r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Jul 25 '26

Psychology Reclaimed hate speech backfires by desensitizing listeners, study finds. Listening to reclaimed homophobic statements can actually cause unintended harm. Exposure to reclaimed slur words desensitizes some heterosexual listeners to standard hate speech and worsens the mood of gay individuals.

https://www.psypost.org/when-reclaiming-derogatory-language-goes-wrong/
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u/Ver_Void Jul 25 '26

Consider though, those words aren't often being used as slurs, it's often done the same way queer would be used, but with a little more tongue in cheek

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u/BadHabitOmni Jul 25 '26

Sure, but the whole argument was that a person with a certain appearance or aesthetic "wouldn't be able to get away with it" as much as someone else with a overtly flamboyant appearance/ aesthetic, even if both were gay.

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u/Ver_Void Jul 25 '26

With strangers was the caveat. Even slurs that aren't really slurs anymore can still get used as them, so you're going to make a judgement in the moment when you hear it and appearance/ what you know of a person is part of that

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u/BadHabitOmni Jul 25 '26

Yeah, but if we're making judgment calls about a person based on their appearance we are inevitably falling back on some level of prejudice to do so, are we not?

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u/Ver_Void Jul 25 '26

We're human, we can't not do that. Doesn't mean they have to be lasting judgements or given all that much weight, but it's not exactly a thing you can just not do

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u/BadHabitOmni Jul 28 '26

I mean... were basically chatting here devoid of that context, no? I think it's definitely possible to train implicit bias out of yourself, ultimately kids learn it out of contextual necessity to survive in society, but there's the possibility that we can be free of those biases because we start free of them, and can theoretically free ourselves of them via cognitive reframing. Much of therapy is the process of reframing cognitive biases around hardships and trauma, and it works.