Hey Jim! Yeah I think you hit the nail on the head, the difficulty of measuring language's impact on us comes from the individuality of response to it. Even min

Hey Jim! Yeah I think you hit the nail on the head, the difficulty of measuring language's impact on us comes from the individuality of response to it. Even minor shift in situational context can alter our response, as can the measurement window (e.g. you can see yourself warming to 'quests' over time), and of course the actual precise stimulus (our response to close- vs open-ended framing, process vs outcome framing, and the individual's cultural knowledge of the specific language used). Thus it's very hard to generalize these snapshot-in-time personal experiences across populations. A recent comparison might be SSRI's effects, which are proving to be no better than placebo at a population level, yet a large body of individual anecdotes show they have very positive effects on some. Rather than dismiss the anecdotes, we need to acknowledge the difficulty of measurement for such a complex & high level topic and be curious enough to look at the problem through different mechanisms of ascertaining truth like qual analysis, logic, and common sense, rather than just accept some murky methods and results as the final word.