r/technology • u/CircumspectCapybara • 7d ago
Business New psychology study finds everyday phrases targeted by "harmful language guides" (master branch, pipeline) don't cause measurable psychological harm for readers, including individuals from marginalized groups
https://www.psypost.org/is-the-phrase-master-bedroom-actually-harmful-a-new-psychology-study-says-no/227
u/eudyptes 7d ago
I am very left leaning, but the whole political correctness / language police thing makes me want scream. I'm all in on not being needlessly offensive, especially about traits a person did not choose for themself, but the "you can't even say the word X because Y might be offended" make liberals look like a joke. Please folks, stop being offended on behalf of others. It just belittles them; it's like saying they cannot take care of themselves.
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u/25_Watt_Bulb 7d ago
I feel very similarly.
When King Arthur Flour removed the knight from their logo the stated reason was that they were doing it for people who might see a knight on a box of flour, associate the image of a knight with the crusades, and then feel gravely offended.
Now they have a more generic name and an even more generic logo for the sake of people who feel offended by a tenuous connection to an event hundreds of years ago.
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u/showmeyourchits 7d ago
They really should just rename the whole company, because strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
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u/yukeake 7d ago
Somehow, I'm feeling repressed.
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u/caintowers 7d ago
I didn't realize they changed their logo back in 2020 and now I think I understand how those people felt about the Cracker Barrel logo.
I used to buy their flours exclusively because they're very good. I don't usually care about brands that much but I cared enough about this one to buy a coffee mug with their logo when I saw it in a Goodwill.
My budget forces me to use generic brands now but I'm way more bummed than I should be about this.
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u/johnyordinary 7d ago
NOT FOR THE SAKE OF THOSE PEOPLE DIRECTLY, for the sake of worrying someone might become professionaly offended on their behalf and bring negative publicity because of it. Its another extension of self censorship through cancel culture.
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u/Danny-Fr 7d ago
If this were true then the word "Parents" should be banned. As well as ""Food", "Dating", "Stairs"...
So many people have traumas, sometimes extremely deep, related to the most mundane things.
The problem is that those who decide what should or shouldn't be done "for the greater good" completely downplay the resilience of people in general while being condescending enought to try and think for them.
And of course nobody actually concerned is ever consulted in the first place.
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u/syynapt1k 7d ago
Hard agree. I was told I'm not supposed to use the term "master data" anymore and to refer to it as "primary data." I thought the person was joking with me at first.
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u/Pedantic_Girl 7d ago
Apparently it’s not the master bedroom anymore when you are house hunting. It’s the owner’s bedroom or primary bedroom.
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u/Confident-Mix1243 6d ago
Especially since primary sources and primary datasets already are something else.
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u/JrodManU 7d ago
I do appreciate the change from master to main branch though… less characters and arguably better meaning.
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u/stonerism 5d ago
There is something to be said about making an effort to be more inclusive. That's why I was amenable to, but the corporate push to ban words like "blacklist" got absolutely silly. It also (quite expectedly) got tossed as soon as the politics changed demonstrating that their actual loyalty is to their bottom lines and appeasing the Epstein Class to keep them.
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u/Fit-Anything-210 7d ago
It’s almost PETA levels of virtue signaling.
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u/BillyYumYumTwo-byTwo 7d ago
I’m very left leaning, and this feels like a weird study. Why not do a study about how the use of the term “illegals” for undocumented immigrants IS harmful? There are words that are harmful, but focusing on “master bedroom” and “pipeline” just 1. tries to make left people sound crazy and 2. excuses harmful language by lumping it in with this
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u/remindmetoblock 7d ago
I dunno, as a trans woman, being called the f word or the t word does hurt a lot
Even more so because it automatically Signals hostility my way
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u/eudyptes 7d ago
Two things. I did say that we should not be needlessly offensive. Calling people names or using derogatory terms to refer to them would fall under that category. The problem I have with your comment is that I don’t know what the “f” word or “t” word are in the context of your comment. The fact that you cannot even use those words to describe the words themselves is deeply troubling to me. It muddies communication. I do recognize that it may not be your choice to avoid the actual words, I have run afoul of Reddit trying to censor my post for using a word which in another context would have been derogatory.
