Black Sheep: The Hidden Benefits of Being Bad by Richard Stephens
From swearing to a mucky office, how so-called bad things can be positive
Impolite society: flicking the V (James Cotier)
Psychologists do concoct some ingenious experiments, so a popular book drawing
together their studies of bad behaviour should be fascinating — especially
as Richard Stephens won the Wellcome Trust science-writing prize in 2014.
Stephens is certainly strong on swearing. It is one of his specialist subjects
as a psychology lecturer. The further up the social scale you go, it seems,
the less swearing you hear — until the top, where everyone freely effs and
blinds. You might have guessed that, but not that the use of the f-word
increases by 300% from the lower-middle to upper-middle classes.
More surprising, he demolishes the old parental argument that swearing is the
last resort of the inarticulate. More fluent speakers are in fact more
fluent swearers. In 2011, Stephens also cleverly showed that swearing boosts
pain tolerance, by persuading volunteers to hold their hands in icy water
while cursing at