The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [122]
Other new methods examine parts of speech, syntax, cohesiveness of sentences and paragraphs—all using increasingly sophisticated mathematical solutions. The time is not too far away where the author of most any extended language sample will be identifiable.
WORDS AS CLUES TO POLITICAL AND HISTORICAL EVENTS
It comes as no news to historians and literary scholars that the primary key to understanding people or works of the past is the study of the written word. Most scholars, however, rely primarily on their own reading of historical works rather than computerized text analyses. This has been changing over the last few years. One area that has been particularly innovative is political science. Partly because of the availability of transcribed speeches, interviews, newspaper and online articles, newscasts, and even letters to the editor, researchers have been able to tap the appeal of political candidates and people’s responses to them.
One of the pioneers in the field, Roderick Hart, has published a series of groundbreaking books and articles that help explain how the results of important historical elections—such as the race between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole—were presaged by the ways the candidates used words in their speeches. He also collected hundreds of letters to the editors in newspapers across the United States and was able to track the perceptions of voters. Extending Hart’s work, we can begin to reinterpret historical events by analyzing the words of all the historical players who leave behind trails of words.
WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE? TRYING TO FIGURE OUT U.S. PRESIDENTS
Watch any news source—television, Internet, newspaper, magazine—and much of the coverage is devoted to understanding the thinking of the current, future, and past presidents. If it’s the middle of an election cycle, pundits make predictions about how each of the candidates would perform if elected. If a president has recently been elected or reelected, we want to know what he or she will try to accomplish in the months and years ahead. And even after the president has stepped down, pundits continue to ask, “What was he thinking? Why did he do that?”
In one of the most impressive books on the psychology of politics, The Political Brain, researcher Drew Westen argues that the most successful politicians are the ones who can emotionally connect with the electorate. Logic, intelligence, and reason are certainly very fine qualities but when the voter enters the ballot box, it is the social and emotional dimensions of the campaign that usually drive the election.
We resonate with people who seem to be attentive and respectful to others and, at the same time, exhibit their emotions in a genuine way. Social-emotional styles can be detected through body language, tone of voice, and, of course, words. For presidents and presidential candidates, we have ample opportunity to evaluate social-emotional style through speeches, interviews, pictures, and videos of their interacting with their families and others. From a language perspective, presidents leave a stream of words like no other humans.
A fairly simple way to measure social-emotional styles is to count how often personal pronouns and emotion words are used. As a general rule, people who are self-reflective and who are interested in others will use all types of personal pronouns at high rates—including I, we, you, she, and they. Similarly, people are viewed as more emotionally present if they use emotion words—both positive and negative—than if they don’t. By analyzing pronouns and emotion words in the speeches of presidents, we can begin to get a sense of their general social-emotional tone.
At most, U.S. presidents give inaugural addresses once every four years. However, most submit a State of the Union message to Congress every year that they are in office. State of the Union messages began with George Washington in 1790. Although Washington and John Adams presented the message in speeches