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• Hundreds of essays of college students in New Orleans four months after Hurricane Katrina destroyed the city.

• Hundreds of interviews and surveys of people across Spain in the weeks after the March 11, 2004, Madrid subway bombings.

• Google Internet searches in England following the London underground bombings in 2005, Pakistan after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in 2007, India after the attacks in Mumbai in 2008, and Poland after the airline crash that killed the country’s president and other leaders in 2010, which all showed comparable trends.

THE USE OF we-words and the sense of group solidarity is not something that just occurs when people are threatened. Much like the football example, people embrace their group identity when it succeeds or behaves admirably. Google Labs has developed a marvelous application called Google Trends (www.google.com/trends) that allows users to track the words people use when searching the Internet. With it, anyone can see how particular cities, states, or countries use words over time. Using Google Trends, it is easy to come up with examples of increased we-word use during times of cultural pride. Nationwide, use of we-words increased in the United States following the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and in Britain after the success of the Conservatives in their 2010 national election. In Canada, use of we-words spiked in February 2010, during the Winter Olympics, which it hosted.

THE IMPORTANCE AND LIMITS OF GROUP IDENTITY

We-words tell us about group identity. By analyzing them closely, it is possible to get a sense of the speakers’ connections with others. Knowing if someone feels that they are an integral part of a marriage, a family, their company, their community, or their country is valuable information. In fact, many psychologists and sociologists have devoted their careers to understanding group identity. People who identify with a group are simply more loyal to it. They tend to rely on people in their group and distrust people outside it. Group identity has frequently been associated with stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. Many family feuds, regional battles, instances of genocide, and world wars have been fought where group identities served as the rallying cries.

If you are interested in groups and how they work, knowing about the people’s identities is a good first step. But it’s only part of the story. Just because I am a member of various types of groups doesn’t mean that I necessarily like all the people in each group, would work well with them, or would even like to eat lunch with them. To really understand how groups work, it is important to track how they communicate with each other.

BEYOND GROUP IDENTITY: CAPTURING GROUP DYNAMICS

It’s easy to forget that the reason language evolved was so we could communicate with other people. To appreciate how a group functions, look at how members of the group interact with one another. When people in the group are talking, are other members of the group listening? When they are working on problems together, do they tend to talk in similar ways?

In the chapter dealing with close relationships, the topic of language style matching, or LSM, was discussed. LSM measures if two people are in synch with one another by looking at how similarly they use stealth words—personal pronouns, articles, auxiliary verbs, and the like. The more similarly two members of a couple use stealth words when talking, e-mailing, or IMing, the more the couple is “clicking” and the more likely the couple will still be together a few months later.

As with couples, all groups can vary in the degree to which they are cohesive, in synch, or clicking. You may have recently had dinner with a group of friends and marveled at how your group was in perfect harmony. Meeting again a week later, the same group may have been completely out of step for no apparent reason. Most of us have had similar ups and downs with group meetings at work, at home, or in online chats. By measuring each person’s relative