The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [124]
The biographies of Reagan paint a very different picture. Indeed, Reagan’s official biographer, Edmund Morris, eventually gave up on a traditional biography because he couldn’t get Reagan to open up in a personal or emotional way about himself. Reagan loved to tell stories of all kinds, but according to Morris, he had a “benign lack of interest in individual human beings.” After working on an in-depth two-part television series on Reagan in 1998, the series editor Adriana Bosch reported, “Reagan was not a man given to introspection … As his son Ron told us, ‘No one ever figured him out, and he never figured himself out.’ ”
Although outsiders may naively think that Bush and Reagan were social-emotional men, the language findings help to burrow under these impressions.
WHAT IS I SAYING?: THE MISSING PRONOUNS OF BARACK OBAMA
One hopes that you have been taking notes in reading this book. If you have, please refer to the many ways that the first-person singular pronoun I is used. Maybe you have skipped or forgotten these earlier chapters but feel as though you can take the Advanced Placement Test on I-word usage. And you can. Please go to the following website and take the one-minute I exam: www.SecretLifeOfPronouns.com/itest. It might be a good idea for those who have taken notes to do so as well.
The ten-item I-test has now been completed by well over two thousand people and demonstrates that very few people know who uses the word I. In fact, Ph.D.s in linguistics do about the same on the test as high school graduates, averaging around five correct answers out of ten. If you didn’t do well on the exam, you are in very good company.
The word I is the prototypical stealth word. It is the most commonly used word in spoken English and we rarely register it when it is used by us or other people. Because people think that I-words must reflect self-confidence or arrogance, they assume that people who are self-confident must use I-words all the time.
Obama is a perfect case study. Within days of his election in 2008, pundits—especially those who didn’t support him—started noting that he used the word I all the time. Various media outlets reported that Obama’s press conferences, speeches, and informal interviews were teeming with I-words. A long list of noteworthy news analysts such as George Will, English scholars including Stanley Fish, and even occasional presidential speechwriters such as Peggy Noonan pointed out Obama’s incessant use of I-words. Some of their articles on the topic were published in highly respected outlets that usually have diligent fact-checkers—the Washington Post, the New York Times.
The only problem is that no one bothered to count Obama’s use of I-words or compare them with anyone else’s. As you can see in the graph on the next page, Obama has distinguished himself as the lowest I-word user of any of the modern presidents. Analyses of his speeches reveal the same pattern. When Obama talks, he tends to avoid pronouns in general and I-words in particular.
If Barack Obama uses fewer I-words than any president in memory, why do very smart people think just the opposite? The problem may lie in the ways we naturally process information. First, as we have found with the I-test, most people believe that those who are the most self-confident use I-words at much higher rates than insecure or humble people. If we think that someone is arrogant, our brains will be searching for evidence to confirm our beliefs. Whenever the presumed arrogant person uses the word I, our brains take note—ahhh, additional proof that the person is arrogant. It is not coincidental that the commentators who have crowed the loudest about Obama’s obnoxious use of I-words are people who do not share his political views.