Watch Your Tongue by Mark Abley

Author:Mark Abley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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The way we talk about an event affects how we think about it. In the 1970s, the psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer demonstrated this in a famous experiment. They showed short films of traffic accidents to groups of students and then asked the students a question about how fast they thought the cars were moving. When the question stated that the cars had “contacted” one another, the students guessed the speed to be, on average, 31.8 miles an hour. But when the question spoke about the cars having “smashed” each other, the answer increased to an average of 40.5 miles an hour. The images shown to the two groups were identical, but the students’ perception of speed depended not just on what they watched but on the words they read.

That kind of awareness is valuable to spin doctors and other professionals keen on doctoring things up—to an extent, political rhetoric is always an exercise in branding. And in the United States, those on the political right have showed great skill at guiding popular opinion by negative branding. In Britain, Canada, Australia and other countries, politicians and media routinely speak of the “public health system” or “publicly funded health care.” But in the United States (the only wealthy nation that does not provide a form of universal health care to its citizens), a standard expression for the same concept is “socialized medicine.” “Socialized” calls to mind the horrors of the Soviet Union. The widespread use of this idiom in the United States has helped to maintain a for-profit medical system.

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