The Secret Life of Pronouns (24 page)

CAN LEADERS BECOME MORE EFFECTIVE BY CHANGING THEIR LANGUAGE?

Yes, I think so. But not for the reasons most people think. Simply using words differently won’t automatically change speakers’ psychological states. As noted throughout the book, words reflect our personality and social situations but rarely directly affect them.

In speeches, commercials, and brief interactions, it is possible that the words individuals use can influence how their audience perceives them. Our brains do, in fact, register if a speaker is using
I
or
we
and react accordingly. And, in fact, if the goal is merely to make a person sound leader-like, then the careful crafting of their words can be effective in the short run.

But, speechwriters, beware. Do you want your presidential candidate to sound presidential or folksy? To sound high status or low status? In both his election campaigns for president, George W. Bush sounded more personal, folksy, and low status than either of his opponents Al Gore or John Kerry. In the 2008 election, Barack Obama’s language was far more presidential and high status than his opponent John McCain’s. The words that the candidates used clearly influenced our perceptions and ultimately our votes.

Note that attaining a leadership position is different from being an effective leader. In most cases, an effective leader is someone who works and interacts with others, who makes decisions that others will agree with. Leadership is not just making speeches. It demands a wide array of thinking and social skills.

Leaders can become more effective by first listening to and analyzing their own language. Think back to the case of John Kerry’s use of we-words in his presidential campaign against George Bush in 2004 described in chapter 2. Recall that his advisers mistakenly believed that if Kerry increased in his use of we-words, he would come across to audiences as more warm and approachable.

Had I been Kerry’s language adviser, I would have first analyzed his speeches and interviews. His high use of we- and you-words and low use of I-words would immediately have signaled that he was trying to sound too presidential, which came across as arrogant. My language therapy would have been to try to change his relationship with the audience and the way he was thinking about himself. He clearly needed to know that his use of we-words was coming across as cold and not authentic.

People can become better leaders by using their words as markers of how they are relating to others. Words are like a speedometer in a car that reflects how fast the car is going. You can’t slow the car by directly affecting the speedometer. Rather, you use the speedometer to gauge your driving. Train a person to become a better driver and their speedometer will follow. Make a potential leader more attentive to their words and the meaning of their words and they can change their relationships with others and become better leaders.

FINAL THOUGHTS ON STATUS, POWER, ARROGANCE, AND LEADERSHIP

That status hierarchies are part of almost every relationship we have is, on a certain level, a bit depressing and threatening. Not only is a pecking order established within minutes of an interaction, but all the parties in the interaction then adopt their linguistic role. Sitting by a person on a plane, meeting a stranger at a party, or being introduced to a colleague in a business meeting triggers each person to see where they stand in the hierarchy compared to the others.

The almost-invisible status competition has been at play since we were young children and will continue to be through old age. Although the existence of social hierarchies may go against our beliefs in democracy and equality, the fast and efficient ways we create pecking orders helps to make all subsequent interactions run more smoothly.

Although the examples used in this chapter have come primarily from projects conducted in English, virtually identical patterns of word use are apparent in Ancient Greek, Arabic, Japanese, and all European languages that we have studied. For example, the characters in the plays of Euripides, writing in the fifth century B.C., use low rates of I-words and high rates of you- and we-words when they are powerful. When the same characters fall from grace, their I-words skyrocket and their you- and we-words drop.

You will notice that the same pronouns—
I
,
we
, and
you
—are linked to status, power, self-confidence, arrogance, and leadership. This isn’t to say that all of these constructs are the same. As recent research by organizational psychologists suggests, people can achieve high status without having direct power over others. Effective leadership sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t involve arrogance or power. Whereas other word categories may be able to distinguish power from status, both can be thought of as markers of a social hierarchy.

What this means is that if you happen to be at a future cocktail party with Gandhi, Stalin, Einstein, and Emilio Barzini from
The Godfather
(but not that pimp Tattaglia), you can bet that you will likely use more I-words than any of them.

CHAPTER 8

The Language of Love

H
OPEFULLY, YOU SHOULD now be convinced that function words reflect psychological states. Sadly, I’ve been keeping something from you: Word use rarely occurs in a vacuum. In most cases, when we use words we are talking or writing to another person, and at the same time, they are talking or writing to us. Most language use occurs among people in ongoing social relationships. What this means is that we can begin to use our word tools to investigate more than solitary individuals—we can begin to study human relationships.

Think what this means. The way that you and your lover, your parent, your boss, and your mortal enemy talk with each other provides important clues to the nature of your relationships. And not just the way you talk—the ways you and your friends e-mail, post updates on your respective Facebook pages or Twitter entries, inform us about your entire social network.

