The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [0]
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
Chapter 1
Discovering the Secret Life of the Most Forgettable Words
Chapter 2
Ignoring the Content, Celebrating the Style
Chapter 3
The Words of Sex, Age, and Power
Chapter 4
Personality: Finding the Person Within
Chapter 5
Emotion Detection
Chapter 6
Lying Words
Chapter 7
The Language of Status, Power, and Leadership
Chapter 8
The Language of Love
Chapter 9
Seeing Groups, Companies, and Communities Through Their Words
Chapter 10
Word Sleuthing
Notes
Footnote
Bibliography and References
APPENDIX
A Handy Guide for Spotting and Interpreting Function Words in the Wild
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Imprint
For you
and for us
and where we have been
and where we will go.
Preface
STOP FOR A minute and think about your last conversation, e-mail, or text message. You think you said something about dinner plans, your laundry, a strategy for the next sales meeting. And you probably did. But at the same time, you said much, much more. The precise words you used to communicate your message revealed more about you than you can imagine.
You, a, am, to, I, but, the, for, not …
Pronouns, articles, prepositions, and a handful of other small, stealthy words reveal parts of your personality, thinking style, emotional state, and connections with others. These words, typically called function words, account for less than one-tenth of 1 percent of your vocabulary but make up almost 60 percent of the words you use.* Your brain is not wired to notice them but if you pay close attention, you will start to see their subtle power.
Function words behave differently than you might think. For example, the most commonly used word in spoken English, I, is used at far higher rates by followers than by leaders, truth-tellers than liars. People who use high rates of articles—a, an, the—do better in college than low users. And if you want to find your true love, compare the ways you use function words with that of your prospective partners.
Although this book focuses on function words, it really isn’t about parts of speech at all. Rather, it’s about how these words serve as windows into people’s personalities and social connections. My training and early research bridged the areas of social, personality, clinical, and health psychology. Only through some accidental discoveries did I even notice the existence of these stealth words.
At first, the study of function words was a side venture. But as I delved more deeply into the topic, I started making some unexpected connections to leadership, mental health, brain function, and other issues. Soon, my students and I were spending time with computer engineers, linguists, FBI agents, lawyers, doctors, and marketing gurus, and with colleagues in history, political science, communications, and even accounting. And, most recently, we have been swept up in the social media frenzy—applying our ideas and methods to Twitter, Facebook, online dating, blogging, instant messaging, e-mail, and even the occasional old-fashioned telephone call.
This book is a little like a travel guide. It is organized around some of my favorite topics in psychology and the social sciences—personality, gender, deception, leadership, love, history, politics, and groups. The goal is to show how the analysis of function words can lead to new insights in each of these topics. At the same time, I want you to appreciate ways of thinking about and analyzing language. No matter what your personal or professional interest, I hope you come to see the world differently and can use this knowledge to better understand yourself and others.
A REVOLUTION IS under way in the analysis of language that will have a profound effect on the social sciences and humanities. The words that people generate in their lifetimes are like fingerprints. Increasingly, these words can be used to establish people’s identities and even their backgrounds. Language use, especially the use of function words, can signal people’s social networks and the roles they play