The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [40]
—60-year-old man
Each of the people emphasizes different aspects of the bottle. The first person focuses almost exclusively on the words and lettering. The second person describes the shadow that the bottle casts. The third person conveys the sensations of holding the bottle and drinking from it, feelings of thirst, its lightness.
The bottle project influenced the way I think about personality. As more and more people described the bottle, Cindy and I started to analyze their descriptions in new ways. Initially, of course, we linked people’s function words with what we knew of their personality. For example, the more people used pronouns (as in “I hope you’re not thirsty”), the more sociable they reported being. I-words were used slightly more by people who were insecure, anxious, or depressed. People displaying markers of formal thinking used high rates of articles and prepositions in their descriptions and tended to be older, more organized, and conscientious.
But something was missing in these analyses. Go back and look at the examples. Yes, the three people use function words differently but what is more striking is what each pays attention to. Why does one person notice the colors and another imagines what the bottle would feel like in his hand? How people naturally describe an object tells us a little about the ways they think and perceive. For example, when I did this task on my own, it never occurred to me to describe how the bottle would feel.
We needed a more efficient way to analyze how people were seeing and experiencing the picture. A few weeks later, Cindy stopped me in the hall with a solution. It was simple and ingenious. The technique, which eventually became known as the Meaning Extraction Method, relied on the most common content words in all the bottle essays we received.
To understand how the technique works, look again at the three bottle texts. As you would predict, the most common words are function words: the, it, is, a, of. In addition, there is a much smaller number of content words. Although the three texts consist of a total 110 different words, within the 40 most frequently used words, there are 14 content words: water, bottle, red, small, white, cap, clear, easy, empty, label, left, letters, light, and plastic. If there were, say, almost 1,500 complete essays that people had written about the bottle, there would be far more content words. In fact, we found that 1,500 essays produced over 200,000 total words, but only about 175 content words were used frequently.
Now imagine that we go into each of the 1,500 essays and determine how often each person uses each of the 175 common content words. Next, we determine how these content words naturally clump together. If you think this sounds suspiciously like factor analysis, you would be correct. Factor analysis, as you recall, can mathematically determine which groups of content words are used together by the various authors of the bottle texts. We discovered that a person who uses the word yellow in an essay is also a person who tends to use other color words—blue, green, white—as well as words like sky, mountain, banner, and label. When you look at this clump of words, you realize immediately that these are all words people typically use together when describing the label on the bottle.
Another word clump includes words like cylinder, shape, cone, top, tall, wide, and other words related to the bottle’s shape. Yet another theme that pops out includes words like light, gray, shadow, reflection, background, wall, and table: a background/lighting theme. There is even a theme that identifies people who are obsessed with whether the cap’s seal has been broken and how it would feel to hold or drink from the bottle—much like the third essay above.
If you are not an expert in computers and factor