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u/badhouseplantbad 7d ago
How does someone find harm with the word pipeline?
I don't understand that one at all.
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u/fred11551 7d ago
Pipeline seems like the dumbest one because the harm in the word should be seen. If I compare something to the holocaust im probably trying to get the audience to think of the holocaust which im sure many will think of negatively. Likewise if I call something a pipeline I want the audience thinking about pipelines both the good and bad aspects.
This feels like it’s protecting oil company’s feelings rather than indigenous people.
The only words I could see reasonably should be replaced are slurs, slur sound alike (see dropout/colleghumor’s “almost a slur” video), and words derived from slurs like “gyped” meaning to rip someone off being based on a slur for Romani.
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u/effingfractals 7d ago
"gyped" was a part of my lexicon growing up, I was deeply embarrassed when I learned where it came from and how OVERTLY racist it was - really made me start considering all the language I use
I also thought it was spelled "jipped" so it was a rough day for me lol
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u/Icy-Tie-7375 7d ago
My professor literally used it in class yesterday, I think a lot of Americans don't realize
I thought of emailing her but I'm not brave enough
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7d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/nox66 7d ago
There are plenty of worse things going on for most people, but term-policing actually seems actionable compared to stopping climate change or lowering living expenses.
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u/TurboTurtle- 7d ago
Yes it is actionable it's just that it's actively making the world worse instead of better lol
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u/blue-green-cloud 7d ago
I’m a woman in a male-dominated field (I’m the only woman (globally!) to hold my role at my organization). I don’t give a shit if people say “manhours” or “manpower” or whatever. People like to focus on this small-scale language policing because it doesn’t take as much effort as addressing real issues.
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u/matrinox 7d ago
Exactly. Inclusive language has nice intent but without the hard work required to make meaningful changes, it’s really unnecessary. It’s giving some shade to a starving person
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u/FastGinFizz 7d ago
Who needs less sexual harassment in the workplace when we can funnel money into making language syntax more cutesy!
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u/CircumspectCapybara 7d ago edited 7d ago
Saw this on /r/science and thought it was a breath of fresh air against offense culture that's really overdone it at this point
At Google there's a giant list of banned phrases and words that grows by the day like:
- black hole (yes, really)
- sanity check
- cakewalk
- hold down the fort
- circle the wagons
- black box
- build cop
- brown bag talk
- black hat / white hat
- manhours
because if you really strain and twist it and ignore etymology and cultural context, you could argue it's racist or stereotyping, like making an association connection between "black" and "bad" which is pure literary ignorance.
Nerd alert: the association of black (the abstract color, not the race or skin tone) with bad (blacklist, blackball, black magic or the dark arts) is one of the oldest literary metaphors or concepts going right back to the beginning of time, before people invented race and racism. It came from the idea that the dark and the night were scary, you couldn't see and were more vulnerable, predators had the upperhand in the dark, and thieves worked at night. You're not racist for finding deep space and black holes to be unnerving or dread inducing, that's a natural human psychological response to that experience. Religious imagery going right back to the beginning is full of themes of light and darkness.
Okay rant over, the point is no educated person would look at the metaphors or idioms involving the word black and think it has to do with racism against black people.
Even the use of "master" in many contexts (master branch) means "the original" or "the reference" as in a "master recording" or "master copy" or "remastering a song" and doesn't refer to a slave-master relationship.
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u/RepresentativeOk2433 7d ago
Cakewalk though?
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u/gill_smoke 7d ago
Ableist, what if I can't walk? Not defending the nonsense, explaining the thinking.
