aware of the messages that we might be sending and the way it might be changing other people's thoughts.
MH: That’s Sam Maglio, a professor of marketing and psychology here at the University of Toronto and Rotman School of Management. Sam’s done considerable research into how words — what we say and how we say and write it — are interpreted in ways we’re not fully aware of.
He’s even got a book coming out next year on the hidden psychology of language — how the words we use every day shape the way we perceive the world.
So what do our words say about us? How are we being manipulated by what we’re hearing, and what — if anything — should we do about it? Welcome to the Executive Summary. I’m Megan Haynes, editor of the Rotman Insights Hub.
Musical intro
MH: Let me preface this episode with a confession… it’s hard to write an episode about language and not fret about every single word choice. How do you write coherently about writing when your subject matter expert is, well, the expert on writing? What if I use the wrong words? What if I say so much that my meaning gets lost? Or worse, what if I use an abbreviation and suddenly people’s perception of my writing is skewed forever and ever? I’m probably overthinking this, but if there’s one take away from this episode for listeners, it’s this: we’re not critically thinking enough about the words we use. And maybe we need to fret about our language just a little bit more…
SM: I know so many people that wear a Fitbit, and what they want that Fitbit to do is track every one of their steps, because every step they take is precious, so they need to hit 10,000 steps per day, and so we're aware of how important it is to take steps, but we're less aware of how important every single word is…
MH: And, ok, we’re probably more aware of the words we use in important emails, documents, presentations, job applications. I definitely put more thought into my wedding vows than, say, a text I sent off reminding my husband to pick up milk on the way home. But as Sam says:
SM: Because we speak so many words, we type so many words and we hear so many words over the course of every single day, it makes us a bit numb to how powerful every individual word is.
MH: And if we’re a little bit numb to the power of every individual word, it can be easy to forget that what we’re saying and what people are hearing doesn’t always line up…
SM: We are not quite at telepathy yet. I can't just take a message that's in my head and beam it past your forehead in a way that perfectly captures exactly not just what I'm thinking, but what I want you to get. And so we're stuck with words.
MH: Take something innocuous.
SM: Out of curiosity, I searched my email history for like in the search bar, "Just wanted to." And there were like thousands and thousands of hits, admittedly going back decades, of just wanted to, right? So when you say just wanted to remind you, or just wanted to let you know, you're saying that you don't want to intrude on somebody else's time, and that's totally fair, but what they're hearing is, I can avoid this for a really long time.
One of the places we get tripped up is taking our own perspective and assuming that it's the same as somebody else's perspective, that because we generate so many words in the course of a day, we talk to ourselves inside our heads with even more words per day. And it's important to appreciate that somebody else that's receiving a message might not hear exactly the message that we're trying to convey.
MH: Does it matter that sometimes what we say and what we mean is lost in translation? Well, yes, or we probably wouldn’t be recording an episode about Sam’s research.
SM: People have these implicit rules they play by when they talk with each other. And one of those implicit rules is, if you're saying it, it must matter.
Musical interlude
MH: If what we say and how we say it matters, what are some of the hidden meanings we might not realize we’re conveying? Sam has done a number of studies over the years on the odd ways the words we say and write carry hidden messages, and it’s worth looking at how that might shape what others are hearing. Let’s start with an easy one: capitalization.
Over a series of four studies, Sam and his research partner looked at what gender we assign capital and minuscule letters.
SM: If we take a name in a foreign language and put it in all uppercase letters, people assume that it's a boy's name and not a girl's name.
MH: This was a pretty consistent finding across all their studies.
SM: And what we found, not a huge surprise here, is that maybe because men have bigger bodies, or because men shout in all caps is associated with yelling at someone on email, but when you print something in all lowercase, it connotes greater femininity of the thing being referred to by that lowercase word, and all uppercase makes you infer that there's some masculinity attached to that object.
MH: Or let’s look at abbreviations. In 2024, Sam and his colleagues looked at how people view and respond to messages that contained abbreviations — think TTYL in place of talk to you later or HBU for how about you. The researchers analyzed messages on Tinder and Discord.
SM: If you use abbreviations in your Tinder conversations, those conversations end sooner than if you type the whole thing out, which means you're less likely to get a date.
MH: Requests for show recommendations on Discord were far less likely to receive a reply if they contained an abbreviation. You would think it’s inconsequential — the recipient, assuming familiarity with abbreviation, understands the message.
SM: We might send a text message, or any number of different online communications, thinking like, oh, it makes it shorter for me to type. It makes it easier for the other person to read to just use an abbreviation to say TTYL or HRU instead of how are you. We think we're making things easier. In fact, we're making things a lot harder on the other person — harder on the other person because they end up thinking the person who sent me this message can't be bothered to type out the whole thing. It sends a signal about what is our relationship like. If you can't be bothered, if you seem insincere because you're using an abbreviation, it makes the message recipient less likely to respond, less likely to go along with what you asked.
It's consistent across relationships in thinking the sender is insincere and I don't feel like responding. The question then is, do you care whether you seem sincere and need a response?
MH: If you have an existing relationship with the person — a significant other or a good friend — then maybe it’s fine if you come across as a little insincere since they already know you. But…
SM: If you are asking a stranger to date you or to give you a recommendation, that's a pretty big gap of social distance to bridge, and putting in the effort of typing it out seems like it helps.
MH: Ok, so avoid abbreviations if you want to come off as sincere. Capitalization can change people’s perception of gender… what about your writing style? Does it matter if you write in present or past tense? Sam studied this as well.
