For the purposes of his official biography, Sam Maglio is a professor of marketing and psychology whose scholarship focuses on “cognition, motivation and affect, with an emphasis on implications for consumer behaviour and well-being.”

But when he tells the story of his field, Maglio, who works between U of T Scarborough and the Rotman School of Management, begins with a simple but intriguing detail: “By some estimates, we speak 16,000 words a day, and it’s really easy to treat those many, many words simply like breaths of air or the steps we take,” he observes. “People sometimes fail to realize that every word they use, or every word they consume, is a choice, and a choice that has consequences.”

Maglio, who in conversation appears himself to choose his words very carefully, wants us to pay much more attention to all those verbal decisions we make throughout the day. “I’m interested in putting words under a microscope and better understanding how these seemingly trivial choices add up to significant effects.”

Turns out, there’s much to observe under that linguistic microscope. Maglio and his collaborators have uncovered clues about how words convey meaning, much in the way that molecular biologists study how the expression of DNA determines the role of cells in the grander scheme of life.

A case in point: Maglio has learned that certain vowel or consonant sounds elicit the same responses or interpretations across languages, a phenomenon known as “sound symbolism.“ If you show people pictures of a pointy star-like shape and a puffy cloud-like shape, and you say one is a kiki and one is a bouba, more than 90 per cent of people around the world, no matter their age, will say the pointy thing is the kiki and the puffy cloud is the bouba, “because it just feels right,” says Maglio. This insight matters to brand marketers who need to invent names for products that will attract consumers in multiple languages.

In a paper published in 2024, Maglio and two colleagues ¹ probed the impact of abbreviations commonly used in text messages on the recipients, using a combination of interactive experiments, surveys and archival data. The findings, at least for Gen Z (who use these abbreviations all the time), may be counter-intuitive. Texting abbreviations, they concluded, may reduce the perceived sincerity of the message and thus reduce the chances that the recipient will respond.

Maglio cites a 2021 paper he co-authored ² that probed how uppercase or lowercase letters carry gendered meaning. Most people think of all-caps text as a form of digital shouting, but this research illustrated how uppercase letters connotes masculinity – an insight with specific marketing applications. By way of example, he shows me a product called WAR PAINT. “My anti-shine powder for when I do [Zoom] interviews and someone’s going to record me,” Maglio says. “You’ll see [the brand] is in all caps. Because if you’re trying to hook masculine dudes on using a little brush to make their forehead look less shiny in an interview, you’ve got to meet them where they’re at, and maybe put it in an uppercase.”

The use of case and abbreviations are by no means the only ways of encoding text with psychological signals. In two other pieces of research, Maglio and colleagues made two key observations about verbs and sentence construction that build on their earlier findings. The first is that the use of the present tense gives a feeling of immediacy to all sorts of writing, from abstracts in academic papers to product reviews on e-commerce sites. “It pulls you into the moment,” he says.

In fact, in a 2024 study examining the tense of more than 1.2 million fashion and beauty product reviews on Amazon, Maglio and David Fang, a former student of his, found that those written in the present tense tend to win higher helpfulness scores from users. The findings, they write, reveal how “subtle temporal cues, like verb tense” can influence the way readers understand these short passages and then act on the advice they provide. This result has “profound implications across multiple domains where effective communication is key, including marketing, politics and interpersonal communications.”

Another paper,³ from 2020, delved into the differences in meaning carried by sentences that use either active or passive construction. While bureaucratic prose often uses passive sentences that seem designed to conceal the creators of certain policies, Maglio and his co-author ⁴ found that using the passive voice may have the unintended consequence of reducing belief in the veracity of a scientific finding. This would be especially concerning for public health warnings issued by governments, for example. Maglio explains: “Consider the phrase `You should put on sunscreen because by doing so, your chances of skin cancer will be reduced by 62 per cent.’ This framing in the passive voice may lead the public to question the veracity of this statistic, making one less likely to heed to the warning.” He contrasts this with the same statement in the active voice – ‘Using sunscreen will reduce your chances of skin cancer by 62 per cent.’

He is well aware of the fact that in today’s hyper-accelerated digital environment, the written word must compete with images and videos. Even more broadly, the language we use today exists in a society riven by mistrust, which raises the stakes for anyone who is in the business of communicating. As Maglio notes, “the word choices and grammatical constructions made by politicians, organizations, charities and even academics and teachers have become ever more critical to the task of communicating effectively in a digitized world.”