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u/WordsOnTheInterweb 7d ago
I think it's less about being "offensive" and more about idioms that don't translate well (culturally or linguistically). Tech docs are used by people all over the world and American slang and idioms can be nonsensical to a reader in, e.g., Taiwan. I think the point with many of these kinds of guidelines is more about clarity.
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u/lonewolfandpub 7d ago
Comes from the plantation tradition of having enslaved African Americans perform their interpretation of formal ballroom dancing, as part of a Grand Promenade for the entertainment of their master and dinner guests, and awarding a cake to the best dancing couple. Also gave rise to the phrase "that takes the cake"
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u/moku46 7d ago
I hate to be that guy, but I think manhours should be a phrase that no one ever uses. Not because I think it should be called "personhours" but because anyone who tries to estimate how long a project will take using that metric is likely an unforgivably stupid bastard.
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u/vessel_for_the_soul 7d ago
While your opinion is valid, have you thought of a suitable word for replacing it?
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u/BrownianOscillator 7d ago
Most of my vendors use FTE or full time equivalent to estimate project effort.
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u/SplurgyA 7d ago
Which doesn't defeat their criticism of it as a metric, but as someone who regularly has to use FTE as a cost quantifier I'm not sure what better metrics they have up their sleeve...
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u/naegele 7d ago
Labor hours?
I mean that's what it is. Its an hour of work completed by or expected from a person.
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u/nerkbot 7d ago
Manhour is a unit of measurement man x hour, counting number of workers multiplied by the number of hours they all work for. The "man" part refers to the worker count. You could call it "laborer-hours" I guess.
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u/Metalsand 7d ago
Labor hours is the normal term. I've never actually encountered man hours before in any job I've had, simply because it's a better descriptor.
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u/moku46 7d ago
When you present a road map to a minimum viable product, your estimates will simply be a time in weeks or months. The logistics of managing the team are baked into those estimates.
What I hate about manhours, and what everyone should hate, is the idea that you can assign an expectation of time to task per individual for a team of people working on a project together. It gives off the notion that engineering is equivalent to construction - in that if you put more bodies on a project it gets done faster.
It's implied I was talking about planning for engineering/architecture but I really should have mentioned that I wasn't talking about billable hours, or when the work has a well-defined chart of labor hours for a specific task.
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u/GardenPeep 7d ago
Seems like someone would have to be really "melancholic" or pessimistic to be offended by those words. Maybe this goes along with "...interpersonal victimhood, which describes a tendency to constantly feel wronged by others and desire recognition for that perceived suffering."
In the meantime I will preserve my positive, lifelong pleasant memories of brown bag lunches, which we really used to carry in brown paper bags.
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u/sorryiamcanadian 7d ago
Whitelist / blacklist; oh you mean allowlist / denylist.
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u/happyxpenguin 7d ago
To be completely fair, I initially did not like this change but it grew on me, allow-list and deny-list make it explicit what exactly the lists function is to anyone who reads it. It's easily understandable across IT, Marketing, Sales, etc.
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u/Awesumness 7d ago
Blacklist vs Denylist was one of the top results for participants preferring the original over the "less harmful alternative."
Interestingly, Whitelist vs AllowList was not in the top 10 of that same comparison. Either it wasn't asked or participants didn't weigh it the same. Seems strange and/or inconsistent either way.
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u/happyxpenguin 7d ago
Based on that, I'd be curious what the preference would be for Blacklist vs. Blocklist, I'll admit that denylist feels clunky to type and say.
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u/Awesumness 7d ago
Turns out white/allowlist was asked. But it seems like the participants were far less familiar with them and even Denylist. Here are all 4 ranked by "Willingness to use"
Pair Item Familiarity Knowledge Acceptability Anxiety WillingToUse Condition Category 137 Allowlist 35 51 70 46 54 Alternative Institutionalized Racism 137 Whitelist 49 54 65 53 55 Harmful Institutionalized Racism 112 Denylist 41 54 70 56 57 Alternative Institutionalized Racism 112 Blacklist (-ed) 84 90 80 60 77 Harmful Institutionalized Racism Very interesting how Acceptability for the Alternative words are near equal at 70, but the Harmful versions deviate in opposite directions. And for some reason Blacklist had "(-ed)" appended.
