Why Casual Language Started Winning Trust
Twenty years ago, polished language meant credibility. Corporate statements, formal press releases, carefully worded announcements. The more professional it
Something fundamental shifted in how we decide who to trust.
Twenty years ago, polished language meant credibility. Corporate statements, formal press releases, carefully worded announcements. The more professional it sounded, the more we believed it.
Now that same polished language makes people suspicious. It feels calculated. Like someone’s hiding something behind the shine.
Meanwhile, CEOs who write “honestly we messed this up” on LinkedIn get more engagement than their company’s official press release about the same issue. Brands that tweet like actual humans build more loyalty than ones that sound like they’ve been through three rounds of legal review.
Understanding why casual language wins trust requires looking at how human psychology shifted online. The trust moved from institutions to individuals. From perfect to real. From polished to casual.
Why Our Brains Flag Polished Language As Fake
How you convey the message is much more important than the message itself.
This isn’t just a communication principle. It’s how human psychology actually works.
Professor Albert Mehrabian’s 1967 research on communication found that when words contradict tone or facial expression, people trust the nonverbal cues over the words themselves. His studies showed that in situations where there’s incongruence between what someone says and how they say it, the delivery matters more than the content for judging sincerity.
The words you choose matter less than how those words feel. A perfectly accurate statement delivered in the wrong tone becomes untrustworthy. A simple admission delivered genuinely creates more trust than a comprehensive explanation that sounds rehearsed.
Online, where we can’t see faces or body language, we rely entirely on tone. And polished, corporate language has a specific tone: controlled, careful, designed not to offend or commit to anything concrete.
That tone triggers suspicion. Not because the content is false. Because it feels like someone optimised it to avoid consequences rather than communicate truth.
Overly formal language activates our threat detection systems. We start scanning for what’s being hidden. The brain treats excessive formality as a warning sign, the same way it treats someone avoiding eye contact.
People Trust People, Not Logos
The fundamental shift happened in where trust lives.
Used to be, you trusted the institution. The bank. The newspaper. The company. The logo carried weight because the institution had built credibility over decades.
Now? People trust individuals more than institutions by massive margins.
A recent survey on crisis communication found that during crises, 22% of people trust the company’s CEO and 20% trust senior management. Only 8% trust a corporate spokesperson.
This isn’t just about crisis. It’s baseline now. When people want to know if a company is trustworthy, they don’t read the about page. They look at what the founder posts on LinkedIn. They check if the CEO sounds like a real person or a press release generator.
The shift makes evolutionary sense. For most of human history, you trusted individuals you could see and interact with. Trusting faceless institutions is the weird new thing we tried for about 200 years. The internet just returned us to the default: trust people whose faces and voices you can assess.
Casual Tone Signals Confidence, Not Laziness
For decades, formal language was code for “this person is educated, capable, trustworthy.” Casual language meant unprofessional.
That coding reversed almost entirely. This explains why casual language wins trust in modern communication.
Now formal language often signals the opposite: that someone doesn’t trust their own authority. They’re hiding behind institutional voice because their personal voice isn’t strong enough. They need the scaffolding of formality to be taken seriously.
Casual language signals confidence. It says “I’m secure enough in my position to sound like myself. I don’t need to perform expertise through language because my expertise is self-evident.”
This is why CEOs posting casually on LinkedIn feels powerful rather than unprofessional. When someone with actual authority speaks plainly, it demonstrates they don’t need the performance of formality.
Genuine confidence allows informality. If you’re genuinely expert at something, you can explain it simply. Insecurity reaches for formality as protection. Complex language, corporate speak, carefully hedged statements. All signals that the speaker doesn’t feel secure enough to be direct.
The Death Of Corporate Speak
There’s a specific type of language that’s dying: the kind designed to say nothing whilst sounding important.
“We remain committed to delivering value to our stakeholders through innovative solutions that leverage our core competencies to drive sustainable growth.”
That sentence is perfectly constructed corporate speak. It’s also completely meaningless. Every word has been optimised to avoid saying anything specific, avoid making commitments, avoid providing information someone could use against the company later.
People have become extremely good at detecting this. The statement washes over them without sticking because their brain correctly identifies it as non-information.
Compare: “We’re going to focus on making our product faster and more reliable this year.”
Same general idea. Vastly different impact. The second version says something specific enough to be held accountable for. That specificity creates trust. The vagueness of the first version creates suspicion.
This is why casual language wins trust. Not because it’s casual. Because casual language forces specificity. You can’t hide behind abstraction when you’re writing like you talk.
Humour As Trust Signal
Brands using humour instead of press releases aren’t just being playful. They’re deploying a psychological trust mechanism.
Humour requires context. You can’t make a joke about your industry unless you actually understand your industry. When a brand demonstrates genuine awareness through humour, it signals competence.
Humour also requires confidence. You’re willing to risk the joke landing wrong. That risk signals you’re secure enough in your position to not play it safe all the time.
And crucially, humour is difficult to fake at scale. You can’t run every joke through legal review. It has to come from someone with genuine understanding making a genuine call about what will work.
All of this combines into a powerful trust signal: this brand has real people behind it who actually understand what they’re doing and feel confident enough to be playful about it.
The Authenticity Paradox
Here’s where it gets complicated: understanding why casual language wins trust doesn’t mean you can fake it.
Casual language built trust because it felt authentic. Now everyone’s using casual language, which makes it feel less authentic.
Brands that sound too casually can come across as trying too hard. The casualness itself becomes a performance.
The next evolution is already happening: radical transparency. Not just casual tone, but actually sharing information companies traditionally hide. Real numbers. Real struggles. Real decision-making processes.
Because once everyone sounds casual, the differentiator becomes substance. You prove you’re real not by sounding informal, but by being willing to say things that aren’t strategically optimal. By prioritising truth over optimisation.
This is the deeper reason why casual language wins trust: it’s harder to maintain when you’re being dishonest. Formality provides cover. Casualness demands authenticity.
What This Actually Means
If you’re trying to build trust through language now, the rules have fundamentally changed.
Formal language doesn’t make you credible anymore. It makes you invisible at best, suspicious at worst. Unless you’re in a context where formality is genuinely required (legal documents, medical information), defaulting to formal communication actively undermines trust.
But casual language alone doesn’t work either. Casual without substance feels manipulative. Like you’re trying to use informality as a substitute for having something worth saying.
What works is casual language combined with genuine transparency. Writing like yourself whilst saying things that matter. Being direct about both successes and failures. Admitting uncertainty when you’re uncertain instead of hiding behind vague positivity.
The goal isn’t to sound casual. The goal is to sound like yourself.
What people respond to is the feeling that an actual person is communicating with them. Not a brand. Not a legal department. Not a marketing team. A person with thoughts and opinions and the confidence to share them directly.
That’s what trust looks like now. Not polish. Just truth delivered in a voice that sounds human.
Sources:
- BusinessBalls – Detailed explanation of Mehrabian’s Communication Theory and common misinterpretations
- Nonverbal Group – Analysis of the “93% of communication is nonverbal” myth and original studies
