People just don’t like negative: stay positive in poll campaigns

When discussing the reasons for the 2015 Delhi debacle, the BJP top brass may want to consider the latest study that corroborates the so-called Pollyanna Hypothesis, which avers that humans tend to favour positive words more frequently than negative ones. Indeed, had they got wind of the finding by a team of US linguists and mathematicians that languages actually skew towards happy positivity — even though no Indian one except English finds a place in their list of 10 — some of the Delhi campaigners may have dispensed with their particularly churlish words. It is heartening to note that while the social media does not always exhibit overwhelming optimism and felicity, a host of other categories tapped by the researchers showed that human beings are largely inclined to prefer happy words.

As languages are a vehicle of expression, it stands to reason that linguistic tilts echo the sentiments of their speakers. Politicians everywhere should take this universal positivity bias as nothing short of an axiom. However, since speaking in Spanish — the language deemed to have the most pronounced bias towards positive words — would not be effective in the Indian context, maybe a positivity audit of Indian languages needs to be conducted, to gauge the relative wisdom of launching any future negative campaigns.