The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [136]
CHAPTER 6: LYING WORDS
131 The research on the physiology of confession involved people talking about the most traumatic experience of their lives into a tape recorder. All potential identifying information from the story has been changed. From an article by Pennebaker, Hughes, and O’Heeron (1987).
134 For anyone seeking a discussion of self-deception in English literature, I recommend the writer and scholar Jim Magnuson. His wisdom on this and other topics has been invaluable to me in our discussions over the years.
140 Somewhere between self-deception, deception, and marketing is the concept of “spin.” In the political world, spin is defined as the art of glossing over the truth. Indeed, after an important debate or speech, political operatives will often meet with members of the press to spin the speech of their own candidate to make it sound even better than it was and spin the opponent’s words to sound worse. In fact, a cutting-edge computational linguist at Queen’s University in Canada, David Skillicorn, has developed a model to identify spin based on linguistic features associated with deception (research.cs.queensu.ca/home/skill/election/election.html).
140–141 In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud devotes a surprising amount of time to slips of the tongue, or, as he refers to them, parapraxes. In retrospect, you can understand why he used parapraxes as a way to introduce his general theory. Everyday slips of the tongue are common and reveal certain truths about what people are really thinking.
142–143 I’m indebted to Melanie Greenberg for allowing me to reanalyze her language data.
144–146 A fascinating account of the Stephen Glass case is available at www.rickmcginnis.com/articles/Glassindex.htm. For the analyses, I only examined thirty-nine of his forty-one stories (one was co-written by someone else and the other was made up exclusively of published quotes).
Somehow relevant to this discussion is a wonderful quote by author Mary McCarthy. In 1979, she was interviewed by the television host Dick Cavett about the author Lillian Hellman, who had a reputation for fabricating some of her stories. When asked about Hellman’s work, McCarthy snorted, “Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.” Hellman subsequently filed a defamation suit against McCarthy, which was dropped after Hellman’s death in 1984.
149 There are several other fascinating papers that are worth mentioning in the literature on high-stakes, real-world deception detection using computerized text analysis. For example, David Skillicorn and his colleagues, as well as Max Louwerse, Gun Semin, and their colleagues, along with other labs around the world have examined the e-mails between Enron employees during the decade leading up to the company’s bankruptcy in 2001 due to its fraudulent accounting activities. In addition, David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina used computerized text analysis to classify deceptive versus truthful chief executives in their quarterly earnings conference calls.
152–153 The project by Denise Huddle and me has not yet been submitted for publication. One additional finding is particularly noteworthy. Recall that I-words signal innocence. Closer inspection indicated that it wasn’t all I-words. In fact, the more that defendants used the actual word I (and I’ll, I’m, I’d, etc.), the more likely they were to be innocent. In fact, use of the word me was used more by the truly guilty.
155 The dating project is by Toma, Hancock, and Ellison (2008).
165 Discrepancy or modal verbs identify words that make a distinction between an ideal and a real state. “I should be eating vegetables” indicates that I’m not eating them (reality) but the ideal person would be. Columbia University psychologist Tory Higgins has developed an elaborate theory around the