The Secret Life of Pronouns (32 page)
Read The Secret Life of Pronouns Online
Authors: James W. Pennebaker
WHAT SONG LYRICS SAY ABOUT THE BAND: THE BEATLES
The Beatles were together for about ten years before breaking up in 1970. During their time together, they recorded over two hundred songs and influenced music, politics, fashion, and culture for the next generation. The lead songwriters, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, together or separately wrote 155 songs, and George Harrison penned another 25. Even today, scholars—and the occasional barfly—debate about the relative creativity of the band members, who ultimately influenced whom, and how the band changed over time.
Most of this book is devoted to the words people generate in conversations or write in the form of essays, letters, or electronic media such as blogs, e-mails, etc. Music lyrics, however, tell their own stories about their authors. My good friend and occasional collaborator from New Zealand, Keith Petrie, suggested that a computerized linguistic analysis of the Beatles was long overdue. Once we realized how complicated the topic really was, we invited another music lover and psychologist from Norway, Borge Silvertsen, to join us. What could we learn about the Beatles by analyzing their lyrics? Quite a bit, it turns out.
In many ways, the lyrics of the band reflected the natural aging process one usually sees in all working groups. Recall from the last chapter that as working groups spend time together, their conversations evidence drops in I-words and increases in we-words, with increasing language complexity, including bigger words and more prepositions, articles, and conjunctions. As the group aged together, the Beatles expressed themselves through their lyrics in the same way any group would in their conversations with each other.
In their first four years together, their songs brimmed with optimism, anger, and sexuality. Their thinking was simple, self-absorbed, and very much in the here and now. In the last years of the band, the group’s lyrics became more complex, more psychologically distant, and far less positive. Particularly telling was the drop in the use of I-words from almost 14 percent during their first years together to only 7 percent in their last three years. Lyrics also provide a window into the personalities of the various songwriters within a group. Although John Lennon and Paul McCartney had an agreement that all of their songs would include both men as authors, the order of authorship and extensive interviews has provided historians with a solid, albeit not perfect, record about who wrote what. Between the two, Lennon is credited as the primary writer for seventy-eight songs, McCartney for sixty-seven, and another fifteen songs are considered true collaborations where both were closely involved in the lyrics.
In the popular press, John Lennon was generally portrayed as the creative intellectual and McCartney as the melodic, upbeat tunesmith. The analyses of their lyrics paint a different picture. Lennon did use slightly more negative emotion words in his songs than McCartney, but the two were virtually identical in their use of positive emotions, linguistic complexity, and self-reflection. Interestingly, McCartney’s songs more often focused on couples—as can be seen in his higher use of we-words—than did Lennon’s.
Who was the more creative or varied in his lyric-writing abilities? We can actually test this by seeing how the lyrics from different songs are mathematically similar—both in terms of content as well as linguistic style. Whereas the popular press usually assumed that Lennon was the creative and stylistically variable writer, the numbers clearly support McCartney. Across his career as a Beatle, Paul McCartney proved to be far more flexible and varied both in terms of his writing style and also in the content of his lyrics.
And let’s not forget George Harrison, the quiet, spiritual Beatle who wrote about twenty-five songs, especially in the last years of the Beatles. Although somewhat more cognitively complex in his words than either McCartney or Lennon, he was the least flexible in his writing. In other words, both the content and style of his lyrics were more predictable from song to song. These same types of analyses also demonstrated that Harrison was more influenced in his songwriting style by Lennon than by McCartney.
DOES COLLABORATION RESULT IN AVERAGE OR SYNERGISTIC RESULTS?
Collaborations between writers is a funny business. When two people work together, in John Lennon’s words, “eyeball to eyeball,” do they produce something that is the average of their usual styles or is the result something completely different than either could have written alone? Language analyses can answer this question for both the Beatles and the Federalist Papers. Recall that Lennon and McCartney had very close collaborations on 15 of their 160 songs. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison jointly wrote three Federalist Papers.
Across the various dimensions of language and even punctuation, we can calculate what percentage of the time the collaboration produces an effect that is the average of the two collaborators working on their own. There are three clear hypotheses:
•
Just-like-another-member-of-the-team hypothesis.
Collaborative writing projects produce language that is similar to that produced by a single person writing alone. Sometimes the work will use words like one author and other times like the other author.
•
The average-person hypothesis.
More interesting is that collaborations produce language that is the average of the two writers. If Lennon uses a low rate of we-words and McCartney uses a high rate, it would follow that their collaboration would produce a moderate number of we-words.
•
The synergy hypothesis.
Even more interesting is the idea that when two people work closely together, they create a product unlike either of them would on their own. Their language style will be distinctive in a way such that most people would not recognize who the author was. Wouldn’t it be great if the results supported this hypothesis? Come on, statistics, please, please me.
And the winner by a mile is, in fact, the synergy hypothesis. When Lennon and McCartney and when Madison and Hamilton were working together, they produced works that were strikingly different than works produced by the individual writers themselves. When collaborating, the Lennon-McCartney team produced lyrics that were much more positive, while using more I-words, fewer we-words, and much shorter words than either artist normally used on his own. Similarly, when Hamilton and Madison worked together they used much bigger words, more past tense, and fewer auxiliary verbs than either did on their own. In fact, across about seventy-five dimensions of language and punctuation, more than 90 percent of the time collaborations resulted in language that was either higher or lower than the language of the two writers on their own.