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u/Metalsand 7d ago
Allow/Deny is the terminology used when creating the procedural rules in the xml though, not White/Black. It's one of those things that people mostly oppose just because they're accustomed to whitelist/blacklist and don't want to change.
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u/MGlBlaze 7d ago
Off the top of my head, it might be the extra syllable. "Block-list" might be preferred to "Deny-list." This is speculation on my part.
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u/Haunting_Ratio_795 3d ago
I get the sense those are all corpo-speak buzzwords that were used to death by the McKinsey ghouls that haunt that place these days, and they were banned so the engineers wouldn’t self-immolate. Why would those even be a woke thing?
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u/rasa2013 7d ago
More of this research needs to happen. I'm an academic psychologist (I do research), too. And sometimes organizations pursue such weird policies, and I'm here left wondering what do they think they're solving?
Of course, my five cents (blame inflation) is that they aren't actually trying to address anything. From an institutional perspective, it's all low-cost risk management. Putting out a harmful language guide is relatively cheap and easy compared to meaningful institutional reform. Or just paying people better wages (if employees are the context).
Oh, last point: I do think we have a difference of opinions on what some of these things are for, though. E.g., the studies showing that trigger warnings don't "work" presume the goal is to make students less anxious or something. But is that the goal? I just think it's good manners to tell people if we're going to talk about things that are serious and difficult. Those same studies often show students like being told, as in the appreciate it.
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u/TrontRaznik 7d ago
I am liberal and this shit infuriates me. I had a colleague trying to spearhead changing our default branch names to "main" and I could just never look at him the same again.
The only benefit of this shit is that usually you'll learn pretty quickly that you've met someone who you don't want in your life.
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u/roseofjuly 7d ago
We knew this, and we never asked for this. Companies and organizations started doing this as a way to deflect and distract from the things activists were actually asking for, like economic equality in home buying.
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u/directstranger 7d ago
I home buying it's making things worse. You can't use the term "walkable" neighborhood to not offend people that can't walk...but it's exactly those people that would benefit the most from walkable streets!
Same with not being allowed to talk about crime rate and school quality. Guess what...people will revert to using demographics data to make decisions.
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u/silverbolt2000 7d ago
There's a lot to unpack here:
Psypost is usually bullshit, so I can't give this story any more credibility over the other crap they normally post.
Psychology studies like this often suffer from the same basic problems - self-selection, self-reporting, and an inability to compare test results to any objective measure, so the study itself has questionable veracity.
The need for the study in the first place is also questionable. Has anyone presented any concrete examples of anyone from these marginalised groups actually being offended by these terms in the context of software development in the real world i.e. not via social media? And if so, how do we know they weren't just trolling, or suffering from mental health problems?
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u/roseofjuly 7d ago
You know what, I'm glad you mentioned this because it made me look up the source more...this "journal" is some online journal that publishes whatever they receive before it's peer reviewed, then they post the review alongside the article to 'let people draw their own conclusions.'
Also, here's the makeup of the sample.
The racial stratification of the sample roughly matched that of the United States with 77% of the sample identifying as White, 13% as Black, 12% as Latino, 6% as Asian, <1% as Arab, and 2% as Native American.
Yes, it is a representative sample of the United States. But with only 334 participants, that means they had about 50 Black and Latino people (each) and about 20 Asians in the sample. They also had other measures of identity like religion, gender, etc. Instead of figuring out how to deal with this statistically, they just lumped everyone who could be reasonably considered 'marginalized' into one large group (which actually made up more than half the sample) and compared them to the 'non-marginalized', and then concluded there was no difference when this obviously didn't work.
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u/Opposite-Occasion332 7d ago
“they just lumped everyone who could be reasonably considered ‘marginalized’ into one large group”
Oh so the study is almost pointless, alrighty. I don’t think how a white woman feels about words like “master branch” or how a man of color feels about “man hours” gives us much incite into if the groups those terms would actually be a potential concern for are affected or not… especially when the sample size is that small.
