The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [107]
SMALL WORKING GROUPS: SOLIDARITY AND PRODUCTIVITY
Imagine that you are thrown into a work group that must come up with a solution to a complex task. As part of a business school exercise, your group must decide if it would be a good investment to buy LuProds Manufacturing Company. LuProds, you learn, has designed a new gear system for bicycles that could revolutionize the bicycle business. No one in your five-person work group knows anything about LuProds or the bicycle business. Over the next four hours, however, your group must write a report that lays out your recommendations backed up with solid information. To add to the pressure, there are ten other groups doing the same task and it is imperative that your group’s performance is among the best.
To succeed on a task like this, each group member must take on an independent task. Someone must learn something about the bicycle business, the gear business, the economic history of LuProds, its competitors, the quality of LuProds’s management team, and potential other LuProds buyers. The team members must work closely together in a coordinated way to come up with an overall recommendation based on all the information available.
What makes for a good working group? Even within the first few minutes of your group being together, we can begin to predict how it will do on the task. This may not surprise you but the ways the group members use function words with each other is one of the best predictors. Variations of this project have been run in business schools and psychology departments around the world. In two studies, my colleagues and I calculated style matching scores for each person in the group. So, for example, if there were five people in the group, we could determine the degree to which each of the five people matched with the average of everyone else in the group. The average style matching, or LSM, score for each group tapped the degree to which the entire group was talking in similar ways. The more group members talked alike, the more cohesive the group. In other words, higher LSM scores reflected more tightly knit groups.
More important, style matching was related to how well the group performed. If people in a group are using similar function words at similar rates, the team performs better. Even before the groups turned in their answers, our language analyses could make reasonable predictions about the ultimate success of the different groups. At least in controlled laboratory settings, the use of stealth words such as pronouns and prepositions among the people in the group showed that the participants were all on the same page—they all shared common assumptions about the task and what needed to be done.
LARGER REAL-WORLD GROUPS: WIKIPEDIA
Lab studies of group behavior tell us how people might behave in more natural settings. How many times in your life will you be in a group with four twenty-year-olds making a major business decision on a topic you know nothing about over a four-hour period? Does language style matching predict success in actual real-world groups? The answer is in Wikipedia.
Created in 2001, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia-like information source that has several million articles. Many of the articles are expertly written and have been carefully edited by dozens, sometimes hundreds of people. For the most commonly read articles, an elaborate informal review takes place. Often, a single person will begin an article on a particular topic. If it is a topic of interest, others will visit the site and frequently make changes to the original article. In many ways, a Wikipedia article is really two articles. The casual visitor sees only the final product. However, by clicking on the “discussion” tab, it is possible to find conversations among the various contributors. These interactions are often quite professional, sometimes detailed and thorough, but occasionally downright rude and