The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [109]
As you look at the table that lists the ten most and least linguistically cohesive communities, the difference between them may not be immediately obvious. It’s not a matter of north versus south, liberal versus conservative, rich versus poor, or even a function of the towns’ racial makeup, age distribution, or migration into or out of the city. Rather, one of the most striking differences between the two lists is that the most cohesive communities have higher and more equal income distributions than the least cohesive. Using a statistic called a Gini coefficient, demographers can determine the degree to which wealth is spread around in any given city, state, or country. Cities where the residents use language in similar ways tend to be communities that are more similar in terms of their incomes. The bigger the split between the rich and poor of a community, the more varied their writing styles for Craigslist ads.
RANKING OF COMMUNITIES BY LANGUAGE STYLE MATCHING STATISTICS FOR CRAIGSLIST ADS
MOST LINGUISTICALLY COHESIVE (TOP 10)
LEAST LINGUISTICALLY COHESIVE (BOTTOM 10)
Portland, Oregon
Bakersfield, California
Salt Lake City, Utah
Greensboro, North Carolina
Raleigh, North Carolina
Louisville, Kentucky
Birmingham, Alabama
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Rochester, New York
Dayton, Ohio
Hartford, Connecticut
El Paso, Texas
New Orleans, Louisiana
Jacksonville, Florida
Richmond, Virginia
Columbia, South Carolina
Worcester, Massachusetts
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Tucson, Arizona
Albany, New York
Note: Cohesiveness is calculated by the degree to which people in the various communities used function words at comparable levels in their Craigslist ads.
You can see why the Gini statistic is important. In communities where there is a much larger split between the rich and the poor, it’s less likely that the different elements of the city will interact. As the range of income within a town becomes smaller, the residents will likely have more in common with one another and should talk more with others. Not coincidentally, they should also have more objects and services that others in the community would want to exchange on Craigslist.
The magic of this project is not about the links between income distributions and social patterns in cities. Rather, it shows how words in the most mundane of places can reveal important information about a community’s social ties. All groups, whether families, work groups, companies, or entire cities, leave trails of their social and psychological lives behind in the words their members use in communicating with each other. Words are one of the human-made elements that connect our thoughts and ideas across people. By tracking our words, we get a sense of the social fabric.
GROUP SPOTTING: HOW WORDS REVEAL WHAT A GROUP IS DOING AND WHERE IT IS
Consider what we know so far. Individuals use words—especially pronouns—to signify their sense of belongingness to a wide range of ever-shifting groups. Whereas we-ness measures reflect feelings of group identity, synchrony measures, such as language style matching, tap a shared worldview by the group members.
Taken together, the various findings point to the shared mind-set of most groups. Within any group—whether a family, school, work team, or even a community—people soon start talking alike. In small groups, they discuss the same topics with each other, and in a sense, it isn’t too shocking that their function words are similar. But as groups get larger and not everyone necessarily talks with everyone else, it is impressive that the group still maintains its own linguistic style.
Sociolinguists would not be surprised that large groups share similar linguistic styles. There is now a generation of important research tracking how neighborhoods, cities, and entire