The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [21]
What’s the weather like outside?
I think it’s cold.
It’s cold.
The answer “I think it’s cold,” as opposed to “It’s cold,” tells more than the outside temperature. The “I think” phrase is implicitly acknowledging, “Although there are different views on this—and you may indeed come to a different conclusion—my own personal belief is that it might be cold outside. I could be wrong, of course, and if you have a different sense of the weather, I won’t be offended.” To say “I think,” then, implies that there are multiple perspectives and, at the same time, announces that the estimation of coldness is ultimately an opinion rather than a fact. To say “It’s cold” is to say the weather outside is cold. An indisputable fact. End of discussion.
Consistent with the greater social interests of women, it is not surprising that they are more likely to use hedges than are men. Interestingly, women are just as likely to use hedges when talking with other women as when talking with men.
GENDER, STEREOTYPES, AND COMPUTERS
There is nothing inherently mysterious about the language of women and men. Nevertheless, most of us have been blind to these sex differences our entire lives. I’m no different. Soon after developing the computerized word counting program LIWC, I started analyzing dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of essays, blogs, and other text samples from men and women. One of the first analyses revealed the pattern of effects you have just read about. When I first found that women used I-words more than men, I just ignored the results. Had to be a fluke. Another study, same effects. Another fluke, I thought. It probably took a dozen analyses with very large samples to slap me awake.
The stereotypes we hold about women and men are deeply ingrained. Even within the scientific community, the study of gender differences in language is highly politicized. One group of scientists passionately believes that men and women are essentially the same; another believes that they are profoundly different. Yet others simply don’t want to think about it. But the stereotypes persist. Some believe that women are more emotional and men are more logical or that women talk about others and men talk about themselves. Yet others are convinced that women simply say twice as many words every day as men. Even though most of these beliefs have been debunked by good scientific studies, it is hard to let go of them.
Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the women’s movement awakened the culture to the fact that women and men were not treated equally. A Berkeley linguist, Robin Lakoff, published a stunning book in 1975, Language and Woman’s Place, that pointed out how women and men talked differently. Lakoff argued that men used the language of power and rudeness, while women’s speech tended to be quieter, passive, and excessively polite. In the decades that followed, several studies supported Lakoff’s observations. By the early 1990s, Deborah Tannen, a linguist at Georgetown University, attracted international notice with her book You Just Don’t Understand. Her book, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for over four years, argued that men and women often talk past each other without appreciating that the other sex is almost another culture. Women, for example, are highly attentive to the thoughts and feelings of others; men are less so. Women view men’s speaking styles as blunt and uncaring; men view women’s as indirect and obscure.
Sociolinguists such as Lakoff and Tannen focus on broad social dimensions such as gender, race, social class, and power. Their approach is qualitative, involving recording and analyzing conversations on a case-by-case basis. It is slow, painstaking work. Over the course of a year, a good sociolinguist may analyze only a few interactions. Whereas the qualitative approach is powerful at getting an in-depth understanding of a small group of interactions, the methods are not designed to get an accurate picture of an entire society or culture. This is where computer-based text analysis methods