By guest blogger Richard Stephens

The 1994 Wonderbra© billboard campaign with its distinctive “Hello Boys!” catchphrase regularly gets a mention as one of most iconic advert series of all time. Its portrayal of super model Eva Herzigova clad only in black lacey pants and gravity-defying bra is said to have sent drivers veering off the roads. However a new study published in the esteemed journal Acta Psychologica suggests that attention grabbing billboard ads may actually have the opposite effect on driving performance.

Michelle Chan and colleagues from the University of Alberta, Canada, were sufficiently concerned about the effects of driver inattention on road vehicle accident rates that they ran a study using a driving simulator in a bid to find out just what kinds of effects roadside advertising strategies might be having on drivers.

A number of psychology students took a simulated drive along a road that was largely indistinctive apart from a succession of advertising billboards. The hoardings that they drove past each depicted a single word. Some words were deliberately positive (e.g. “liberty”) while others were negative (e.g. “gloom”) and still others were chosen for their neutrality (e.g. “errand”).

Image of driving simulator taken from Chan et al 2016

Eye-catchingly, a further selection of words including “asshole”, “fuck” and “dildo” were chosen because they were taboo. As the students drove along the simulated route a computer measured and recorded how safely they were driving including their speed, lane maintenance (keeping towards the centre of the lane as opposed to drifting left or right), and use of the steering wheel.

Interestingly, on the route passing by the taboo billboards, driving performance did not worsen by any of the measures used. In fact, surprisingly, lane position actually improved. Drivers positioned the car more centrally in scenarios where the billboards at the side of the road contained taboo words like “dildo”. Not only that, but in a spot memory test after the driving tasks had been completed, the volunteers could recall more of the taboo words featured on the billboards compared with the words from the other categories. There were no effects of the other word types other than a small increase in speed (around 2 km/h) when passing by the positive words.

The improved recall of the taboo items echoes previous research showing that swear words are more memorable because they are emotionally arousing. In fact, this emotionally arousing property of taboo words seems to underlie the beneficial effects on driving performance shown in the study. The researchers suggest that the excitement aroused when we encounter a taboo stimulus – like a swear word – can trigger a response known as “cognitive tunnelling”. Effectively, this is a narrowing of the focus of attention to just one part of the visual environment.  Paradoxically this could benefit driving if attention becomes narrowly focused on just the road ahead.

Another way that taboo words on billboards could have improved car control is related to the idea of a rabbit becoming frozen in the headlights of an onrushing car. The paper cites previous research finding that viewing taboo and threatening images can bring about a suppression of the motor system. The authors suggest that any reduction in responsiveness of the musculature caused in this way might improve performance by reducing incorrect responding. However, this seems less likely to me as I would expect any suppression of mobility to impair driving rather than enhance it.

An obvious criticism of this research is that it involved naughty words, rather than risqué images, which is the issue more relevant to real life. However, the researchers point out that regions of the brain involved in processing emotion (for example the amygdala, the prefrontal cortex and the anterior temporal cortex) have been shown to become more activated in response to emotionally arousing pictures compared with emotionally arousing words, and on this basis they actually suggest that scantily clad and attractive models on billboards may well show more pronounced beneficial effects on driving because of a still-greater narrowing of drivers’ attention.

However, while this idea may hold theoretically, any benefits of cognitive tunnelling must depend on drivers quickly returning their attention back on to the road after it has been grabbed involuntarily by a provocative billboard. I predict this would be far more challenging for taboo imagery compared with taboo words. For example, a recent study found that cards players made less advantageous decisions when the backs of the cards depicted sexually explicit images as opposed to traditional card patterns.

Large amounts of planning and money are expended by companies including the makers of the Wonderbra© to make adverts as eye-catching as possible. While this study suggests these ads may unintentionally be contributing to road safety, a great deal more research is needed before anyone might recommend that transport authorities should actively encourage risqué advertising billboards on the roadside.

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Chan M, Madan CR, & Singhal A (2016). The effects of taboo-related distraction on driving performance. Acta psychologica, 168, 20-6 PMID: 27136396

Post written by Richard Stephens for the BPS Research Digest. You can read more of Richard’s work in his critically acclaimed popular science book, Black Sheep The Hidden Benefits of Being Bad, available from all good book stores and online. Richard is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Keele University and Chair of the Psychobiology Section of the British Psychological Society.

