The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [53]
Unlike earlier cultural upheavals, the 9/11 attacks occurred when a sizable group of people were starting to blog regularly. An undergraduate on my research team with considerable computer expertise, Michael Cohn, dropped by my office a couple of weeks after the attacks and proposed analyzing the text of thousands of blogs to track how people changed in their writing and thinking from before the attack to the weeks and months afterward.
Working with a popular blog site at the time, LiveJournal.com, Michael, Matthias Mehl, and I saved the postings of over a thousand people who blogged at least three or four times per week in the two months before and after 9/11. We selected blogs from people who lived in the United States and who represented a wide range of ages. By all accounts, the bloggers were regular people who simply liked to blog about a broad array of topics. Analyses of over seventy thousand blog entries revealed startling changes in pronoun and emotion word use from before to during to after the attacks.
Consistent with the telephone messages and blog entries soon after a death, online bloggers immediately dropped in their use of I-words as soon as they learned of the September 11 attacks. In the top graph on the next page, you can see that use of I-words dropped substantially from the baseline level of 6.2 percent. From a statistical perspective, this was a jaw-dropping, breathtaking change.
Hold on to your seats; there’s more. Just as I-words dropped, use of first-person plural we-words jumped at an even higher rate. As you can see on the bottom graph, use of we-words almost doubled from before to after the attacks. Recall from earlier chapters that there are different types of we-words. The types of we-words people used were a mix of we meaning Americans and we referring to family.
Here are two examples.
A twenty-five-year-old female, whose previous blog entries described her attraction to another man and the awkwardness of running into an old boyfriend, was deeply shaken by 9/11:
Note: Graphs reflect percentage of I-words (top) and we-words (bottom) within daily blog entries of 1,084 bloggers in the two months surrounding September 11, 2001.
I watched the buildings collapse, I cried as the WTC [World Trade Center] came tumbling down … My sadness was replaced with anger … and fear. The idea that our home is no longer safe. I think we are as angry for loss of safety … as we are for the lives that were lost.
This man’s earlier blogs were generally devoted to philosophical and cultural topics. The day before the attacks, he wrote at length about Ayn Rand and libertarianism. The next day he became the epitome of social responsibility:
What can we do to help? Blood banks are probably VERY crowded right now, and may be for several days. Don’t let that stop you. YOU are needed. YOU can help.
Approximately 92 percent of the blog entries mentioned the attacks in the first twenty-four hours after the collapse of the buildings. In a powerful way, it forced people to embrace others in their family, community, and nation.
Analysis of people’s use of emotion words in the blogs bolstered the pronoun findings. After relatively brief drops in positive emotions and increases in negative emotions, people’s use of emotions returned to normal. And, in fact, they tended to express more positive emotions than they did before the attacks occurred. To capture these effects, our computer counted the percentage of words that reflected positive emotion (e.g., love, happy, gift) as well as negative emotion words (hate, cry, worry). As you can see in the next figure, during the two months prior to the attacks, people generally used far more positive than negative emotion words. People are basically quite