The Psychology of Language: Why Are Some Words More Persuasive Than Others?

What’s actually going on in the brain when it processes language? And if words affect the mind in different ways, are some more persuasive than others? Buffer cofounder Leo Widrich dives into what the research has to say about this and more.

Here’s a secret right off the bat and I hope it isn’t too odd: one of the things I fuss about a lot, especially for Buffer copy (for example our welcome email if you sign up!) are words—very simple words, in fact. Should it say “Hi” or “Hey”? Should it be “cheers” or “thanks”? How about “but” or “and”? I’m guessing you might have a similar obsession with this. There are many occasions when [my Buffer partner] Joel and I sit over one line and change it multiple times, until we feel it really sits right. This is partly to improve our metrics for click rate and others. It’s also to simply create an emotion. The one key question we ask ourselves is: “How does this make you feel?”

That question might sound very obvious. And yet, it’s a very different question than, “Which message do you want to send?” or “What is the content of this announcement?” By always focusing on “How will this make someone feel?” when you write even a single line, we immediately improved the amount of responses we got from our users. Let’s dig in to how our brain works and expose some of the most persuasive words in English.

Our Brain While Listening to Words

Recently, a lot of the long standing paradigms in how our brain processes language were overthrown. New and cutting edge studies that produced quite startling and different results. The one study I found most interesting is UCL’s findings on how we can separate words from intonation. Whenever we listen to words, this is what happens: “Words are then shunted over to the left temporal lobe [of our brain] for processing, while the melody is channelled to the right side of the brain, a region more stimulated by music.”

So our brain uses two different areas to identify the mood and then the actual meaning of the words. On second thought, what still doesn’t quite make sense is why we can even distinguish “language” so distinctly from any other sounds.

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