Paper: Power and Vulnerability: Managing Sensitive Language in Organisational Communication

by sodestream Project • Monday 27 November 2023 • Permalink

Patrick Healey, Prashant Khare, Gareth Tyson, Mladen Karan, Ignacio Castro, Ravi Shekhar, Stephen McQuistin, Colin Perkins, Matthew Purver

Frontiers in Psychology, section Psychology of Language, 2024

Abstract

Organisational responsibilities can bring power but also a degree of vulnerability and exposure. This tension leads to divergent predictions about the use of potentially sensitive language: power might license it, exposure might inhibit it. Data from a large corpus of organisational emails shows that people in positions of relative power are approximately three times less likely to use sensitive words than people more junior to them. This tendency appears to be independent of whether other people are using potentially sensitive words and independently of a whether a particular word occurs in a sensitive context. These results suggest that, in at least some circumstances, vulnerability is a more significant influence on language use than social power.

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