The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [104]
Speed-dating is the perfect place to start. Think back to the speed-dating project in the last chapter where strangers met for ten consecutive four-minute “dates” back-to-back. Even in these ridiculously short meetings, people’s use of we- and I-words changed quickly and predictably. Minute-by-minute in the brief speed-dating sessions, I-words for both people dropped and we-words increased.
The I-drop/we-jump effect can be seen far outside the dating context. In some studies, students visit a psychology laboratory and end up talking to a complete stranger for fifteen minutes in a get-to-know-you setting. In the first five minutes, both participants typically talk a little about their backgrounds, their majors, and where they live. Because both people are describing themselves, they tend to use I-words at relatively high rates. During the next five minutes, they talk less about themselves as they begin to establish common ground between them. By the final five minutes, their use of I-words drops between 10 and 50 percent compared to their starting levels. At the same time, their use of we-words increases anywhere from 20 to 200 percent. The patterns are even stronger in online get-to-know-you chats between two strangers.
The same shifts occur in larger groups. In a business school experiment with four-person groups, people worked on a complex group-decision task for thirty minutes. Same results: People in the groups decreased their I-word usage by 19 percent and increased their we-words by 39 percent from the first ten minutes to the last ten minutes.
More interesting are shifts in we- and I-words in real-world groups that last over hours, days, months, and even years. The airline cockpit project discussed earlier found similar patterns. The longer a crew is together, the more the group uses we-words.
And the I-drop/we-jump effect extends to bigger groups over much larger time frames. One project involved eighteen engineers, economists, and computer experts working on a complex online national defense project over almost two years. Another included around twenty professional therapists who met twice a year for three years as part of their professional training. Another project tracked the lyrics of the Beatles over their ten years of singing together. For all these groups, I-word usage dropped month by month, year by year, just as we-word use increased.
What does all this mean? The more time we spend with other people, the more our identity becomes fused with them. We may not necessarily like or trust them but as our history becomes intertwined, we see ourselves as part of the same group. An interesting corollary of this phenomenon happens as we age. By and large, the older we get, the more time we have spent with virtually everyone around us. One might even predict that older people would use fewer I-words and more we-words than when they were younger. And it’s true. In a study of language use among almost three thousand people, those over the age of seventy used 54 percent more we-words and 79 percent fewer I-words than adolescents.
BRINGING “US” TOGETHER: WHEN EVENTS CREATE GROUP IDENTITY
Gradually adopting the identity of a group is a natural process that we rarely notice. One minute in a conversation our opinions are sprinkled with I and the next with we. It just happens. There are other times, however, when the ways we identify with a group change quickly and dramatically.
The simplest examples can be seen with our allegiances to sports teams. One of the most clever social psychology experiments to demonstrate this was run in the mid-1970s by Robert Cialdini and his colleagues. Students who were attending universities with top-ranked football teams were called in the middle of football season as part of a survey purportedly dealing with campus issues. In the previous weeks, their home football teams had won a major game but also had lost another. After a few preliminary questions, the interviewer asked about one of the two pivotal games in the season, “Can you tell me the outcome of that game?