The Secret Life of Pronouns (33 page)

As you can see in the graph, several presidents were far more social-emotional than their predecessors. Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush used particularly high levels of personal pronouns and emotion words. James Monroe, Warren Harding, and Barack Obama all evidence significantly lower social-emotional ratings than those before them. In fact, it is interesting to see that George W. Bush is unquestionably the most social-emotional president in the history of the office and that Obama is currently the lowest since Richard Nixon.

Rate of social-emotional language by U.S. presidents in their annual State of the Union messages delivered to Congress. The numbers have been adjusted to control for written versus spoken presentations.

A State of the Union address is essentially a formal speech that could, in theory, be written by anyone. Its tone may reflect that of the president’s administration but it doesn’t necessarily tell us about the psychological makeup of the president. Fortunately, a more natural source of a president’s language now exists thanks to the popularity of press conferences. Beginning with FDR, press conferences evolved into freewheeling interactions between the press and president that were transcribed and saved.

From a psychologist’s perspective, press conferences are glorious. The members of the press variously try to cajole, befriend, challenge, and sometimes outrage the president. The press-president relationship is further complicated because both the press and the president desperately need each other to accomplish their somewhat different goals. Most important, interactions with the press are generally unscripted and allow us to monitor the presidents’ thoughts and emotions through the use of words.

Most presidents have only a small number of formal press conferences every year—usually between four and ten—more if there is a national crisis, fewer if they are being publically ridiculed or impeached. In addition to the formal press conferences, presidents often will talk with reporters on random occasions such as after introducing a foreign dignitary or while waiting for their car. Because most meetings with the press are recorded and transcribed, there are usually dozens of natural-language samples available for most presidents since the 1930s.

Interestingly, the ways presidents talk with the press are linguistically quite similar to their State of the Union addresses. As with his State of the Union speeches, George W. Bush emerges as the president whose language is the most social-emotional in press conferences. Since FDR, Nixon has been the lowest by far.

What about Ronald Reagan? Many people consider Reagan one of the most socially adept presidents since FDR. In both speeches and press conferences, Reagan’s use of personal and emotional language was always around the average. From the outside, he seemed like a social-emotional person—perhaps a bit like George W. Bush. Closer analyses of Reagan’s language suggest that this may be an illusion. Reagan, it seems, stands out more as a storyteller than a social-emotional leader. Recall from earlier chapters that stories or narratives require the use of social words together with past-tense verbs. Combining these two dimensions, Reagan’s score on storytelling is
far and away
higher than any other modern president’s.

The Ronald Reagan findings provide a little more insight into the different personalities of presumably sociable or personable people. No matter what their politics, most people who spent any time with George W. Bush felt that he was socially engaged. In social gatherings, he was genuinely interested in other people and readily expressed his own emotions. Whether accurately or not, most walked away with a sense of knowing him.

The biographies of Reagan paint a very different picture. Indeed, Reagan’s official biographer, Edmund Morris, eventually gave up on a traditional biography because he couldn’t get Reagan to open up in a personal or emotional way about himself. Reagan loved to tell stories of all kinds, but according to Morris, he had a “benign lack of interest in individual human beings.” After working on an in-depth two-part television series on Reagan in 1998, the series editor Adriana Bosch reported, “Reagan was not a man given to introspection … As his son Ron told us, ‘No one ever figured him out, and he never figured himself out.’ ”

Although outsiders may naively think that Bush and Reagan were social-emotional men, the language findings help to burrow under these impressions.

WHAT IS
I
SAYING?: THE MISSING PRONOUNS OF BARACK OBAMA

One hopes that you have been taking notes in reading this book. If you have, please refer to the many ways that the first-person singular pronoun
I
is used. Maybe you have skipped or forgotten these earlier chapters but feel as though you can take the Advanced Placement Test on I-word usage. And you can. Please go to the following website and take the one-minute
I
exam: www.SecretLifeOfPronouns.com/itest. It might be a good idea for those who have taken notes to do so as well.

The ten-item I-test has now been completed by well over two thousand people and demonstrates that very few people know who uses the word
I
. In fact, Ph.D.s in linguistics do about the same on the test as high school graduates, averaging around five correct answers out of ten. If you didn’t do well on the exam, you are in very good company.

The word
I
is the prototypical stealth word. It is the most commonly used word in spoken English and we rarely register it when it is used by us or other people. Because people think that I-words must reflect self-confidence or arrogance, they assume that people who are self-confident must use I-words all the time.

Obama is a perfect case study. Within days of his election in 2008, pundits—especially those who didn’t support him—started noting that he used the word
I
all the time. Various media outlets reported that Obama’s press conferences, speeches, and informal interviews were teeming with I-words. A long list of noteworthy news analysts such as George Will, English scholars including Stanley Fish, and even occasional presidential speechwriters such as Peggy Noonan pointed out Obama’s incessant use of I-words. Some of their articles on the topic were published in highly respected outlets that usually have diligent fact-checkers—the
Washington Post
, the
New York Times
.

