Today, my mom received a survey asking what she thought of President Obama's policies. We began to answer the questions, but threw it out when we realized how slanted the words were. One question asked "Do you think we should have a universal health care plan run by government bureaucrats?" First, this is a vocab word. Second, this is a slanted word designed to make you say "no". No one wants bureaucrats running the policy, but had they said officials or some more positive term, you would be more inclined to say "yes". I don't remember the other questions but they were all of a similar nature. This shows how word choice can affect the answers people give and how they think about politics.
On the back of the survey was a form asking for donations. They expected to rile people up after using slanted words so that they would be more willing to donate.
This remided me of Hayakawa while using a vocab word, so I thought I would share it and see what everyone else thought.
~Becca
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I agree, word choices are definitely a powerful force in influencing people's decisions. Thinking about this reminded me of a study my economics class read about today relating to the importance of wordchoices and how people base their decisions off of them. (I found it on wikipedia, but I couldn't find the exact article we read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(social_sciences)#Experimental_demonstration)
ReplyDeleteIn the study, researchers pose the same question worded differently to two different groups of people and see that people's decisions are vastly influenced by wording. For the first questioning group, people prefferred to take a risk in order to "save" people. However, noone wanted to take a risk that could result in people dying, even though the outcome of both plans would be exactly the same.
-Bryce C.
Even in basic grammar, words convey how the speaker feels, DON'T you agree?
ReplyDeletethat was me (tori)
ReplyDelete