The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [118]
Some of these differences may be psychologically important but most probably aren’t. The person who ends most e-mails with “Sincerely” may do this just because they were told to do so when they were younger. Even though these variations may not say anything about your conflicts with your mother when you were an infant, they still mark you. That is, they are part of your general writing style that makes you stand out from everyone else. And that is the interesting story. All of the language features we can measure can help to identify you.
THE CASE OF THE FEDERALIST PAPERS
In 1787 and 1788, a series of eighty-five essays were published in pamphlets and newspapers across the American colonies in an attempt to sway people to support the proposed document that would become the U.S. Constitution. Published anonymously under the name Publius, the papers discussed a wide range of topics, including the role of the presidency, taxation, state versus federal power, etc. Even at the time, many knew that Publius was not a single person but, instead, James Madison (who would become the fourth president), Alexander Hamilton (the first secretary of the treasury), and John Jay (the first chief justice of the Supreme Court).
In the years that followed, the authorship of seventy-four of the essays gradually became known. Madison wrote fifteen, Hamilton fifty-one, Jay five, and Madison and Hamilton jointly wrote three of the articles. The authorship of the remaining eleven was never determined and has been a source of speculation ever since. The first serious attempt to identify the author of the eleven papers was undertaken by historian Douglass Adair as part of his dissertation in 1943. Adair’s historical analysis deduced that all eleven anonymous essays had been written by James Madison.
The debate resurfaced in 1964 when statisticians Frederick Mosteller and David Wallace introduced a new way to analyze words. By focusing on a small number of function words, they concluded that Adair was indeed correct because their elegant statistical models pointed to Madison as the likely author. Since then, identifying the anonymous authors of the Federalist Papers has become something of a sport whenever new language analysis methods are developed.
I am proud to announce the New Official Findings. Historians, prepare your quills.
Function Word Analyses
Using similar methods to those of Mosteller and Wallace, we find the same effects. The anonymous eleven cases all use pronouns, prepositions, and other stealth words in ways similar to James Madison. Case closed?
Not so fast. Other statisticians have discovered a small problem that exists with the investigation of our founding fathers’ function words. Since Mosteller and Wallace, another technique has been devised that is called cross-validation. The idea is to examine each of the original essays individually as if they were anonymously written. In other words, we pull one of the known essays out of the stack and then develop a computer model based on the remaining essays to try to determine who wrote the essay we pulled out. It’s a marvelous method because we are determining results about a question whose answer we already know. If our cross-validation analyses successfully guess who wrote all of the known essay writers, we can place a tremendous amount of trust in our research methods.
Heartbreak city. The cross-validation results suggest that Mosteller and Wallace might have been wrong. About 14 percent of the known essays are not classified correctly based on function words. This is a serious problem. If the computer can’t tell us what we already know with extremely high accuracy, we have to be careful in interpreting the results from essays about which we don’t know the author.
Punctuation Analyses
Recall that people’s use of punctuation can reveal authorship in many cases. Using similar