The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [37]
NARRATIVE THINKING
Some people are natural storytellers. They can’t control themselves. From a simple language perspective, the function words that generally reveal storytelling involve people (which means the use of personal pronouns of all types—especially third-person pronouns), past-tense verbs, and conjunctions (especially inclusive words such as with, and, together). Here is a lovely example:
Okay, so my friend Chris came to visit town for the football game this weekend. She decided that she wanted to have a GOOOOD time so we went out on Friday night, and she got wasted off her ass.…. She was throwing up at parties and in bathrooms of EVERY place we went! We got kicked out of Waffle House.…. KICKED OUT! I mean seriously, who gets kicked out of Waffle House.… It was crazy.
Kicked out of Waffle House? Crazy indeed. Even though the writing assignment is for people to track their thoughts and feelings as they occur, at least 20 percent of the writers can’t help but tell a story of some kind. In fact, people who score high on the narrative thinking factor tend to have better social skills, more friends, and rate themselves as more outgoing.
Briefly consider what these findings mean. By statistically clumping people’s function words into meaningful categories, we are seeing how they think, how they organize their worlds, and how they relate to other people. Their almost-invisible function words are revealing the very essence of who they are.
As Laura King and I delved into the study of thinking styles, we found that people are surprisingly consistent in their thinking and writing styles. For example, the ways students wrote in the stream-of-consciousness exercise was related to the ways they wrote when writing a paper on the ways the nervous system worked. Other studies suggest that your thinking styles when you are young will remain with you most of your life. In fact, if you have ever happened across a school paper or diary entry you wrote when you were a young teenager, you will likely see that your writing and thinking styles have not changed that dramatically. In other words, people’s language styles are part of who they are.
People also fluctuate in their thinking styles depending on who they are with, what they are doing, and how they feel about themselves. As will be discussed in later chapters, someone who is in the middle of a depression may slide from high to very low levels of formal thinking. And a person attempting to make an important life decision may evidence signs of increased analytic thinking in her or his e-mail, blogs, or natural conversations.
Finally, we can study anyone’s writing or speaking style and begin to get a better sense of who they are. As an example, look back at the various personal ads at the beginning of the chapter. Armed with your knowledge of ways of thinking, you can spot who is the highest in formal thinking (Marcus and Mirah), analytic thinking (Juan and Mirah), and narrative thinking (Margaret and Gigi). These analyses are based on very few words and should be interpreted with caution; the more words that can be collected, the more trustworthy the conclusions. When we return to the study of love and relationships (chapter 8), you will be able to see how we can match thinking styles and predict which relationships are more likely to last based on a pair’s writing or speaking style.
THE MAGIC OF FACTOR ANALYSIS
Some people who read this book won’t particularly like graphs or tables, and certainly not statistics. Even if you have a deep-seated aversion to statistics, you might find this box interesting. Fascinating, really.
Factor analysis is based on the idea of correlation. A simple correlation is a statistic