Is the phrase “master bedroom” actually harmful? A new psychology study says no

Institutional efforts to ban supposedly problematic words might be solving an issue that does not actually exist. A new study found that everyday people generally do not find these targeted words offensive, and reading them in a story does not negatively affect psychological well-being. The findings were published in the Journal of Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences.

A harmful language guide is a document published by an institution, university, or business that advises people to stop using certain everyday words. These guides typically provide a list of banned terms alongside supposedly safer alternatives. For example, some guides recommend replacing “blind review” with “anonymous review,” or swapping “master bedroom” for “primary bedroom.” The stated goal is often to dismantle destructive hierarchies and reduce distress for marginalized groups.

The reasoning behind these guides is a subject of intense debate. Proponents argue that words with violent, sexist, or racist origins cause ongoing damage to readers and listeners. Critics point out that these guides often rely on circular logic, claiming a word is damaging simply because it has a bad history, without providing evidence that it actually hurts anyone today. The expansion of what counts as damaging language is an example of concept creep, a psychological term describing how society increasingly labels mild or ambiguous behaviors as harmful.

This expanding definition of harm can have real-world consequences. For instance, a study covered by PsyPost in 2024 found that having a broader, looser concept of mental distress makes people more likely to incorrectly self-diagnose themselves with mental disorders. Similar language-based interventions have also fallen short in practice. According to a 2023 meta-analysis, adding trigger warnings to reading materials fails to reduce emotional distress and actually increases a reader’s anxiety before they even see the content.

“This study was motivated by ongoing debates about whether words cause harm and the rise of harmful language guides that attempt to ban or discourage the use of some words,” lead researcher Michael A. Eskenazi, an associate professor of psychology at Stetson University, told PsyPost. “While there are certain words that society has nearly universally deemed reprehensible and harmful, there is an entire other class of words with much less clear levels of harm, such as pipeline or master bedroom.”

Eskenazi and his colleagues wanted to test whether these more ambiguously targeted words actually cause the damage they are accused of causing. To investigate, they designed two separate studies to explore how people view these words and whether reading them leads to negative psychological outcomes.

In the first study, the research team recruited 616 adults from the United States to rate 175 pairs of words and phrases. Each pair included a term flagged by popular language guides alongside its recommended alternative. Participants read each phrase in a neutral sentence and rated how familiar they were with it, how acceptable they found it, and how much anxiety it caused them.

The results indicated that people generally favored the alternative words, rating them as slightly more acceptable. However, the vast majority of the supposedly damaging words were still rated as highly acceptable by the participants. Only a small fraction of the list generated negative ratings, and these were almost entirely recognized slurs or pejoratives. The findings suggest that everyday English speakers do not view most of the targeted words as problematic.

To see if these words cause subtle psychological damage in practice, the researchers conducted a second experiment. They recruited 334 different adults and randomly assigned them to read one of two versions of a short story. One version contained 25 randomly selected terms from the language guides, such as “pipeline” or “tone-deaf.” The other version replaced those terms with their recommended alternatives, such as “pathway” or “unenlightened.”

After reading the assigned story, participants completed surveys measuring their reading comprehension, current anxiety levels, positive and negative emotions, and feelings of social inclusion. The researchers also assessed several personality traits. One of these traits was interpersonal victimhood, which describes a tendency to constantly feel wronged by others and desire recognition for that perceived suffering.

The researchers found no differences in psychological well-being between the two groups. Reading a story packed with supposedly harmful language did not increase anxiety, decrease feelings of belonging, or lower positive emotions. Interestingly, the group exposed to the targeted language actually scored slightly higher on reading comprehension than the group reading the alternative words.

The team also specifically looked at participants belonging to marginalized groups, such as racial minorities, LGBTQ individuals, and people with disabilities. They found that these individuals were no more negatively affected by the language than non-marginalized participants. The targeted words simply did not trigger the adverse reactions that language guides warn against.

“Most of the words that are hot topics of debate right now were not viewed as harmful by most people, and we found no evidence that exposure to them caused measurable psychological harm,” Eskenazi explained. “Language is constantly evolving, and the meanings of words can change over time.”

“A word that may have been used in racist, sexist, or other derogatory ways 50 or 100 years ago can shed that original meaning, become ameliorated, and enter common speech without any intention of hurting or demeaning anyone,” he added.

The only people who experienced slight increases in negative emotions when exposed to the words were those who scored high on moral elitism and a need for recognition. These specific personality traits reflect a persistent feeling of being a victim in social situations. For everyone else, the words had no measurable negative impact.

These findings align with research covered by PsyPost earlier this year, which found that a strong belief that words can cause lasting psychological damage is associated with worse mental health. When authorities tell people that everyday phrases are dangerous, it might encourage a heightened state of sensitivity that harms well-being rather than protecting it.

“Whether a word is harmful is an empirical question,” Eskenazi noted. “Creators of harmful languages guides should consider more carefully how and why they select words as harmful, whether they are doing more harm than good but emphasizing a word’s ‘harm,’ and whether the alternative words they suggest actually provide any measurable benefit.”

Sam Pratt, a PhD student in psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles who was not involved in the study, told PsyPost that the research suggests initiatives to ban these words are likely misguided. “In practice, people don’t seem to notice or care about such subtle differences in word choice,” he said.

“This is consistent with research from other areas of psychology; for example, framing climate change as ‘climate crisis’ or ‘climate emergency’ does not make people more willing to take climate action,” Pratt explained. “Although it’s tempting to believe that such subtle interventions can have huge benefits (think back to the priming craze in psychology), this is often a fantasy.”

There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting this research. First, the study focused on ambiguous phrases commonly found in corporate and academic language guides, not explicit racial slurs or intentionally degrading insults. The findings do not imply that true pejoratives are harmless, nor do they excuse the use of intentionally abusive language.

“The results of this study should not be used to justify the use of pejoratives or racial epithets, as the vast majority of the words in this study do not fit into those categories,” Eskenazi said. “Instead, our results primarily apply either to words that have lost their originally derogatory meaning (e.g., lame) or to words that have never had a discriminatory meaning but that some people claim are associated with discrimination (e.g., pipeline).”

Second, the experiment involved a single exposure to a short story. Some advocates argue that the damage from insensitive language builds up over time through repeated, daily exposures, which this study design could not measure.

Pratt also pointed out that the experimental text was a fictional story with no bearing on the participants’ real lives, making it difficult to interpret their self-reported feelings of belonging. “In the contexts where these policies actually operate (schools and workplaces), people are embedded in a community and are constantly asking themselves the question ‘do I belong here?’” Pratt noted. “They may find an answer in how their peers speak to them. So a stronger test would be to study whether actual communities that adopt policies restricting harmful speech end up with more positive cultures.”

Finally, language is constantly changing, and words that used to refer to specific medical or social conditions often evolve to mean entirely different things in casual conversation. “Understanding the history and legacy of discrimination is valuable, but our findings raise questions about the benefit of banning words that are no longer associated with those historical meanings or never even had an association with them to begin with,” Eskenazi concluded.

The study, “Pipelines and Master Bedrooms: How Harmful is Harmful Language?,” was authored by Michael A. Eskenazi, Scott W. Semenyna, and Christopher J. Ferguson.