Social relationships have their own personality. One friend in my social network is someone I often talk to about personal and emotional topics, and when we meet, we always eat Mexican food; another friendship is characterized by our arguing and joking over beers. Even my e-mails to and from my two friends reflect the kinds of interactions we have during our periodic lunches. These different relationships have gone on for years and are both warm and fulfilling. If I were to analyze the language of these interactions, each would have its own fingerprint, its own conversational personality.

By inspecting the language of close relationships, a picture of the relationships themselves begins to emerge. Not only can we look at relationships over months or years but we can also track how two people are connecting with one another on a minute-by-minute level. For example, it is possible to tell how engaged two people are with one another by analyzing how similarly they talk with one another.

Consider this brief snippet of an IM interaction between two college students who are very much in love:

HER: I’m glad I can at least talk to you now, but I want to see you so badly. I hate being apart from you

HIM:
. I wish there was a heart-melting smiley … I love you

HER: Seriously though … I’ve always been the type of girl that I could go long periods of time and it wouldn’t be that I wouldn’t … think about you, it’s just that the distance wouldn’t get to me … but today, I felt like I was going crazy not seeing you! Like when I say I missed you like crazy … I mean CRAZY!!!!I love you too

HIM: I do love you … so much

Both members of the couple are closely attentive to each other and repeat many of the same words and phrases. Compare the words of intense love with words of intense, well, outrage. For several years, a daytime television talk show,
The View
, has commanded a large audience in the United States. The hosts are a group of smart and often opinionated well-known women with backgrounds in news, comedy, and politics. Over the years, occasional bitter disagreements have erupted that were both political and personal. On May 23, 2007, a long-simmering tension between the conservative co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck and liberal Rosie O’Donnell erupted:

HASSELBECK: Because you are an adult and I’m certainly not going to be the person for you to explain your thoughts to. They’re your thoughts. Defend your own insinuations.

O’DONNELL: I defend my thoughts.

HASSELBECK: Defend your own thoughts.

O’DONNELL: Right, but every time I defend them, Elisabeth, it’s poor little Elisabeth that I’m picking on.

HASSELBECK: You know what? Poor little Elisabeth is not poor little Elisabeth.

O’DONNELL: That’s right. That’s why I’m not going to fight with you anymore because it’s absurd. So for three weeks you can say all the Republican crap you want.

HASSELBECK: It’s much easier to fight someone like Donald Trump, isn’t it? Because he’s obnoxious.

O’DONNELL: I’ve never fought him. He fought me. I told a fact about him—

…

HASSELBECK: I gave you an opportunity to clarify.

O’DONNELL: You didn’t give me anything. You don’t have to give me. I asked you a question.

HASSELBECK: I asked you a question.

O’DONNELL: And you wouldn’t even answer it.

HASSELBECK: You wouldn’t even answer your own question.

O’DONNELL: Oh, Elisabeth, I don’t want—You know what? You really don’t understand what I’m saying?

HASSELBECK: I understand what you’re saying.

Obviously, the tone of the interactions between the two lovers and the two adult television hosts is different. Unlike the lovers’ IMs, the women’s sparring resembles a schoolyard fight between two bullies. Despite the striking differences in the two interactions, it is intriguing to see how in both exchanges, the two people converge in their use of words. In both interactions, the two people are completely focused on each other and practically mimic what the other person has just said—one in a loving way, the other in sputtering rage.

Conversations are like dances. Two people effortlessly move in step with one another, each usually anticipating the other person’s next move. If one of the dancers moves in an unexpected direction, the other typically adapts and builds on the new approach. As with dancing, it is often difficult to tell who is leading and who is following in that the two people are constantly affecting each other. And once the dance begins, it is almost impossible for one person to singly dictate the couple’s movement.

In his poem “Among School Children,” William Butler Yeats asks, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” In reading both transcripts, you get the feeling you can’t. You can almost hear the players adjust their speaking rate, tone, and volume. As they both become more emotional, their uses of words converge. Less obvious, however, is their parallel use of function words. That is, both the happy lovers and the angry talk show hosts tend to use pronouns, prepositions, articles, and other function words with each other at almost identical rates. In both interactions, the two people are on the same psychological page and it is reflected in their language.

VERBAL MIMICKING

Social scientists have long known that people in a face-to-face conversation tend to display similar nonverbal behaviors. When one person crosses his or her legs, the other person follows. When one makes a grand hand gesture, the other will likely do the same a bit later. This nonverbal mimicking was first thought to reflect how much the two people liked one another. In fact, it is a marker of engagement, or the degree to which the two are paying attention to each other. If you are in love or you are outraged with your conversational partner, the two of you will match each other’s nonverbal actions precisely.

The same is true for the words used in a conversation. If the two people are talking about the same topic then their words should be similar. After all, that’s what a conversation is. More interesting is that people also converge in the ways they talk—they tend to adopt the same levels of formality, emotionality, and cognitive complexity. In other words, people tend to use the same groups of function words at similar rates. Further, the more the two people are engaged with one another, the more closely their function words match.

