The Secret Life of Pronouns (22 page)

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Authors: James W. Pennebaker

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It’s surprisingly simple. Look at the last ten e-mails that you sent to someone and compare them with the last ten they sent you. Calculate the percentage of I-words each of you used. If you have a great deal of time, you can do the same with the you- and we-words that you both used as well. Statistically, I-words are the most trustworthy. Here’s the rule: The person who uses fewer I-words is the person who is higher in the social hierarchy. If the two of you are about the same in I-word usage, you probably have an equal relationship.

We know this because of an e-mail study that Matt Davis and I conducted a few years ago. We recruited ten volunteers—some graduate students, undergraduates, and even a couple of faculty who let us analyze their incoming and outgoing e-mail to and from about fifteen people. Matt wrote a computer program that scrambled all of the e-mails so that they were unreadable and preserved the anonymity of the e-mailers and what they actually said.

In addition to the e-mails themselves, we asked each of our volunteers to rate each of their fifteen correspondents along several dimensions: sex, age, how well they knew them, how well they liked them, and similar questions. The pivotal question was about relative status. That is, for each of the fifteen correspondents, the volunteers made judgments in response to the question:

Evaluate this correspondent in terms of relative status:

All correspondents were rated for their relative status on the seven-point questionnaire. So if the volunteer was a graduate student, they might rate a senior professor as a 6 or a 7 and a high school student as a 1 or a 2.

The results were clear-cut. The person with the higher status used fewer I-words, more you-words, and more we-words. This was not a subtle finding. For most of the people, the effects were quite large.

As I pondered the findings, I kept asking myself if I did the same thing. You should know that I have always harbored the illusion that I am a very egalitarian guy. I have tried to treat undergraduates, graduate students, staff, people in the community, and my superiors in the academic world with respect. Certainly these analyses would not show large status effects in my e-mail. I’m the egalitarian guy, remember? I analyzed my data and that was the day I abandoned my I-treat-everyone-the-same self-view. The analysis of my words revealed the same status differences as others in our study. Some edited examples:

Dear Dr. Pennebaker:

I
was part of your Introductory Psychology class last semester.
I
have enjoyed your lectures and
I’ve
learned so much.
I
received an email from you about doing some research with you. Would there be a time for
me
to come by to talk about this?

—Pam

Dear Pam—

This would be great. This week isn’t good because of a trip. How about next Tuesday between 9 and 10:30. It will be good to see you.

Jamie Pennebaker

Pam, as you may guess, had been a first-year college student in my Introductory Psychology class. Notice how she uses I-words in every sentence. Pennebaker manages to avoid the use of a single I-word in his return e-mail. Not coincidentally, Pam uses the honorific “Dr. Pennebaker” and Pennebaker refers to her by her first name. But now watch the same Pennebaker when writing to a world-famous faculty member trying to get him to attend a conference:

Dear (Famous Professor):

The reason
I’m
writing is that
I’m
helping to put together a conference on [a particular topic] …
I
have been contacting a large group of people and many have specifically asked if you were attending.
I
would absolutely love it if you could come … The only downside is that we can’t pay for any expenses …
I
think the better way to think about this gathering is as a reunion rather than a conference …
I
really hope you can make it.

Jamie Pennebaker

Dear Jamie—

Good to hear from you. Congratulations on the [conference]. The idea of a reunion is a nice one … and the conference idea will provide us with a semi-formal way of catching up with one another’s current research … Isn’t there any way to get the university to dig up a few thousand dollars to defray travel expenses for the conference?

With all best regards,

Famous Professor

All of a sudden, the formerly distant, high-status Pennebaker is writing like the lower-status, slightly groveling student. If you look a little more closely at the e-mails you will also see that all the e-mails are friendly and enthusiastic. Not using I-words does not make the writer appear cold or arrogant, just slightly less accessible and more distant.

Many people ponder these findings and think the differences in I-word usage simply go along with making a request of some kind. If you want something, maybe you use
I
. When you are in the position to grant the request, perhaps you don’t. Some other studies indicate this isn’t the case. A good example are some e-mails I sent a few years ago in my capacity as an administrator in my department. We were running low on office space and I had to ask a few people to move to different offices. Here are some edited versions of an e-mail I sent to a Very Important Professor and another one to a Humble Graduate Student. The results were painfully predictable:

Dear (Very Important Professor):

I’ve
been trying to avoid this but
I
think
I
may need to ask you if you would be willing to give up your office …
I
can find you something significantly less grand should worse come to worse.

Dear (Humble Graduate Student):

As you probably know, office space in the department is at a premium. We are doing our best to accommodate all the students. However, would you be willing to move your office …? Thanks so much for your help with this.

As with the earlier examples, the tones of the e-mails are honest, warm, and constructive. Even though the content is essentially the same, they convey slightly different messages. The request to the Very Important Professor is written as though I have my hat in my hand. You can see me stooping over a little and speaking in a quiet voice. In the second e-mail, I’m not speaking at all. I’m merely conveying information from “us”—the department. “We really don’t want to bother you but we want you to move. Nothing personal, mind you.”

