The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [27]
The similarity of effects for the two people was striking and the overall results promising. Whether their testosterone went up or down, no predictable changes were seen in their use of articles, prepositions, nouns, verbs, and negative emotion words. However, there was one fascinating and reliable difference—in social pronouns (including words like we, us, he, she, they, and them). As testosterone levels dropped, they used more social pronouns. Think what this means: Both GH and the anthropologist inject themselves with testosterone and they now focus on tasks, goals, events, and the occasional object—but not people. And then, as the days wear on, they awake each morning and notice that there are other human beings around. And these human beings are interesting and worth talking about and talking to. And then, a few weeks later and another injection, and voilà! They’re cured. No more worrying about others.
This study gives us a glimpse of how testosterone may psychologically affect people. Prior to receiving their results, I asked both participants how they felt that testosterone affected their language. GH was certain that the injections gave him more energy, made his mood more positive, and stimulated more thoughts of sex, aggression, sports, and traditional masculine things. The anthropologist, on the other hand, was adamant that testosterone had absolutely no psychological effect on him whatsoever. Both were wrong.
What does a study like this tell us about sex differences and the biology of function words? Only a little, I’m afraid. Injections of testosterone did not change GH’s sex or the anthropologist’s masculinity. There is no evidence that this hormonal assault had any effects on the ways either person understood, thought about, or categorized their world. It is significant, for example, that not a hint of changes in articles, nouns, verbs, cognitive words, or prepositions occurred. Finally, this was a study on only two people in unusual circumstances, meaning we should be cautious in generalizing the findings.
On a broader level, however, the testosterone study, along with the various gender-language projects, tells us a little about the ways men and women see and understand their worlds. Men are less interested in thinking and talking about other people than are women. The effects may be influenced by testosterone, but quite frankly, the testosterone findings are too preliminary to make grand pronouncements just yet.
That there are differences in social interests between women and men isn’t exactly news. However, the fact that men consistently use more articles, nouns, and prepositions is news. OK, maybe it’s not going to be on CNN’s Headline News. But it is news because these language differences signal that men tend to talk and think about concrete objects and things in highly specific ways. They are naturally categorizing things. Further, the use of prepositions signals that the categorization process is being done in hierarchical and spatial ways. Think about when we use prepositions:
The keys to the trunk of the car from Maria are next to the lamp under the picture of the boat painted by your mother.
The words to, of, from, next to, under, of, and by specify which and whose keys and exactly where they are in space. There is a hierarchical structure in the sense that these are not just any keys. Rather, they are part of the category of trunks, which are part of the category of cars from Maria. Similarly, the location of the keys is specified in both horizontal (next to) and vertical (under) planes. Statistically, it is much more likely that a sentence such as this would be uttered by a man than a woman. It’s not that the man has a penchant for prepositions and nouns—rather