The Secret Life of Pronouns (26 page)

The phone calls started and we talked about work, our lives, our mutual friends, and other issues of the day. During the period I was working on the arithmetic problems, I recall thinking, “Wow, I’m really good at this. I’m as socially adept when I’m busy as when I’m not.” Later, when I transcribed the conversations, I was startled to see how differently I spoke while engaged in the arithmetic problems. I stuttered and repeated myself. I deflected any complicated questions and tried to get the other person to talk more. Similar to the participants in Yla’s experiment, I tended to laugh more and used more positive language in general.

Both of my students rated the distraction phases of the conversation as enjoyable as the other parts. In fact, the LSM measures indicated that we matched in our language use during the distraction period at rates as high or higher than during the nondistraction periods. What happened, however, is that both students started speaking to me in the ways I was speaking to them. As I psychologically distanced myself from the conversation, my conversational partners did the same. What intrigues me is that none of us were consciously aware of it. In fact, after the phone calls, I discussed the conversations with both students, asking their perceptions. One said that she was vaguely aware that I was slightly more distracted during the arithmetic problems but said, “You often are distracted in phone calls.” Oooh.

Two people who respect and like one another learn how to dance with each other across conversational topics. They are both invested in paying attention to one another, even during periods of distraction or disagreement. What makes the conversational dance dynamic is that as one person’s attention wanders, the other person attempts to adjust to it. An unspoken rule in this dance, however, is that both people are ultimately committed to it. If one or both members of the conversation simply doesn’t care about the other person, the dance is at risk of falling apart.

CREATING A LANGUAGE LOVE DETECTOR

Wouldn’t it be nice if there existed a device that could alert people if they were compatible? You could take it on dates with you, and at the end of the evening, the two of you would read the love detector’s “date compatibility score” on the front of the meter and decide if you should meet again tomorrow or never see each other again.

Good news. We may have a prototype for your startup company. It’s not a device, really. Instead, it just requires that you use a digital recorder to transcribe your interaction and then analyze the words to assess LSM. Oh, and for it to work, you should probably plan on having at least ten dates that are virtually identical in format. Hmmm. Perhaps a bit like speed-dating.

THE DATING DANCE

Indeed, Molly Ireland, several other colleagues, and I have found that the LSM between couples on a brief four-minute date predicts if they want to meet again. As you may know, in a typical speed-dating session, you meet and talk with eight to twelve different “dates” for a few minutes each. At the end of each date, each person rates the other person before moving to the next date. Usually the following day, the daters contact the speed-dating organizers and tell them which of the ten people they would be interested in meeting in a more relaxed setting. Most people report that the conversations range from superficial to passionate to exhausting. Sometimes people meet the loves of their lives; most times they don’t.

Lonely hearts may not always like speed-dating but researchers love it. In a recent project, about eighty daters gave permission for us to record their four-minute conversations so that our research team could analyze their word use. Does LSM in the brief interaction predict whether the couple gets together in the future? Yes, to some degree. Those in speed dates characterized by above-average LSM were almost twice as likely to want future contact as those with below-average LSM.

More interesting, however, is that we could predict which couples would get together afterward better than the individuals themselves. Immediately after each brief date, participants completed a short questionnaire about the desirability of the person they just met. The individual ratings of desirability were, of course, related to their eventually meeting, but LSM was more strongly related. Why? Whether or not two people eventually meet up is dependent on both parties. A guy might find a woman attractive but she might find him repulsive. The two must tango together. And LSM is capturing the dance—whereas the questionnaire is just assessing the dancers separately.

PREDICTING YOUNG LOVE

Let’s assume that a relationship advances beyond the four-minute speed-date and the young couple starts to date seriously. Would style matching between the two of them predict the long-term prospects of their relationship? Preliminary findings suggest yes.

Most people in passionate relationships are highly attentive to their partners. They detect subtle shifts in the other person’s moods and behaviors. Linguistically, their levels of style matching are quite high. After a few weeks or months together, some couples begin to realize that their relationship may have a limited shelf life. As their attention to their partner wanes, their degree of language style matching drops as well.

By tracking the language style matching of young dating couples, it is often possible to predict which couples are most likely to survive. For example, my former graduate student Richard Slatcher and I worked on a project with young dating couples. Rich, who is now on the faculty at Wayne State University, wanted to see how the couples talked with each other using instant messaging, or IM. He recruited eighty-six couples who reported that they IMed with each other on a daily basis and who agreed to let us analyze several days of their messages. We then compared what happened to couples who had high LSM in their instant messages with each other and those who had low LSM.

Of the forty-three couples with the highest LSM scores, 77 percent were still dating three months later, compared with only 52 percent of the couples with low scores. In other words, those couples who naturally synchronized their function words with each other were more likely to maintain their relationship over time.