Did I consciously adjust the language of these e-mails? No. I have no memory of specifically writing them. My brain must have kicked in on its own and adjusted the writing style knowing who would read the e-mail later. Don’t blame me. It was my brain that was so sensitive to status differences.

I love the e-mail study because it demonstrated an important effect that held up across several people and, more important, revealed my own hypocrisy. Status hierarchies are everywhere yet they go on right below our noses. We are generally oblivious to them, especially when corresponding with friends whom we may have known for years.

THE SPEEDY UNFOLDING OF SOCIAL HIERARCHY IN CONVERSATIONS WITH STRANGERS

Think back to the scene from
The Godfather
at the beginning of the chapter. Do we have the ability to detect pronoun use in natural conversations so, like Vito Corleone, we can determine who is the powerful person in any given situation? In a word, no. People talk too quickly and we simply can’t detect small differences in pronoun use with our ears. Once the conversations are transcribed, however, computer programs have little problem.

Unlike e-mails or letters, when talking with others, the words fly out of our mouths with very little forethought. Despite these very different forms of social interaction, the same general word categories can identify social status in conversations as in written communications. Several studies have now been conducted with college students and, in a manner of speaking, in the White House with top administration officials.

In one of the first studies linking pronoun use to status in natural conversations, my graduate student Ewa Kacewicz invited students to participate in a get-to-know-you task. Pairs of strangers entered a room and talked about anything that interested them for ten minutes while they were videotaped. The conversations were fairly standard—where are you from? What’s your major? How do you like the university? At the end of the conversation, the two people went to separate rooms where they each evaluated the interaction. Both tended to agree on which person had more status and who tended to control the interaction more.

The findings from Ewa’s project and others like it have been clean and consistent. High-status people use we-words and you-words at high rates and use I-words at low rates. In fact, this same pattern emerges when people are chatting with each other on the Internet. What is most striking, however, is how fast the social hierarchy emerges in the conversation. In Ewa’s first study, the two people who were going to have an interaction met just as they were going into the laboratory. They were asked not to talk until both were seated and the video cameras were turned on.

Within the first minute of the conversation, the social hierarchy was established. I suspect that the two people had a rough sense of the hierarchy within seconds of seeing one another. Perhaps they noticed each other’s height, weight, attractiveness, clothing, or general bearing. Whatever it was, their relative use of pronouns was fixed almost immediately.

When two strangers meet and chat on the Internet, you would think that it would take a little longer for the hierarchy to emerge. Surprisingly, it doesn’t take much longer. The Internet project was part of a large classroom exercise that I conducted with my colleague Sam Gosling and graduate student Yla Tausczik. Hundreds of students were asked to go online at particular times where they were randomly connected with another person. They were simply asked to chat about anything they wanted for fifteen minutes. At the end of the fifteen minutes, they completed a questionnaire about the conversation.

Just like the face-to-face natural conversation project, the status differences were apparent in the first three minutes of the interaction. This amazed us because there were no physical appearance cues, voice tone, or anything else that could prejudge status for the two participants. How was it possible for the two people to tacitly agree who was more dominant so quickly?

Reading some of the online transcripts helped to understand the process. Early in the conversation, both participants tossed out cues about themselves and, at the same time, fished for cues about the other person. Some participants would also make subtle moves that diminished the other person’s stature. Here is an example of two females at the beginning of their conversation. Person B (Brittany), whose comments are in bold, is the one who both agree was more dominant when they completed questionnaires at the end of the conversation:

A: hello, is anyone here?

B:
I am. Hi.

A: oh hey

B:
I’m Brittany

A: what are we supposed to talk about? I’m Chris, nice to meet you.

B:
dont take this the wrong way, are you a boy or a girl?

A: haha girl

B:
Chris is kind of ambiguous, lol, nice to meet you. what year are you

A: freshman. What about you?

B:
cool. im a junior. Major?

A: studio art but i am going to be transferring to communications to do photo journalism. You?

B:
history

A: are you involved in any organizations or anything like that here

B:
um, im getting certified to teach high school but other than that, no. you?

A: i am thinking about being a photographer. I don’t want to draw for a living

B:
photography is great

A: i’m not a serious art student … i did art in high school so i could get into the art school here

Notice at the beginning the two people appear to be approaching the interaction in the same way. By the third time she writes, however, Brittany makes an underhanded power play, “don’t take this the wrong way, are you a boy or a girl?” I ask you, dear reader, can you imagine any sentence that starts with “Don’t take this the wrong way …” that can end well for the listener? Brittany has already put Chris on notice that she has the potential to be a bully.

Afterward, both look for information about the other that can help peg them on some kind of social hierarchy. However, once Brittany discovers that Chris is younger and in a less prestigious major, she psychologically takes control. Once Brittany has established her dominance, Chris begins to focus on herself in a more nervous, submissive way. Much later in the conversation (not included here), the higher-status Brittany works to give Chris advice about how she can (and should) get teacher certification.

Interestingly, both Chris and Brittany reported that they enjoyed the conversation and liked one another. At the end of the time period, the two exchanged e-mail addresses and promised to get in touch with one another in the future. And it is safe to say should they meet for coffee, Brittany will still be the person with the higher status in both of their eyes.

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