To some people, swearing is second nature. They can’t help but drop the F-bomb every sentence. But can the amount you swear actually reveal something about your personality?

Yes according to a new study. Research conducted in the United States by Social Psychological and Personality Science suggests that the more you swear, the more honest you are.

Fucking hell yeah.

The study stated,

“The consistent findings across the studies suggest that the positive relation between profanity and honesty is robust, and that the relationship found at the individual level indeed translates to the society level.”

The paper, titled, Frankly, we do give a damn: The relationship between profanity and honesty, conducted three experiments to examine the relationship between cursing and honesty.

Experiment one was conducted with 276 participants who were all recruited online. They rated their own honesty/swearing spectrum.

Experiment two examined the Facebook status updates of 73, 789 of the social networking site’s users who also used the ‘myPersonality’ app.

The final experiment examined the integrity of each state, in order to take a look at the honesty factor. So things like the presence of independent ethics commissions and judicial accountability were looked at.

However, it must be noted that causality can’t be definitively concluded from studies like these. It could be that people who are honest swear more, or that if you swear more, it keeps you honest.

Still, we’ll take anything that excuses our foul mouths.