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By guest blogger Richard Stephens

A few years ago the New Yorker ran a social media campaign asking what word should be deleted from the English language. Nominations ranged from the political (Obama) to the superfluous (actually) and from the expression of hyperbole (awesome) to an outdated word for trousers (slacks). Intriguingly, the most popular suggestion – the so-called “runaway un-favourite” – might surprise a few people and especially those who enjoy baking.

Psychologist Paul H. Thibodeau from Oberlin College in the US has taken it upon himself to delve deeper. His amusingly titled research paper published recently in PLoS One, “A Moist Crevice for Word Aversion”, has made a case study of “Moist” – the word that the New Yorker found people most love to hate.

Thibodeau asked hundreds of volunteers recruited online in the US to rate how aversive they found various words, including moist. Verifying the results of the New Yorker campaign, he found 20 per of them disliked this specific word.  The people that were averse to “moist” gave it a 24 per cent higher unpleasantness rating than people that were not averse to it; to put this into context, this was a similar difference in how aversive people rated “fuck” compared with “delicious”.

Thibodeau tested several possible reasons for moist’s unusual unpopularity by seeing what other words were unpopular among the moist-haters. One idea is that people are averse to the word “moist” because of how it sounds. If true then people should also be averse to similar sounding words like “hoist” and “foist”, but they weren’t. This isn’t too much of a surprise given that the sounds that make up a language tend to be random, apart from a smattering of onomatopoeic words (words that convey sounds) like “splash”.

Another clue comes from the observation that “moist” can be very good in some contexts, such as when it describes the texture of the slice of cake we’ve just been served, but can be very bad in others, for example when it refers to the condition of the armpit of the person crammed next to us on the London tube. So, perhaps the word “moist” is seen as aversive because there is conflict in many people’s minds between these simultaneous strong positive and negative connotations.

Thibodeau tested this possibility by assessing how people rated “moist” on a 5-point positivity scale (from “Not at all positive” to “Very positive”) and also on a similar 5-point negatively scale (from “Not at all negative” to “Very negative”). In fact, “moist” tended to be rated around the middle of both scales rather than being very high in both as the conflicting connotations explanation would require.

Yet another possibility is that “moist” is aversive because it brings to mind unsavoury associations, such as sexual words or words connected with non-sexual bodily functions. This is actually the most promising explanation because people who were averse to the word “moist” also tended to be averse to bodily function words like “phlegm” or “puke”. But note, these same people were not usually averse to sexual words like “horny” or “pussy” suggesting that their aversion to the word “moist” was driven not by sexual prudishness but a dislike of more mundane bodily functions.

Other intriguing insights come from when Thibodeau asked people to explain their dislike of the word “moist” – whether it was the sound, the meaning, or both. Most often people indicated it was the sound of the word, at odds with the earlier finding that “hoist” and “foist” were not unpopular. That people averse to the word “moist” tended to misappropriate the source of their aversion to the sound of the word may indicate a general tendency for us not to notice when disgust colours our opinions.

On the evidence of this psychological case study of the word “moist”, aversion to certain words is unlikely to be due to the word sound even though people may mistakenly suggest otherwise. This is another example of a psychology research finding contradicting “common sense”. There was also no evidence that word aversion arises from ambiguous and conflicting word connotations. It all came down to semantics – it was the meaning of the word and its associations with other words that underlay the negative evaluation. That aversion to the word “moist” was correlated with aversion to certain revolting bodily functions, like coughing up phlegm and vomiting, suggests that we are most likely to be averse to words that are linked to unsavoury associations.  

Marketeers might want to take note, especially brands that use English names for products on sale in non-English speaking countries. Customers might be wary of Soup For Sluts instant noodles, for example, or Pee Cola fizzy drink and Deeppresso instant coffee!

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Thibodeau, P. (2016). A Moist Crevice for Word Aversion: In Semantics Not Sounds PLOS ONE, 11 (4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0153686

—further reading—
Why do people find some nonsense words like “finglam” funnier than others like “sersice”

Post written by Richard Stephens for the BPS Research Digest. You can read more of Richard’s work in his critically acclaimed popular science book, Black Sheep The Hidden Benefits of Being Bad, available from all good book stores and online. Richard is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Keele University and Chair of the Psychobiology Section of the British Psychological Society.

Our free weekly email will keep you up-to-date with all the psychology research we digest: Sign up!