Note that collaborations produce quite different language patterns than what the individuals would naturally do on their own. What’s not yet known is if collaborative work is generally better than individual products. This is a research question that is begging to be answered.
SUMMING UP: PACKING YOUR AUTHOR IDENTIFICATION TOOL KIT
Author identification is becoming a very hot topic in the computer world. The three methods that we have relied on involve tracking the rate of function word usage, analyzing punctuation and layout, and examining the use of obscure words. Each of these methods does far better than chance in identifying characteristics of an author as well as matching the author’s writing to other writing samples.
In terms of understanding the author’s personality, we currently know the most about function words. As discussed throughout the book, pronouns, articles, and other stealth words have reliably been linked to the authors’ age, sex, social class, personality, and social connections. Less is currently known about punctuation and personality, but I suspect future research will begin demonstrating convincing links. After all, it’s hard to imagine that there isn’t a difference between the writer who writes at the end of his or her note, “Thanks.” versus one who writes, “Thanks!!!!!!!!!”
The least is known about the use of relatively obscure words and their link to personality. If one author uses
intriguing
and another
remarkable
, does the choice of the word itself say anything about the person?
There are also a number of other exciting methods being developed by labs around the world that are relevant to author identification. One strategy is to look at something called N-grams. These can be pairs of words (or bigrams), three words in a row (or trigrams), etc. Looking at the beginning of this paragraph, the bigram approach would look at the occurrence of “there are,” “are also,” “also a,” and so forth. The idea is that some people naturally use groups of words together in a unique way that identifies who they are.
More elaborate strategies attempt to mathematically predict word order within sentences based on the words the writer has already used. In the beginning of the last paragraph, the odds that it would start with the word
there
might be 1 in 1,000. The odds that the word
are
would be the second word, knowing that the first word is
there
, is perhaps 1 in 20. Knowing “There are,” the odds that the third word is
also
… you can get the idea. Researchers can determine how unique a person’s writing is and how much it deviates from chance on a sentence-by-sentence level. One argument is that every person’s way of stringing words together is unique to them. Yet another linguistic fingerprint idea.
Other new methods examine parts of speech, syntax, cohesiveness of sentences and paragraphs—all using increasingly sophisticated mathematical solutions. The time is not too far away where the author of most any extended language sample will be identifiable.
WORDS AS CLUES TO POLITICAL AND HISTORICAL EVENTS
It comes as no news to historians and literary scholars that the primary key to understanding people or works of the past is the study of the written word. Most scholars, however, rely primarily on their own reading of historical works rather than computerized text analyses. This has been changing over the last few years. One area that has been particularly innovative is political science. Partly because of the availability of transcribed speeches, interviews, newspaper and online articles, newscasts, and even letters to the editor, researchers have been able to tap the appeal of political candidates and people’s responses to them.
One of the pioneers in the field, Roderick Hart, has published a series of groundbreaking books and articles that help explain how the results of important historical elections—such as the race between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole—were presaged by the ways the candidates used words in their speeches. He also collected hundreds of letters to the editors in newspapers across the United States and was able to track the perceptions of voters. Extending Hart’s work, we can begin to reinterpret historical events by analyzing the words of all the historical players who leave behind trails of words.
WHO
ARE
THESE PEOPLE? TRYING TO FIGURE OUT U.S. PRESIDENTS
Watch any news source—television, Internet, newspaper, magazine—and much of the coverage is devoted to understanding the thinking of the current, future, and past presidents. If it’s the middle of an election cycle, pundits make predictions about how each of the candidates would perform if elected. If a president has recently been elected or reelected, we want to know what he or she will try to accomplish in the months and years ahead. And even after the president has stepped down, pundits continue to ask, “What was he thinking? Why did he do that?”
In one of the most impressive books on the psychology of politics,
The Political Brain
, researcher Drew Westen argues that the most successful politicians are the ones who can emotionally connect with the electorate. Logic, intelligence, and reason are certainly very fine qualities but when the voter enters the ballot box, it is the social and emotional dimensions of the campaign that usually drive the election.
We resonate with people who seem to be attentive and respectful to others and, at the same time, exhibit their emotions in a genuine way. Social-emotional styles can be detected through body language, tone of voice, and, of course, words. For presidents and presidential candidates, we have ample opportunity to evaluate social-emotional style through speeches, interviews, pictures, and videos of their interacting with their families and others. From a language perspective, presidents leave a stream of words like no other humans.
A fairly simple way to measure social-emotional styles is to count how often personal pronouns and emotion words are used. As a general rule, people who are self-reflective and who are interested in others will use all types of personal pronouns at high rates—including
I
,
we
,
you
,
she
, and
they
. Similarly, people are viewed as more emotionally present if they use emotion words—both positive and negative—than if they don’t. By analyzing pronouns and emotion words in the speeches of presidents, we can begin to get a sense of their general social-emotional tone.
At most, U.S. presidents give inaugural addresses once every four years. However, most submit a State of the Union message to Congress every year that they are in office. State of the Union messages began with George Washington in 1790. Although Washington and John Adams presented the message in speeches to Congress, Thomas Jefferson changed the tradition by simply submitting a written version. In 1913, Woodrow Wilson reinstated the spoken State of the Union message. However, from 1924 until 1932, the messages returned to written format. Beginning with the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (or FDR) in 1933 and up to today, virtually all States of the Union have been presented in speech format to Congress. Despite these variations in presentation style, it is fascinating to see how the emotional tones of the messages have changed from president to president.
