The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [31]
From the very beginning of my education, I was always taught that in the United States we do not have social classes. England and India did, of course. But not the U.S. In graduate school in social psychology, there were often discussions of racial differences and inequality in the United States but never anything about social class. That’s right, the U.S. didn’t have social classes. By the time I was a young faculty member studying physical health, most conferences I attended in the U.S. would include presentations demonstrating large racial differences in blood pressure and other diseases, smoking and obesity and other health behaviors, and life expectancy. Nothing about social class. Well, you know why.
By the early 1990s, I was attending more and more international conferences. If the speakers were from Europe, their graphs and tables always included class information but not race. The Americans were just the opposite. By the mid-1990s, however, something shifted. Statisticians started remarking that the effects of social class in the United States were often stronger than the effects of race. Indeed, in the last decade, a dizzying number of studies have shown powerful effects of class on smoking, drinking, depression, obesity, and every physical and mental health problem you can imagine.
Social class is generally measured by years of education that people have completed and their yearly income. You might think that lower social class is associated with health problems because poorer people don’t have access to health care. In fact, the exact same social class effects are found in Sweden and other countries where health care is universal. Social class is linked to almost everything we do—the foods we buy, the movies we see, the people we vote for, and the ways we raise our children. And, predictably, the ways we use function words.
Over the last forty years, a smattering of studies have pointed to social class differences in language development, vocabulary, and even language patterns in the home. None to my knowledge have examined language differences among large samples of adults. Recently, my colleagues David Beaver, a linguist, and Gary Lavergne, a researcher in the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) Office of Admissions, and I teamed up to study the admissions essays that high school students write in order to gain access to college. UT-Austin is a selective undergraduate institution and recruits about seven thousand top students each year. In addition to writing two essays, applicants must also complete a large number of surveys in order to be considered for admission. Among other things, students are asked to supply information about their families’ social class—including education of parents and estimated parental income. Examining the data for four consecutive years allowed us to study the social class–language connection with over twenty-five thousand students.
The table on the next page should be somewhat familiar. Students coming from higher social classes tended to use bigger words, more articles (and nouns), and more prepositions. Students from lower social classes tended to be more personal in their admissions essays, using more pronouns, auxiliary verbs, present-tense verbs, and cognitive mechanism words (many of which are associated with hedges).
Statistically, these are very large effects. The patterns are identical for males and females, and younger and older applicants. Also, these are all smart and motivated students. Why are there social class differences in function word use? Clearly, something about the students’ upbringing and life experiences is influencing their word choices.
One promising idea is that there are differences in language use within families of differing social classes from the beginning. There is some preliminary research to support this idea. Perhaps the most cited and overinterpreted study was one done by Betty Hart and Todd Risley in the mid-1980s. In their study, thirteen professional families, twenty-three working-class families, and six families