The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [120]
In their first four years together, their songs brimmed with optimism, anger, and sexuality. Their thinking was simple, self-absorbed, and very much in the here and now. In the last years of the band, the group’s lyrics became more complex, more psychologically distant, and far less positive. Particularly telling was the drop in the use of I-words from almost 14 percent during their first years together to only 7 percent in their last three years. Lyrics also provide a window into the personalities of the various songwriters within a group. Although John Lennon and Paul McCartney had an agreement that all of their songs would include both men as authors, the order of authorship and extensive interviews has provided historians with a solid, albeit not perfect, record about who wrote what. Between the two, Lennon is credited as the primary writer for seventy-eight songs, McCartney for sixty-seven, and another fifteen songs are considered true collaborations where both were closely involved in the lyrics.
In the popular press, John Lennon was generally portrayed as the creative intellectual and McCartney as the melodic, upbeat tunesmith. The analyses of their lyrics paint a different picture. Lennon did use slightly more negative emotion words in his songs than McCartney, but the two were virtually identical in their use of positive emotions, linguistic complexity, and self-reflection. Interestingly, McCartney’s songs more often focused on couples—as can be seen in his higher use of we-words—than did Lennon’s.
Who was the more creative or varied in his lyric-writing abilities? We can actually test this by seeing how the lyrics from different songs are mathematically similar—both in terms of content as well as linguistic style. Whereas the popular press usually assumed that Lennon was the creative and stylistically variable writer, the numbers clearly support McCartney. Across his career as a Beatle, Paul McCartney proved to be far more flexible and varied both in terms of his writing style and also in the content of his lyrics.
And let’s not forget George Harrison, the quiet, spiritual Beatle who wrote about twenty-five songs, especially in the last years of the Beatles. Although somewhat more cognitively complex in his words than either McCartney or Lennon, he was the least flexible in his writing. In other words, both the content and style of his lyrics were more predictable from song to song. These same types of analyses also demonstrated that Harrison was more influenced in his songwriting style by Lennon than by McCartney.
DOES COLLABORATION RESULT IN AVERAGE OR SYNERGISTIC RESULTS?
Collaborations between writers is a funny business. When two people work together, in John Lennon’s words, “eyeball to eyeball,” do they produce something that is the average of their usual styles or is the result something completely different than either could have written alone? Language analyses can answer this question for both the Beatles and the Federalist Papers. Recall that Lennon and McCartney had very close collaborations on 15 of their 160 songs. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison jointly wrote three Federalist Papers.
Across the various dimensions of language and even punctuation, we can calculate what percentage of the time the collaboration produces an effect that is the average of the two collaborators working on their own. There are three clear hypotheses:
• Just-like-another-member-of-the-team hypothesis. Collaborative writing projects produce language that is similar to that produced by a single person writing alone. Sometimes the work will use words like one author and other times like the other author.
• The average-person hypothesis. More interesting is that collaborations produce language