The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [38]
Factor analysis is a more elaborate correlation method. Instead of just correlating two variables, it relies on correlations of large groups of variables. So, imagine that we give people a questionnaire that asks them to rate the degree to which they feel nervous, guilty, afraid, sad, enthusiastic, energetic, and joyful. We would probably find two clumps of correlations here. Ratings of nervous, guilty, afraid, and sad would all be closely linked to each other. A person feeling nervous would likely feel guilty, afraid, and sad. A second clump would include the items enthusiastic, energetic, and joyful. A factor analysis would determine how the original seven questionnaire items naturally broke into broader factors. In this case, the factor analysis would reveal that there were two distinct clumps of variables—negative emotion states and positive emotion states.
Factor analysis is wonderful because it helps researchers boil down a large group of variables into more manageable overarching factors. Biber, for example, relied on dozens of language dimensions that linguists care about—proper nouns, noun phrases, gerunds, possessive pronouns. By running factor analyses on the use of these language dimensions across over four hundred books and articles, he was able to reduce the dozens of language dimensions to only about seven dimensions. His relatively simple factors were able to discriminate the literary genres he studied. As described below, factor analysis is a grand method for the analysis of personality as well.
FINDING PERSONALITY IN PICTURES
One of my colleagues, Sam Gosling, is a groundbreaking personality researcher who studies what he calls “behavioral residue.” He tries to guess people’s personalities by looking at their offices, bedrooms, web pages, book collections, and music collections. He finds that people leave bits of their personalities wherever they go. The rigid, conscientious person typically has a neat office and bedroom and elegantly organized music collection. The same person may even have a detailed system to save e-mails.
The words we write and speak can also be thought of as a form of behavioral residue. Function words are good indicators of the broad ways that people connect to others, think about their worlds, and even think about themselves. By the same token, content words can yield valuable clues to people as well. Why does one of your friends always talk about his cats and another feels compelled to mention her new diet? The content of a conversation reveals what issues are important to people, including their values, their goals, and, at the broadest level, their personality.
The content of speech reveals what people are paying attention to. A few years ago before studying language, I became interested in how people naturally looked at their worlds. Do people differ in the ways they pay attention to their environment as they walk around? To what degree do we all see the same objects and events in different ways? As part of a little experiment, I fitted a small video camera inside a baseball cap. Several of my students agreed to be guinea pigs in my project. All were given the same instructions:
After you have put on your camera-hat, walk down the stairs at the end of the hall and leave the building. Walk the two blocks to the main shopping district close to campus. Go into the drugstore on the corner and buy a pack of gum. Leave the store and walk back to the lab taking a particular backstreet to the Psychology Building. Be your usual self and ignore your hat.
The entire excursion took about ten minutes for each of the five