The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [123]
As you can see in the graph, several presidents were far more social-emotional than their predecessors. Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush used particularly high levels of personal pronouns and emotion words. James Monroe, Warren Harding, and Barack Obama all evidence significantly lower social-emotional ratings than those before them. In fact, it is interesting to see that George W. Bush is unquestionably the most social-emotional president in the history of the office and that Obama is currently the lowest since Richard Nixon.
Rate of social-emotional language by U.S. presidents in their annual State of the Union messages delivered to Congress. The numbers have been adjusted to control for written versus spoken presentations.
A State of the Union address is essentially a formal speech that could, in theory, be written by anyone. Its tone may reflect that of the president’s administration but it doesn’t necessarily tell us about the psychological makeup of the president. Fortunately, a more natural source of a president’s language now exists thanks to the popularity of press conferences. Beginning with FDR, press conferences evolved into freewheeling interactions between the press and president that were transcribed and saved.
From a psychologist’s perspective, press conferences are glorious. The members of the press variously try to cajole, befriend, challenge, and sometimes outrage the president. The press-president relationship is further complicated because both the press and the president desperately need each other to accomplish their somewhat different goals. Most important, interactions with the press are generally unscripted and allow us to monitor the presidents’ thoughts and emotions through the use of words.
Most presidents have only a small number of formal press conferences every year—usually between four and ten—more if there is a national crisis, fewer if they are being publically ridiculed or impeached. In addition to the formal press conferences, presidents often will talk with reporters on random occasions such as after introducing a foreign dignitary or while waiting for their car. Because most meetings with the press are recorded and transcribed, there are usually dozens of natural-language samples available for most presidents since the 1930s.
Interestingly, the ways presidents talk with the press are linguistically quite similar to their State of the Union addresses. As with his State of the Union speeches, George W. Bush emerges as the president whose language is the most social-emotional in press conferences. Since FDR, Nixon has been the lowest by far.
What about Ronald Reagan? Many people consider Reagan one of the most socially adept presidents since FDR. In both speeches and press conferences, Reagan’s use of personal and emotional language was always around the average. From the outside, he seemed like a social-emotional person—perhaps a bit like George W. Bush. Closer analyses of Reagan’s language suggest that this may be an illusion. Reagan, it seems, stands out more as a storyteller than a social-emotional leader. Recall from earlier chapters that stories or narratives require the use of social words together with past-tense verbs. Combining these two dimensions, Reagan’s score on storytelling is far and away higher than any other modern president’s.
The Ronald Reagan findings provide a little more insight into the different personalities of presumably sociable