The Secret Life of Pronouns (35 page)

Drug and alcohol abuse takes a massive toll on society. One way that many states have attempted to curb and treat abuse is by establishing therapeutic communities—which are essentially treatment prisons where people are given the opportunity to undergo intensive drug and alcohol rehabilitation over several months after they have been convicted of a drug-related crime. If the participants successfully complete the program and stay drug- or alcohol-free for a specified time after they are released, their records are usually expunged. Most therapeutic communities require intensive group therapy along with writing exercises.

One of my former graduate students, Anne Vano, conducted an ambitious project to learn if the ways women wrote within a treatment facility might predict their lives once they were released from prison. Working with a single therapeutic community, Anne collected and transcribed writing samples from about 120 women. The writing samples she focused on were essays that the women wrote within about a week of their being released. The essays were expected to be personal and heartfelt. In the months afterward, Anne worked with the warden’s office to collect follow-up information, such as the women’s abilities to maintain jobs and whether or not they violated their parole or were re-arrested.

The stories the women wrote were powerful by any measure. They often described instances of being the victims of physical and sexual abuse and, at the same time, detailed their own deplorable behaviors toward others, such as their children. They often expressed great anxiety about their leaving the prison to return to an uncertain home life.

After leaving the prison, 15 percent of the 120 women were arrested and another 10 percent jumped parole four months after the program was completed. About 65 percent were holding down a steady job.

Interestingly, the way the women wrote in their final essay modestly predicted whether they were functioning effectively four months later. The two language dimensions that were most closely associated with therapeutic success were:

•  a high social-emotional style, which includes use of personal pronouns and emotion words

•  a high rate of positive emotion words

The tasks for the women on leaving the therapeutic community were to integrate into new jobs and into a functioning social network. Categorical and dynamic thinking were simply irrelevant dimensions for these women. To survive in their worlds outside prison they needed to be aware of others and themselves. It appears that the social-emotional and optimistic styles they exhibited in their writings were skills that could serve them well on the outside.

IT’S HARD TO imagine two studies more different than the college admissions and therapeutic community projects. Categorical thinking predicts better college grades for one group; social-emotional language predicts lower re-arrest rates in another. Different aspects of language are linked to different parts of our lives.

What I love about these two studies—and, in fact, all of the projects in this book—is that stealth words rearrange themselves in different configurations to predict a broad array of behaviors. For example, using language associated with high social-emotional style can help keep you out of prison and contribute to your being elected president and maybe provide some of the skills needed to write successful top-selling love songs.

Depending on the context, using I-words at high rates may signal insecurity, honesty, and depression proneness but also that you aren’t planning on declaring war any time in the near future. Using I-words at low rates, on the other hand, may get you into college and boost your grade-point average but may hurt your chances of making close friends.

It’s important to return to a theme that has bubbled up several times. The words related to social and psychological states are reflections of those states—not causes. They are telling us what is going on inside people’s heads. The people who use high rates of personal pronouns and emotion words just prior to their release from prison are approaching their writing topic in a social-emotional way. It’s unknown if the treatment program they were immersed in actually pushed them to think social-emotionally. It is also impossible to know if the words in their writing samples directly affected their behaviors once they were released. And it’s even more unlikely that if they had forced themselves to use these words in their essays (thinking it might be good for them) it would have influenced their lives outside the prison gates at all.

We are standing on the threshold of a new world. Think of the many applications that the computer analysis of function words has opened up. By analyzing inaugural speeches or ancestral diaries, we are able to know the influential writers or speakers of our past. We can also start to answer some of the burning psychological questions we have in our everyday lives. We can gain insight into how our online dating prospects view us, distinguish which rap artists are honest about being true gangsters, diagnose if our therapists are just as depressed as we are, or expose which of our colleagues secretly think they are highest in status.

Function words can help us know our worlds just a little better. From author identification that can help in catching criminals or in identifying historical authors, to understanding the thinking of presidents or tyrants, to predicting how people might behave in the future, function words are clues about the human psyche. Most promising, however, is that by looking at our own function words, we can begin to understand ourselves better.