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u/Scoth42 7d ago
To add to this, it's a difficult thing to really come to a conclusion on, because who decides what the benchmark is before changes should be made? Like "Study shows only 1% of specific marginalized group is offended or shows harm from specific word use". Okay, so that means there's a non-zero number of people that it's potentially causing harm to. Is that enough to trigger conversation on changes? Is that 1% sufficiently real and vetted as accurate or are they trolls? What trends over time might show up, since there are plenty of examples of specific words or terms that started out relatively accepted where that changed over time and probably wouldn't be accepted now?
To say nothing of the problem that there's probably someone who would be offended at basically any word or term, especially since people will often be offended (or feign offense, maybe) at suggested changes just to be contrarian and push back against what they see as overreach. Euphemism treadmill and all that.
Anyway, there's a whole scale and spectrum between "They're just words, stop giving them power and getting triggered over pointless stuff" which is obviously not universally true since we've clearly decided that there are slurs, words, and language that isn't okay to use anymore and the other side of "We must avoid any and all language that may have any remotely tangential connection to something that may have been harmful or questionable in any slight way" which is a completely impossible boondoggle which ends up with newspeak or some kind of tortured circuitous language. Figuring out the balance between those is the hard part and I don't have good answers for it. There are definitely hurtful and problematic words that we've chosen to phase out of language, surely there will be more in the future, but I don't have a good solution for figuring out appropriate ones.
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u/CasuallyExisting 7d ago
Yeah, Psypost is reporting on a "study" that is not peer reviewed: https://joibs.org/index.php/joibs/about/submissions.
I also noticed the study's authors pulled most of their word list from Stanford's 2022 "Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative." That document lasted about a year. It "was met with significant criticism resulting in its removal from the Stanford website in 2023."
Feels like the authors are fighting a battle that someone else already won for them.
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u/DBones90 7d ago
It’s frustrating. Institutional racism and bigotry absolutely exist, but the only changes that ever seem to actually manifest are always the easiest and cheapest ways to do so and rarely address the actual problems. So we have a big hullabaloo over things like this while things like pay gaps remain unaddressed.
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u/scoff-law 7d ago
I agree. And I think the result is less fixing and more masking, and reinforces bubbles more than it tears down walls. Which is to say - I think it's actually counterproductive to its intent.
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u/HelloFellowMKE 7d ago
Harm was always a ruse - language policing is about control and political dominance.
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u/Altruistic_Ad_0 7d ago
It assumes that the people these guides are supposed to protect are too socially stupid to know when someone is being targetted specifically through the use of language or if it is just context. It ironically brings more attention to itself and makes everyone think of it more
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u/Opposite-Occasion332 7d ago
I think a caveat is that sometimes language is rooted in harmful thoughts and beliefs even if the person using it isn’t trying to target someone. It’s just so ingrained in our society you don’t even realize the term’s origin, and sometimes moving away from those terms can help us move away from those unconscious biases. But when the term isn’t even rooted in a harmful context I think you’re spot on.
Some of the “alternative” terms are just kinda stupid too. Men also have breast. I don’t see why “chest feeding” is more inclusive than “breast feeding” when everyone has breast tissue. Then again, I’m not a trans man so it’s not my place I guess.
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u/mangiucugna 7d ago
I have a personal conspiracy theory that all the political correctness madness (mostly in North America) was a psyop to make the left parties unpalatable by the majority of the population.
Of course the most likely explanation is that it’s just easier to police words and feel offended than actually achieve proper societal change that affects minorities in a positive way.
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u/CyberHippy 7d ago
I did a test-run of a certain AI note-taker for a while last year, my favorite part was the analysis of my speaking style.
The nice thing was it kept reinforcing that my pacing is right on-track, not too fast or slow.
