Is manipulation good or bad?
I’d like to start this extremely scientific (ahem) post by directing you to a disclaimer about my tools and limitations.
“Note again that we’re manipulating frequencies in order to gain a deeper insight into what is happening in the corpus,” said University of Lancaster professor Tony McEnery from my laptop screen in a very smart British accent.
“Manipulate frequencies? Isn’t that like manipulating data?” I thought. “You’re not allowed to manipulate data!” In the great words of The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
I posted confusedly in the course forum. Professor Tony McEnery in his infinite wisdom replied, “Have you even been paying attention?”
Just kidding, he didn’t say that. But he did politely recommend that I investigate my suspicions using techniques we had literally just learned.
This is a look at the process that I used to investigate the semantic prosody of “manipulation,” prosody being the way in which certain seemingly neutral words can be perceived with positive or negative associations through frequent occurrences with particular collocations. Basically, what do people actually think about when they hear or say the word manipulate?
The findings
I started playing around with the word “manipulate” in British and American English using the Brown and LOB corpora. My mini-study focused on “manipulat*” thus encompassing any words containing that combination of letters (including manipulating, manipulator, manipulated, manipulative etc).
“Manipulat*” occurred approximately the same number of times in both American and British English (20 and 18 times per million words, respectively). Because the frequency was relatively low, I decided to start with an all-up analysis of the word’s usage rather than comparing and contrasting the two corpora.
As we see in Figure 1, “manipulat*” most frequently referred to changing an abstract concept such as situations, ideas, or environments. After that, “manipulat*” indicated motion or the physical movement of objects. Least frequent was the word “manipulat*” in regards to people.
This was all pretty straightforward, but it didn’t tell me anything about the prosody of the term, or how manipulation was actually perceived.
I noticed a secondary meaning distributed across the other uses of the term. Almost 50% of the time, the word “manipulat*” was used to indicate that one party benefited at the expense of someone or something else (Figure 2).
Henceforth, I’ll refer to this self-beneficial characteristic as “negative.” Some examples include:
- “She knows the power of sex urge and how to use it to manipulate her husband.” (Brown)
- “At this stage, the prisoner was led to suppose that coercive manipulations of his thinking were morally uplifting and harmonizing experiences.” (LOB)
- “It seems to me the time has come for the American press to start experimenting with ways of reporting the news that will do a better job of communicating and will be less subject to abuse by those who have learned how to manipulate the present stereotype to serve their own ends.” (Brown)
I was starting to uncover some of the implicit negativity that I suspected in my hypothesis, but at less than 50% negative usage, things weren’t looking great. I wasn’t wrong… but I wasn’t really correct, either.
It would be as if every time someone used the word “manipulate,” your brain flipped a coin and just went whichever connotation landed face up. Since that’s definitely not how our brains work, it was evident that my perception of manipulation as an inherently negative term simply wasn’t holding up. Thanks, science.
The breakthrough
I wasn’t ready to give up quite yet. Why did the way Professor McEnery used the word in the lecture video result in such a visceral reaction? I decided to get more specific and investigate the usage that had initially triggered my linguistic curiosity.
Given my teeny tiny sample size, I was able to thoroughly read and annotate the context for each of the 38 occurrences. I pulled out all the occurrences of “manipulat*” which involved research, science or data across the Brown and LOB corpora. There were six such uses of the root word “manipulat*” conveniently split between American and British English.
Lo and behold — in American English, the use of “manipulat*” in regards to science and research was exclusively negative. The reverse was true for British English in the LOB Corpus, where the three uses of “manipulat*” in regards to research were 100% neutral.
See Figure 3 for what’s probably a needless graph to illustrate this straightforward concept.
For example:
American English
- “A similar amateurish characteristic is revealed in Adams‘ failure to check the accuracy and authenticity of his informational sources. If he found data that fitted his general plan, he used it and counted his sources trustworthy. Conversely, if statistics were uncovered which contradicted a cherished theory, the sources were denounced as faulty. Such manipulations are frequently encountered in his essay on the suppression of the monasteries during the English reformation.”
- “He has his cake and eats it too: if the workers say they are dissatisfied, this shows conscious alienation; if they say they are satisfied, this shows unconscious alienation. This sort of manipulation is especially troublesome in Fromm ‘s work because, although his system is derived largely from certain philosophic convictions , he asserts that it is based on empirical findings drawn both from social science and from his own consulting room.”
British English:
- “So the time-constant is **f and we can now sketch the current time curve as in Fig. 1.7. The exponential part is **f and to this must be added **f ; after a little manipulation the current can be written **f.”
- “It is true, as the author says, that practical chemistry in schools consists largely of volumetric and qualitative analysis, at the examination stage.
It is also true that this does little more than provide training in manipulation, coupled with some knowledge of reactions.”
The title of this blog post should have been “more about the word manipulate than you ever wanted to know”
The data may be a bit… excessive. But hey, it’s my first time! And I think the findings are ultimately quite interesting.
It would appear that my initial misunderstanding came from differences between American and British English. While relatively infrequent, the term “manipulate” as used by Tony McEnery speaking British English in the lecture video does not exist in as meaningful of a way in American English.
My final question is for you, readers. What do you think of when you hear the word “manipulate?” Are my findings in line with your experiences? How would you have approached this problem? I’d love to hear from you through comments and tweets with any thoughts.