Notes

In addition to the extensive comments and feedback from Cindy Chung, Sam Gosling, and Ruth Pennebaker, a number of other people read all or parts of the manuscript, including David Beaver, Molly Ireland, Jeff Hancock, Maureen O’Sullivan, Rich Slatcher, and Yla Tausczik. Thank you all.

PREFACE

ix    Estimates of the number of words in the average person’s vocabulary range from thirty thousand to a hundred thousand. Part of the problem is in the definition of a word. For example, do you count singular and plural? Different spellings of the same word? How about a word that you might use that isn’t in the dictionary, such as “fancify” (as in, to make something fancy)? For a discussion of the number of function words, see Chung and Pennebaker (2007).

x    One of the most exciting breakthroughs in language analysis is the recent release of the Google Books corpus. In a stunning article by Jean-Baptiste Michel and his colleagues in the journal
Science
, the authors analyzed the words from over five million books, or 4 percent of all the books that have ever been printed. Focusing on language use over the last two hundred years, the authors were able to examine a wide range of historical trends. For example, how frequently has Freud or Darwin been mentioned? How long does fame last? How has language been evolving?

I urge you to try out Google Labs’ program Books Ngram Viewer at ngrams.googlelabs.com/. The study of history will never be the same.

xi    Some of the best popular books on language that combine a rich knowledge of language with basic social and psychological questions include Goffman’s
Forms of Talk
, Lakoff and Johnson’s
Metaphors We Live By
, George Miller’s
The Science of Words
, Pinker’s
The Language Instinct
, Tannen’s
You Just Don’t Understand
, and Wierzbicka’s
Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words
.

CHAPTER 1: DISCOVERING THE SECRET LIFE OF THE MOST FORGETTABLE WORDS

3    The website Analyzewords.com is one of several experimental sites that we have been developing. This one was the result of a collaboration among Chris Wilson, a writer at Slate.com; my daughter, Teal Pennebaker, who is a world-class expert on social media; and my longtime computer guru and collaborator Roger Booth. The program analyzes the recent history of anyone’s Twitter posts. Using algorithms we have developed over several years of studying language and personality, we are able to estimate personality profiles by language use. As with all experimental systems, please don’t take the results too seriously.

4    The expressive writing research has a rich history. The basic idea is that if people are asked to write about a traumatic experience for fifteen to twenty minutes a day for three or four consecutive days, they later show improvements in physical and mental health compared to others who have been asked to write about superficial topics. To get a better sense of the literature, see my popular book
Opening Up
as well as articles by Frattaroli (2006) and Pennebaker and Chung (2011). For a list of articles, including many that you can read for free, go to the publications link on my website, www.psy.utexas.edu/pennebaker.

6    For technical information about the development of the LIWC program, see the articles associated with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count on the publications link of my website, www.psy.utexas.edu/pennebaker. The LIWC program is commercially available from www.liwc.net. All profits from the sales of the program are returned to the University of Texas at Austin graduate program in the Department of Psychology.

LIWC is by no means the only text analysis program around. Dozens of different programs are now available. Programs that are particularly useful for people interested in language and psychology include:

Art Graesser’s Coh-Metrix program (cohmetrix.memphis.edu), which calculates the degree to which any groups of texts are readable and coherent.

Rod Hart’s DICTION program (www.dictionsoftware.com) was designed to capture the verbal tone of messages, with particular focus on political speeches.

Tom Landauer’s Latent Semantic Analysis (lsa.colorado.edu) is a suite of programs that allows people to compare the similarity of any texts with other texts.

Mike Scott’s Wordsmith program (www.lexically.net) is a wonderful all-purpose word analysis tool. Although not tailored for advanced psychological analyses, it is a nice word counting system.

10–12    The findings concerning positive emotions, negative emotions, and change in cognitive words were first published in Pennebaker, Mayne, and Francis in 1997. See also Moore and Brody (2009) and Graham, Glaser, Loving, Malarkey, Stowell, and Kiecolt-Glaser (2009).