SM: There's something about the present tense that is immersive and more believable. And what we find is more persuasive. And so we tested this idea. If you go on Amazon to write a review, you could very reasonably say this product worked great because you've used it before. Or you could say this product works great because presumably you're still using it. Or you could even go to the future tense and talk directly to the person reading the review and say this product will work great.
MH: In looking at millions of reviews written in past, present or future tense, those written in the present tense were far more likely to get a “thumbs up” from other users — implying they were more helpful. And on the topic of persuasive and immersive, what did Sam’s research say about active versus passive voice?
SM: Active voice would say Bill threw the ball, and passive voice would say the ball was thrown by Bill. Passive voice is generally just trashed by speaking coaches. When you write something in the active voice, it's more immersive, and people are more likely to believe it's true.
But my research collaborator and I started to wonder, well, are there certain benefits to writing in the passive voice that might get overlooked?
MH: To study this, Sam and his colleague sent out research abstracts — the blurb at the top of scientific papers — to participants. Some were written in active voice, others in passive. When asked which research was most replicable — that is, more likely to be repeatable by other researchers — participants overwhelmingly favoured those written in an active voice, with Sam and co concluding it was more believable. That’s not to say that passive voice is all bad.
SM: That passive voice also creates a sense of distance between the speaker and the thing that they're talking about. So it signals certain benefits, like objectivity and detachment, like if I speak in the passive voice, fly on the wall about the thing I’m talking about.
MH: He points to an analysis of Supreme Court decisions in the U.S., which tend to be written in passive voice. While those decisions are often about specific cases, the rulings are designed to be bigger and widely applicable.
SM: And so when you're speaking in the language of universal laws and rules, there seems to be something that clicks very well about the enduring distance and permanence of the passive voice.
MH: All of this is to say, the words we use may convey different meaning than we intend… but that doesn’t necessarily mean we need to optimize all of our word choices.
SM: I feel like a lot of the findings from the psychology of language show that, like anything, there's a trade-off. And so if you skew more toward one or more toward the other, you might get certain benefits, but it comes at certain costs.
Musical interlude
MH: Ok, so when it comes to language, there are trade-offs — and on an individual level that might mean tweaking what you say or write to make sure you’re properly conveying the right meaning. But what does it mean at a wider scale?
SM: So there's a famous research study that looked at housekeepers working in hotels. Now, most of them, all of them until you come along and intervene, think that what they're doing on the job — changing beds, emptying garbage baskets, sweeping, vacuuming, mopping — is work. Researchers come along and introduce an intervention. You have some housekeepers on some floors in the same hotel, but other floors don't get this intervention. What you do is exercise, because when you're crouching down to sweep something up, or when you're reaching up to pull a towel off of a shower, you're exercising. And what the researchers did was they measured all sorts of physiological characteristics of the housekeepers before the intervention. And then they waited, I think it was four weeks, and then they measured again. The housekeepers who spent those four weeks thinking that what they were doing was exercise showed drastic improvements in a number of different markers, like their blood pressure was better and their weight was down.
MH: Participants didn’t change any other behaviour — they weren’t eating healthier, exercising more or even picking up extra shifts. Yet the word choice made a difference. That might be good — in the case of people unintentionally living healthier lives when faced with a simple redefinition of what it means to go to work each day. But it also means that the words you hear might be used to manipulate you…
SM: Liberal-leaning think tanks will use the phrase climate change more. Right-leaning think tanks say global warming. They say, well, they're almost making it sound worse, right?
MH: Even though they might have similar roots, Sam says global warming becomes easier to dismiss when there’s an unseasonably cool June or a super frigid November — and right-leaning think tanks use that to their advantage. Some people have a healthy dose of skepticism.
But we’re increasingly living in information bubbles, where what we’re exposed to is more limited to views that already agree with our own.
Technology has also supercharged the spread of misinformation. And with the internet at our fingertips, it’s even harder to avoid hot takes and headlines that might be manipulative.
And thanks to the mere exposure effect, that has a huge influence on what we believe.
SM: If you read something just once, if you're merely exposed to it, you find it more favorable, you find it more persuasive. And then the more you hear it — the more you hear it — called the illusory truth effect, the more you hear something makes you more likely to believe that it's true just by virtue of the fact that someone said it.
MH: The solutions to these dangers aren’t groundbreaking, even if they do require a bit of self-awareness and analysis.
SM: But I think it's also important to have a bit of a psycholinguist in your ear when you hear a marketing pitch, when someone's asking you to do something, to be aware of how their precise wording might be intended to create a certain effect or drive a certain behavior.
So I think part of it starts with being aware of how our psychology plays tricks on us. Our psychology makes us want to click on the clickbait, even though we might know it's not true. And so how many studies have you heard where people will post things or retweet things or like things and they haven't even read the article, because if the world is on fire, then damn it, everyone needs to know that the world is on fire? Take a breath before that and not be part of the problem, because it's very easy for a thump to turn into an echo, to turn into a chorus of all sorts of negative things.
Outro music
MH: This has been Rotman Executive Summary, a podcast bringing you the latest insights and innovative thinking from Canada's leading business school. Special thanks to Professor Sam Maglio.
This marks the end of our fourth season — if you’re just joining us for the first time, make sure you check out some of our earlier episodes.
We’ve covered everything from how we can improve healthcare delivery to rebuilding organizational trust to what history can teach us about our economic uncertainties.
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And if you want more bold ideas in less time, check out Rotman Visiting Experts — a monthly podcast featuring sharp conversations with today’s top business thinkers, including Oliver Burkeman, Terry O’Reilly and Amy Edmondson. It’s available wherever you get your podcasts.
This episode was written and produced by Megan Haynes. It was recorded by Dan Mazzotta and edited by Avery Moore Kloss.
Thanks for tuning in.