Behaviour Change and Linguistic Relativity: The Power of Words by Dr Kate Muir

I’m pretty sure everyone would agree that words have power: we’ve all read a book, heard song lyrics or a speech that has stayed with us or influenced us in some way. I’d go even further and propose that of all the myriad influences on our thoughts and behaviour, none is more important than language. Let me explain what I mean. This idea is the basis of linguistic relativity, the theory that language influences our thoughts, and how we perceive the world . The strong version of this theory claims that language actually dictates thought - that the language we speak constrains our perception and cognition. A limited vocabulary means an equally limited worldview. If you don’t know a word, you quite literally are unable to perceive, or think about the concept that word represents. The crux of the argument is that humans rely on internal categories and concepts, in order to understand the flux of information we are bombarded with. The language we speak is part of this system of organisation; verbal labels assist us in making sense of and navigating our way through the world. Languages segment our experiences and perceptions in different ways – speakers of another language will literally see and describe the world differently. Take colour perception, for example. We perceive a particular wavelength of light, and label it with a colour name; this system is going to vary depending upon the language we speak. The colour one language defines as ‘green’, for example, may not even exist in another. There is indeed some evidence that language has a significant influence upon colour perception. Roberson, Davies and Davidoff studied a Papua New Guinean tribe called the Berinmo, who had only five basic colour terms, compared to ten in English. The figure below shows how the five Berinmo colour terms (box b) roughly map onto the English (box a; after Davidoff ).

Berinmo participants consistently showed poorer performance in tasks involving colour terms. For instance, Berinmo participants showed inconsistency in picking the best example of a colour category, whilst English participants exhibited high consensus. Berinmo participants also had poorer memory for colours than the English participants. This suggests that both sets of speakers relied on naming strategies during the memory tests, and as the Berinmo’s colour terms cover various shades of colour, their verbal labels were not helpful to them. The strong Whorfian view of this evidence indicates that these two cultures, because of their varying colour terms, literally see different colours. These days, the weak version of linguistic relativity, that language merely influences thought but does not determine it, is more accepted. Languages spoken around the world differ in their representations of time, space, shapes and objects; thus, the language spoken biases the way speakers of different languages think about these concepts. For instance, in English, we use front/back terms to talk about time (the past is behind us, the future is ahead) whereas Mandarin uses up/down terms (the past is up, the future is down). Speakers tend to show a bias towards thinking about time in the same way as the terms used in their language: Mandarin speakers are quicker to confirm that March is earlier in the year than April if they have just seen a vertical array of objects, than if they had seen a horizontal array. The opposite is observed for English speakers . Other research demonstrates that bilinguals categorise objects differently according to the language they use at the time . Language can thus be seen to influence many aspects of cognition and behaviour. In my view, language isn’t just a means of communication; it is a weapon of sorts. Change a person’s language, and you change the person. My point is this: in studying and implementing behaviour change, we should not underestimate just how influential language can be. If we are to encourage positive behaviour change and influence society for the better, we should choose our words carefully.

[1] Whorf, B. (1956).  Language, thought and reality: selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. New York: Wiley.

[1] Roberson, D., Davies, I. & Davidoff, J. (2000).  Colour categories are not universal: replications and new evidence from a stone-age culture.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129 (3), 369 – 398. 

[1] Davidoff, J. (2001).  Language and perceptual categorisation.  Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5 (9), 382 - 387.

[1] Boroditsky, L. (2001).  Does language shape thought?  Mandarin and English speakers’ conceptions of time.  Cognitive Psychology, 43 (1), 1 – 22.

[1] Athanasopoulos, A., Bylund, E., Montero-Melis, G., Damjanovic, L., Schartner, A., Kibbe, A., Riches, N. & Thierry, G. (2015).  Two Languages, Two Minds: Flexible Cognitive Processing Driven by Language of Operation.  Psychological Science, 26 (4), 518 – 526.