12–13    The findings on pronouns and changing perspectives were based on an article by Sherlock Campbell and me, published in 2003.

13    One of the more interesting discoveries about expressive writing was reported in an important paper by Youngsuk Kim. In her expressive writing project, bilingual Korean-English and Spanish-English students wrote either in their native language, second language, or both. Youngsuk had all participants wear a portable tape recorder for two days prior to writing and, again, a month after the writing experiment. Compared to people who did not write, participants who wrote about emotional upheavals spent more time with others, talked more, and laughed more. Although the effects were modest, those who wrote in both their native and learned languages tended to benefit the most.

14    Cheryl Hughes and Martha Francis were the first two students to earn doctoral degrees in psychology at Southern Methodist University. The results of Hughes’s attempts to change people’s thinking by influencing their word choice were the basis of her doctoral dissertation in 1994. More recently, Yi-Tai Seih, Cindy Chung, and I asked people to write in either the first person (as if they were simply describing their experience), second person (as if they were talking into a mirror), or third person (as if they were watching themselves in a movie) in their expressive writing. In another study, people were asked to change perspectives from essay to essay. To our surprise, people reported that writing in any perspective was helpful, as was switching perspectives. Our current thinking is that enforced perspective switching is probably good for some people and not others. Not the kind of groundbreaking conclusion we were looking for.

CHAPTER 2: IGNORING THE CONTENT, CELEBRATING THE STYLE

19    The drawing is from the
Thematic Apperception Test
by Henry A. Murray, Card 12F, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

20    Throughout this book, I include quotations from people who have been in my studies or classes, from text on the Internet, or even from conversations or e-mails from friends or family members. In all cases, all identifying information has been removed or altered.

22    In this book, the terms
style
,
function
, and
stealth words
are used interchangeably. They have many other names as well—
junk words
,
particles
, and
closed-class words
. Linguists tend to disagree about the precise definitions of each of these overlapping terms.

26    The table of function word usage rate is based on analyses from our own data representing language samples from over two thousand conversations, two hundred novels, twenty thousand blogs, and thousands of college student and adult writing samples. For more information, see Pennebaker, Chung, Ireland, Gonzales, and Booth (2007).

28    Political campaigns are wonderful to analyze. Presidential candidates are under the spotlight most every day, whether giving speeches, doing interviews, or simply talking with people on the street. Most of their words are transcribed, making it easy for text analysis experts to track language over the course of the campaign. For some analyses of the 2004 presidential election, see an article by Rich Slatcher, Cindy Chung, Lori Stone, and me. You might also be interested in a site that David Beaver (a linguist from the University of Texas), Art Graesser (cognitive scientist, University of Memphis), Jeff Hancock (communications expert, Cornell), and I have created devoted to political issues, www.wordwatchers.wordpress.com.

29    One of the finest books that discuss the roles of the brain and language is George Miller’s
The Science of Words
. It is the perfect introduction to the topic for someone without a great deal of background in the area.

31    The story of Phineas Gage is discussed in George Miller’s book. Alexander Luria described Pavlov’s experiences with his dogs in his classic 1973 book.

32–34    Knowing what pronouns and other words refer to within a given communication based on previous shared knowledge is called common ground. It is so central to communication that it has been studied across various fields and has been written about extensively in psycholinguistics by Herb Clark as a theory of common ground, in linguistics by David Beaver as presupposition theory, and in the cognitive sciences by Phil McCarthy and his colleagues as givenness/newness.

35–36    Unfortunately, the cross-language research is not covered in any detail in this book. My former student Nairán Ramírez-Esparza is discovering some remarkable changes in the ways people think as they switch from English to Spanish and vice versa. For example, bilingual speakers feel that they are more outgoing when speaking English and more reserved when speaking Spanish even though their behaviors show the opposite. Working with Cindy Chung and others, Nairán finds that the ways people think about a topic in Spanish are subtly different than the ways they think about it in English. See also work by Kashima and Kashima (1998).