The only problem is that no one bothered to count Obama’s use of I-words or compare them with anyone else’s. As you can see in the graph on the next page, Obama has distinguished himself as the
lowest
I-word user of any of the modern presidents. Analyses of his speeches reveal the same pattern. When Obama talks, he tends to avoid pronouns in general and I-words in particular.

If Barack Obama uses fewer I-words than any president in memory, why do very smart people think just the opposite? The problem may lie in the ways we naturally process information. First, as we have found with the I-test, most people believe that those who are the most self-confident use I-words at much higher rates than insecure or humble people. If we think that someone is arrogant, our brains will be searching for evidence to confirm our beliefs. Whenever the presumed arrogant person uses the word
I
, our brains take note—ahhh, additional proof that the person is arrogant. It is not coincidental that the commentators who have crowed the loudest about Obama’s obnoxious use of I-words are people who do not share his political views.

Use of first-person singular pronouns in press conferences as a function of total words.

There is another story as well. Obama’s impressively low use of I-words says something about him: He
is
self-confident. In an interview on National Public Radio’s
Weekend Edition
on August 8, 2009, Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson were asked about their book,
The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election
. Looking back over his distinguished political reporting career studying presidents since Eisenhower, Johnson noted that Obama is “the single most self-confident of all the presidents” he had ever seen.

Obama’s use of pronouns supports Johnson’s view. Since his election, Obama has remained consistent in using relatively few I-words compared to other modern U.S. presidents. Contrary to pronouncements by media experts, Obama is neither “inordinately fond” of first-person singular pronouns (as George Will wrote) nor exhibiting “the full emergence of a note of … imperial possession” (to quote Stanley Fish). Instead, Obama’s language suggests self-assurance and, at the same time, an emotional distance.

AVERTING YOUR I’S FOR ATTACKS AND WARS

I-words track where people pay attention. If people are self-focused, insecure, or self-effacing, they tend to use first-person singular pronouns at high rates. If confident, focused on a task of some kind, or lying, their rates of using I-words drop. Rarely do we get samples of real-world spoken language from people on a daily basis over several years to be able to track fluctuations in their attentional focus and thinking patterns. Recent U.S. presidents, especially George W. Bush, have proven to be an exception. Unlike most of his predecessors, Bush met with the press an extraordinary number of times. During his first four-year term in office, at least 360 separate press conferences or press gatherings were transcribed and posted on the WhiteHouse.gov website. By analyzing his use of I-words in his answers to questions, we could determine how he was thinking in light of ongoing political and social events.

Bush’s presidency will likely be fodder for historical analyses for generations. The prodigal son of the forty-first president, he was generally thought to be a warm and charming man but without a clear vision of what he wanted to accomplish as president. Bush’s tenure as president was more tumultuous than most. Nine months into his presidency, operatives working with Osama bin Laden attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon, killing over three thousand people. Less than a month later, on October 7, 2001, Bush directed an attack that toppled the government of Afghanistan in a futile hunt for bin Laden. In his most controversial act as president, Bush turned his sights on Iraq and, arguing that the country harbored weapons of mass destruction, launched a full-scale invasion in March 2003. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found and the United States and its allies continue the occupation of Iraq to this day. His second term in office, which will not be discussed here, also had its problems, including the destruction of New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina, the mounting turmoil in occupied Iraq, and the beginning of the global economic meltdown.

Overlaying the actions of Bush was his personality. Many considered him to be relatively transparent, sometimes exhibiting boyish delight, petulance, defensiveness, and compassion. In reading the transcripts of his press conferences, the different sides of his personality often emerge even when he was responding to a single question. No matter what your political persuasion, the transcripts reveal a man both warm and charming and, occasionally, arrogant and mean.

Three interconnected events defined his first term. The first was the 9/11 attacks. As noted in the last chapter, within a matter of days he went from being tolerated to being adored by the American population. The second defining event, which the world did not directly witness, was his decision to invade Iraq. And the third was the actual invasion in March 2003. The graph on the next page charts Bush’s use of I-words in his press conferences on a monthly basis. Each month, he typically spoke to the press six to eight times, uttering around a thousand words during each press conference. As is apparent, his use of I-words dropped during his first three months in office. In fact, this happens with most new presidents (although not Barack Obama). Starting the job is generally an intimidating experience that takes a few weeks to get used to.

The first dramatic drop in I-word use occurred immediately after the 9/11 attacks. Bush, like the majority of Americans, curtailed his use of
I
’s and increased in his use of we-words. The effect of the attacks on him was large, and over the next few months, his attention was focused on a number of pressing matters—the invasion of Afghanistan, the anthrax attacks, and attempting to reorient the government to deal with terrorism. You will note that after November 2001, his use of I-words gradually increases most months.