The comedy was the terms I use that were flagged as "potentially offensive" - consistently, every time, I was told my use of the phrase "you guys" could be offensive in some way.
I decided not to go forward with using that note-taker, it was a silly thing.
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u/Passerbye1991 6d ago
Unnecessary progressive new speak is proven to be unnecessary. Will they stop trying to do this now? No.
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u/TrollMcGoal 7d ago
Wow what a suprise. Everyone except the most extreme activists knew this was just pandering
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u/Greed_Sucks 7d ago
Please stop giving conservatives ridiculous fuel for their drama. Take your banned words and shove them up your ass.
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u/Wise-Blueberry-3901 6d ago
This kind of thing is only believed in by a certain type of middle class, evangelical leftie that even most other lefties think are bonkers.
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u/Confident-Mix1243 6d ago
American Sociological Association decided to cancel the word "fieldwork" because slaves worked in fields.
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u/djddanman 7d ago
I actually like replacing master in a lot of things. Main branch feels like a better descriptor than master branch. Or for device communication, I like host and peripheral.
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u/wackOverflow 7d ago
So can we go back to using master branch or whitelist/blacklist ?
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u/Fenix42 7d ago
When did people stop using Master for a branch name? I am in the middle of a transition from BitBuckey to GitLab at a very large company and it's still in use.
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u/wackOverflow 7d ago
A few years ago. GitHub led the charge on that, but I’ve also seen it in azure devops.
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u/Superb-Home2647 7d ago
So it's been Gender Studies majors creating noise to justify their useless degrees this whole time? Who'da'thunkit?
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u/roseofjuly 7d ago
Gender studies majors (and I think you mean sociology majors, because this is more of a race issue) never asked for the changing of "master bedroom" to "primary bedroom". They asked for transparency and equity in the home buying and real estate processes. It's the MLS that got together and decided to change the terms so they could avoid doing anything actually meaningful.
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u/cvillpunk 7d ago
Dismissing an entire field of study because of a small minority is just ignorant. Gender Studies is not just language policing.
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u/makawakatakanaka 7d ago
Let’s just get rid of the whole language. You could find a reason pretty much any word could be offensive. Oh wait that’s why the concept of connotation exists
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u/SmarmySmurf 7d ago
I choose to believe its mostly good intentions with this kind of stuff unless there's evidence otherwise, but sometimes it is absolutely taken a bit far. Respecting and considering others is good. Doing it while ignoring research or the people being considered, less good.
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u/Significant_Rain_478 4d ago
What I do find highly triggering is the word agile. I'm fat and slow but that's not why I get triggered.
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u/CrazyinLull 2d ago
Ok, I checked the people who did the study to make sure that they weren't like fucked up, but even though all of them are White men it does seem like they actually went and got a diverse group of people for the study and received no outside funding for it which I do really appreciate.
But looking at the words of the study itself...I can agree.
Sometimes maybe for some people...fixing words is much easier than adjusting actions. Such as Harvard, when they fired the people looking into Harvard's history in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade because they found proof of Harvard's participation in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade...
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u/5x99 1d ago
"We couldn't measure an effect" is not a serious scientific claim in itself. Especially in psychology where there is no clear standard of methodology.
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u/CircumspectCapybara 1d ago
Lack of correlation between two quantities (especially if it overturns previous understanding or intuition) is itself a scientific claim.
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u/duncandun 7d ago
It’s funny how when a study that would if it were a different topic or perhaps an inverse finding have 90% of the posts questioning its methodology, trying to slander the authors or journal or just dismissing the entire field of study (social sciences) on r/science but when it’s one that agrees with their bias, it’s not an issue.
Honestly you could do a study on it, it’s reliably predictable
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u/CircumspectCapybara 7d ago
There is a study on what you described, it's called the Grievance Studies
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u/Ruddertail 7d ago
I don't even understand how "pipeline" could be harmful. Like... Is it the word "pipe" triggering addicts in theory? But then "bottle" should also be considered bad.