We’re taught that politeness is a virtue. But some of the habits we reflexively flag as rude turn out to be unusual markers of a well-functioning mind.
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Most of us have been on the receiving end of someone who swears a little too freely or who has a habit of cutting us off mid-sentence to jump in with their own thoughts. Our social instincts are quick to label both as failures — of manners, of self-control, of basic respect. Etiquette culture has long operated on the assumption that restraint, careful word choice and patient turn-taking are proxies for intelligence and good character.
Psychology, it turns out, doesn’t entirely agree. A growing body of research suggests that certain behaviors we’ve been socialized to treat as conversational failures are, under the right conditions, associated with higher cognitive ability. This doesn’t mean rudeness is something to celebrate. But it does mean that our social snap judgments are sometimes getting the neuroscience wrong. Here are two habits worth reconsidering.
An assumption deeply embedded in social convention is that people who swear frequently do so because they lack the vocabulary to express themselves any other way. But this tidy story is empirically backwards.
In a 2022 preregistered study published in the Journal of Individual Differences, researchers Anna-Kaisa Reiman and Mitch Earleywine at the University at Albany recruited 266 undergraduates and administered a battery of tests measuring swear word fluency, general verbal fluency, vocabulary size and Big Five personality traits. Their central finding cuts against the stereotype cleanly: swear word fluency does not arise from a lack of verbal skills.
Participants who scored higher on general verbal fluency and vocabulary also tended to score higher on the taboo word fluency task. The mental lexicon, it appears, does not have a polite section and a rude section.
The personality profile that emerged from the same study is telling. Swear word fluency showed a positive association with Openness and Extraversion, and a negative association with Agreeableness. Openness to experience, which includes traits like intellectual curiosity, appetite for novel ideas and comfort with ambiguity, is the personality trait most consistently linked to general intelligence across decades of research. The fact that it also predicts comfort with taboo language suggests that swearing and intelligence may share the common root of a lower threshold for conventional constraint.
The caveat is worth stating plainly: this is correlation, not causation. Swearing more won’t make you smarter. What the research suggests is that intelligent people may simply be less inhibited about crossing verbal taboos — partly because they read social contexts well enough to know when the cost is low, and partly because they’re less governed by the social performance anxiety that keeps others polished and guarded. The habit reads as rude. What it may actually reflect is a lower threshold for verbal pretense.
There are two fundamentally different types of interruption, and conflating them is one of the more consequential errors in how we judge people in conversation. Psycholinguist Katherine Hilton at Stanford University documented this in a study of over 5,000 American English speakers. American English speakers have different conversational styles:
In other words, whether an interruption reads as rude depends almost entirely on the listener’s own conversational norms, not on any objective feature of what just happened. What one person experiences as being steamrolled, another experiences as enthusiastic engagement.
The distinction that matters is between intrusive interruptions, like cutting someone off to redirect or dominate, and cooperative ones, where the interrupter jumps in to build on an idea, complete a thought or signal enthusiastic comprehension.
The latter are associated not with disrespect, but with fast cognitive processing: the interrupter’s mind has already synthesized the incoming information and generated a response before the speaker has finished delivering it. Some people interrupt to secure airtime because they believe the thought will vanish if they wait, and their inner dialogue is loud and persistent. This is less a social failure than a feature of rapid associative thinking.
The large-scale data from personality and intelligence research supports this framing. A landmark 2023 meta-analysis published in PNAS by Deniz Ones and Kevin Stanek, synthesizing findings across more than 1,400 studies, found that the politeness facet of agreeableness, characterized by deference, restraint and social compliance, was negatively associated with certain cognitive abilities.
Agreeableness overall had the weakest correlation with intelligence, and the politeness facet was negatively associated with some cognitive abilities, suggesting that the most accommodating, never-interrupt behavior in the room may not belong to its sharpest mind.
None of this is a license to bulldoze conversations. Intent is everything. The cooperative interrupter is engaged, not dismissive. The difference between a rude interruption and a cognitively energized one is usually visible in what follows, whether the person adds to the thread or severs it entirely.
The deeper takeaway from both of these habits isn’t that rudeness is a virtue. It’s that our social radar was calibrated for conformity, not cognition. We read restraint as intelligence and expressiveness as its absence, but the research increasingly suggests the relationship is more complicated than that.
A strategically deployed expletive and an enthusiastic conversational overlap are easy to misread. They’re the kind of behaviors that look, on the surface, like those of someone who never learned the rules. Often, they belong to someone who learned them well enough to know exactly when they don’t apply.
Do your habits also reflect a particularly swift brand of intelligence? You can take the Cognitive Style Test to know.
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