I’m pretty certain that there is a legal requirement for anyone who writes about language to mention the Whorf Hypothesis (or, if you are an anthropologist, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis). In line with these regulations, the extreme version of the Whorf Hypothesis is that one’s language and vocabulary dictates one’s perception. So, for example, if I didn’t have a word for the color orange, I wouldn’t be able to perceive the color. Due to an interesting historical movement in psychology and linguistics, the Whorf Hypothesis was roundly dismissed, beginning in the 1960s. New and more interesting versions of the hypothesis keep returning. The research of Nairán, Lera Boroditsky, and many others is now showing that, in some cases, our language can direct our attention, thinking, and memory.

CHAPTER 3: THE WORDS OF SEX, AGE, AND POWER

40–44    The best summary of our research on sex differences and language is a paper by Matt Newman, Carla Groom, Lori Handelman, and me published in 2008.

41    When people sit in front of a mirror and complete a questionnaire, they use more words like
I
and
me
than when the mirror is not present (Davis and Brock, 1975). The nature of self-focus among women has been demonstrated in a series of studies by Barbara Frederickson, Tomi-Ann Roberts, and their colleagues. An interesting take on people’s stereotypes of the ways pronouns work has been shown by Wendi Gardner and her colleagues.

45    Ask any group of people in any culture and they will agree that women talk far more than men. A group of my former students Matthias Mehl, Simine Vazire, Nairán Ramírez, Rich Slatcher, and I ran six experiments in the United States and Mexico where we asked almost four hundred college students to wear a digital tape recorder for two to four days. Everything they said was later transcribed. Surprisingly, across all studies men and women spoke almost exactly the same number of words per day. It is very rare for a study that found absolutely nothing to be published, but the premier journal
Science
did so in 2007.

46–47    The blog project where we identified authors was conducted by Shlomo Argamon, Moshe Kopel, Jonathan Schler, and me in papers that came out in 2007 and 2009.

49–51    The script paper by Molly Ireland and me is currently under review.

57–60    In addition to the Pennebaker, Groom, Loew, and Dabbs article, see recent work by Jon Maner’s lab as well as by Robert Josephs and his colleagues dealing with testosterone and behavior.

60–63    As we get older, our personalities change. Richard Robins and his colleagues have shown higher self-esteem, John Loehlin and Nick Martin reported increases in emotional stability, and Seider et al. (2009) found greater use of relational pronouns with increasing age. Much of this section is based on an article by Pennebaker and Stone (2003).

67    In the last twenty years, research on social class and physical health has ballooned within the United States. Some excellent articles on the topic include papers by Edith Chen, Karen Matthews, and Thomas Boyce as well as a classic by Nancy Adler and her colleagues.

68–70    There have been virtually no scientifically sound studies tracking natural language use in the home among people of differing social classes. The Hart and Risley study is promising, as is an earlier one by Brandis and Henderson in 1970.

CHAPTER 4: PERSONALITY: FINDING THE PERSON WITHIN

76–82    Most of the initial work on personality and language was the result of a collaboration with Laura King. You can see the actual analyses by reading the Pennebaker and King (1999) paper. A number of people have expanded on this work, especially in how language is related to self-reported personality. Two great projects have been published, one by Francois Mairesse and colleagues and another by Tal Yarkoni. Psychologists Lisa Fast and David Funder, as well as Matthias Mehl, Sam Gosling, and I, have published on word use and personality. See also the creative work of Jon Oberlander, Alastair Gill, and Scott Nowson.

85–90    Cindy Chung’s insight into the Meaning Extraction Method, or MEM, is now being used by labs around the world. It essentially allows researchers to extract themes from text automatically. One of the slickest applications is in pulling out themes written in different languages. For example, we can have the computer analyze thousands of blogs in, say, Finnish. Using the MEM, we can pull out several themes that are popular in Finnish blogs. All we have to do at the end of the project is to find someone who speaks Finnish so that he or she can tell us what we have discovered. The first MEM paper was by Chung and Pennebaker (2008).