The matching of function words is called language style matching, or LSM. Analyses of conversations find that LSM occurs within the first fifteen to thirty seconds of any interaction and is generally beyond conscious awareness. Several studies suggest that LSM is apparent in some unlikely places.

Imagine, for example, that you were required to answer a series of open-ended essay questions as part of a class assignment. Imagine also that each of the open-ended questions was written in a very different style, ranging from very formal to extremely informal in style. Would you notice the differences in the writing styles of the questions? More important, would you change the ways you answered the questions by adjusting your answers to match each question’s language style? Surprisingly, you would likely not notice the differences in writing styles but you would adjust the style of your answers.

Working with my colleague Sam Gosling and graduate student Molly Ireland, we set up an online class writing assignment for several five-hundred-person Introductory Psychology classes. Students were forewarned that they would need to answer four separate brief essay questions about aspects of a class writing assignment. We never told the students that the different questions would be written using different language styles. For example, one particular essay question was written either in a pompous, arrogant style or, in another version, the same question was written in a chatty “Valley girl” style. Here are two samples where students were asked to write about a particular theory that had been discussed in the textbook:

Pompous instructions:
Although your professors gave this topic rather minimal attention, cognitive dissonance is a common psychological phenomenon with which the vast majority of uninformed laymen will be familiar … generating an example should be simple enough once one has become reasonably familiar with this concept.

Valley girl instructions:
OK, we might not have talked about cognitive dissonance much. Which I think is totally crazy cause it’s like, everybody should be able to see that cognitive dissonance is majorly relevant. Like, it’s seriously happening ALL the time, you know??… So OK, it’s your turn. I mean, like really try to think of an example of cognitive dissonance and tell me everything about it.

At the end of both questions, everyone read the same instructions:

In the space below, give a real-life example of cognitive dissonance, explaining what led to it and how it was resolved. Support your example with evidence from your book.

So, like, you get the idea of the differences between the writing styles of the two questions. Interestingly, the students provided equally knowledgeable answers no matter what the writing style. The only difference was that students who received the pompous question answered in pompous ways and those who read the Valley girl instructions wrote in the same freestyle informal lingo. Because everyone responded to four different essay questions, each written in a different style, many students later reported not even noticing the writing styles at all.

It’s hard to look at those two essay questions and not notice the striking differences in the ways they are worded. Nevertheless, we all naturally adjust to the speaker (or exam writer) we are working with. In fact, Molly ran another experiment where she gave people two pages from previously published novels. She then asked her participants to pick up where the original author left off and to write another page of the novel. For half of her participants, she explicitly told them to try to match the author’s writing style. Molly found that everyone, even those who were not explicitly told to do any language matching, naturally matched the writers’ original styles. In fact, when people were directly told to match styles, they were slightly worse at style matching.

Language style matching is much more pervasive than you might think. You may have had the experience of watching a particularly riveting movie and then, afterward, talking like one of the characters you have just seen. Several people tell me that after reading a book with a distinctive writing style they find themselves writing and talking using that same style over the next few hours or even days. In fact, if I, like, started—you know—writing in a Valley girl style for like gobs of paragraphs, and, you know, if, uhhh, your phone rang and like you totally answered it? You would like majorly start talking like this.

I’ll stop now to preserve our respective senses of dignity.

LANGUAGE STYLE MATCHING AND THE BRAIN

If style matching is so pervasive, why does it occur? One explanation is that it is hardwired in our brains. In the 1980s, a team of Italian neuroscientists measured the activity of a group of brain cells in a macaque monkey that fired whenever the monkey grasped a particular object. Later, they discovered that the same group of cells fired when the monkey watched a person’s hand grasp the same object in the same way. Other studies suggested that there might be an entire group of brain cells that mirrors the actions of others. These groups of cells are collectively called mirror neurons or mirror neuron systems.

More recent studies have asked ballet dancers to watch videos of ballets while their brain activity was being scanned. The researchers found that mirror neuron systems became activated for ballet dancers while watching the ballet videos, whereas nondancers did not show the same activity. Most of us have had subjectively similar experiences. For example, if you have ever played tennis, you may have noticed that if you watch an intense match on television, you sometimes catch yourself subtly moving your arm in an attempt to hit the ball.

Particularly noteworthy is that most researchers report that mirror neurons are most dense in Broca’s area in the brain. You will recall from chapter 2 that Broca’s area is also the area implicated in the processing of function words. It’s not coincidental that the ability to use function words is closely linked to mimicking nonverbal behaviors and, according to recent findings, voice intonation and inflection. Indeed, many scholars now claim that the ability to mimic social behavior and its close links to Broca’s area explain the early development and evolution of language abilities.