Reading the IMs of the various couples painted a clearer picture of how the relationships were succeeding or failing. The more successful high-LSM relationships revealed how both members of the couple were truly interested in each other. In addition, the overall tone of the IMs was positive and supportive. The relationships with lower LSM scores, which were more destined to fail, often revealed striking patterns of detachment between the two people. For example, the following couple had low LSM scores although they claimed that their relationship was passionate and satisfying. Nevertheless, their failure to connect with each other is obvious:

HIM: hey you! how ya doing?!

HER: fine you

HIM: great. me and jim are gonna go out on the town

HER: sweet

HIM: i have to find an oil painting of a cow for my mom’s birthday and i’m gonna get my hair cut hopefully. what are you up to?

HER: not much

HIM: bout to jump in the shower too. we had a sweet christmas party last night. i got pics. pretty funny. listening to christmas music, its great

HER: good

HIM: ha ha, not very chatty today

HER: eh well … guess not

HIM: so.… you have a good week? what are you doing this weekend?

HER: yeah it was okay. working

HIM: ah … oh well at least youll have $$$$$$$$! that’s good. Im gonna jump in the shower. you think of somehting to talk about! be back in 10 min if you’re still here. jim is waiting on me to get ready. bye bye

HER: then go!

HIM: miss ya! ha ha. fine bye

The male is chatty and, I would guess, falsely upbeat. His girlfriend is cool, detached, and unresponsive. His language is personal, with high rates of pronouns, and hers is noncommittal. By her relative silence, she is conveying her annoyance, which he avoids confronting.

Compare their interaction with another where the female is trying to emotionally engage her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend. Over the previous two days of their occasional IMs, the female has tried to talk about their relationship and the male has constantly been busy with homework, exercising, even watching television. On the third day, she finally catches him when he might have some time to chat:

HER: are you there? are you gonna be able to talk for 5 minutes

HIM: yes. go

HER: what are you doing at the same time you’re chatting with me?

HIM: cleaning

HER: i feel too mad to say anything to you

HIM: fine

HER: did you not even feel one bit of bad when you read the card?

HIM: of course i did

HER: are you sure

HIM: hang on for 1 min please … Yes.

HER: or are you just saying … please hurry … hello?… what is the problem

HIM: alright … sorry

HER: what were you doing

HIM: my friends got here. Go

HER: but tell me what made you feel bad about the card

HIM: that you were being so nice. but i still dont feel that im wrong

HER: so why did you feel bad …

HIM: it did, but the fact that you told me not to expect it

HER: i don’t understand. the fact that i told you not to expect it made you feel bad?

HIM: look, i will call you @ nine. i cant speak like this

In this second case, the style matching numbers are also low. Although both use personal pronouns at similar levels, the computer analyses reveal that she is more concrete (using more articles) and more complex (e.g., conjunctions, prepositions) in her thinking than he is. She is also more personal and emotional, and focuses all of her attention on her boyfriend. He, on the other hand, is distracted and avoidant. Whenever she tries to get closer or to connect with him, he slips out of reach. This pattern of interaction was consistent over several days of instant messaging. Nevertheless, when both members of the couple completed questionnaires about their relationship, both rated their levels of intimacy and relationship satisfaction as very high (!). As is typical, the language style matching numbers did a far better job at predicting the couple’s later separation than their self-reports.

The LSM method allows us to make reasonable guesses about the success of relationships by tracking a few interactions between couples. Similar ideas have been tested with recently married couples. John Gottman and his colleagues at the University of Washington report that by listening to the ways a young couple fights during a laboratory exercise, he can predict the likely success of the marriage. Gottman brings the couples into his lab and has them discuss issues that they have conflicts about—usually topics dealing with money, sex, or household chores. If, during tense discussions, both members of the couple show respect, try to reduce tension, avoid accusations, and inject positive emotions, their marriage is more likely to last. On the other hand, if one or both spouses are dismissive of the other, actively avoid discussing an emotional topic, or use the task as a way to launch personal attacks on the other, the marriage is in trouble.

A happy marriage is more than the egalitarian sharing of pronouns and prepositions. When two people use function words in similar ways and at similar rates, they are seeing their worlds in parallel ways. Having a similar worldview, though, does not ensure marital bliss. Gottman’s work reminds us that the strongest relationships are also characterized by shared positive emotions. Similar findings emerged in our dating couples—those with the highest style matching scores
and
the highest rates of shared positive emotions were the couples most likely to stay together. Interestingly, shared positive emotions on their own do not predict the long-term happiness or potential for survival of a relationship. The members of the couple must be both positive in their outlooks and engaged with each other.

USING LSM TO UNDERSTAND PAST RELATIONSHIPS

One advantage of using computerized language analysis is that we can explore relationships over history wherever some kind of written record exists. For example, if we have access to old letters, poems, or lyrics that two people shared, we can get a glimpse of their emotional connection with each other. Computerized text analysis can illuminate our understanding of marriages, friendships, or alliances in history. Molly Ireland, who has been immersed in the language style matching research, has tracked down several enlightening cases, two of which include the poems of poets from one well-known happy marriage and from one equally famous unhappy one. By analyzing their works, we get better insight into each pair’s relationship.