The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [44]
—17-year-old female
There is a certain transparency in these and most TAT stories. The first story suggests someone who may feel threatened by younger people at his job and has a sense of powerlessness. In McClelland’s words, the story hints at an inhibited need for power. In fact, one way to detect inhibited power motivation according to McClelland is to see how frequently the person uses negation words such as no, not, never. The sixty-four-year-old gentleman who wrote the essay used not or never five times—which is quite impressive. Is it possible that the story reflects some of the same experiences that he is having in his life?
And, by the same token, do you think the seventeen-year-old female who wrote the second essay may be having some conflict with her own mother? Just a wild guess, of course. The second essay indicates that the writer is high in her need for affiliation and moderate in her needs for achievement and power.
The scoring methods for knowing people’s needs are a bit complicated. Historically, essays such as these were read phrase by phrase and scored by professionally trained raters. More recently, computer programs have been developed that systematically look for words that suggest needs for achievement (e.g., win, lose, succeed, fail, try), power (e.g., threat, boss, employee, lead, follow, master, submissive), and affiliation (e.g., love, friend, lonely). Note that words that are opposite in meaning, such as win and lose, can both reflect the same need. People who are obsessed with achieving may alternately aspire to success and, at the same time, fear failure. People who are low on a need for achievement simply don’t think along the success-failure dimension.
Research on needs for achievement, affiliation, and power has yielded important findings. Those with an inhibited need for power, for example, have been found to have elevated blood pressure levels. David Winter, one of the leaders in the analysis of need states, has done elegant work on speeches of world leaders and accurately predicted leadership styles, possibility of declaring war, and other behaviors. For example, analyses of the first inaugural addresses by John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush indicated that both were inordinately high in need for power and affiliation. In Winter’s view, this can be a toxic combination where a powerful leader is inclined to rely on a tightly knit cohort of friends in making major decisions. In early 2001, after analyzing Bush’s first inaugural address, Winter warned that Bush’s language was consistent with a pattern of aggressiveness based on a tight group of followers who would be resistant to dissenting opinions.
INFERRING PERSONALITY INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE LAB
Methods like the bottle and garden party test as well as the Rorschach and TAT are all aimed at inferring people’s behaviors or personalities from the ways they use words. The techniques are generally administered in controlled laboratory settings. People see the same pictures with the same instructions and are asked to write or talk about them in the same ways. When the situation is virtually identical from person to person, any differences we see in language should reflect differences in the people themselves.
One frustration for researchers is that it is not possible to know how their results generalize beyond the artificial constraints of the laboratory. For example, in the bottle study, those who wrote about the bottle’s shadow tended to be more artistic, better psychology students, and less obsessed with cleanliness and order. How can this be interpreted? In all likelihood, we have stumbled across a perceptual style that is only apparent when people are interpreting certain visual scenes. In other words, the bottle findings tell us something about how some people naturally detect nuances in the visual properties of objects. It could be something about that particular bottle