The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [60]
Self-deception comes in many forms. As evidenced by the student who spoke about his father’s death, people can deny or fail to appreciate the emotional impact of an event. Another form is a brash overconfidence in one’s own abilities or situations. Yet another is a firmly held belief that is either demonstrably false or not proven. Examples include the man who is convinced of his ex-girlfriend’s love even after she has married someone else and has issued a restraining order against him. At the extreme, delusions by people suffering from serious mental disorders such as schizophrenia could also be an example of this form of self-deception.
Can self-deception be captured by language? To some degree, yes it can. Look back to the student’s story about the death of his father. Three language features jump out:
• Impersonal language. Most people, when writing about a personal upheaval, take the experience, well, personally. They use phrases like “I saw” or “I felt.” Notice how the student never uses the word I.
• Lack of emotions. Despite his writing about the death of his father when he was fourteen years old, the student uses virtually no emotion words, especially negative emotion words. His only emotion-related words, in fact, are implied—the experience was manageable and minimal.
• Concrete, stiff, and oddly distant language. You can see he tends to use a high rate of concrete nouns (as measured by his use of articles—a, an, and the). He also uses a large number of verbs, especially words like would. Words such as would, could, and should introduce a type of distance between the actual event and the person’s perception of it.
SELF-DECEPTION IN LITERARY CHARACTERS
Self-deception of all forms is frequently portrayed in literature. Consider Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. At the beginning of the story, Scrooge is an emotionally cold older man who is contemptuous of the Christmas season, family, and close human connections. We first see Scrooge in his business office on Christmas Eve excoriating his clerk Bob Cratchit about his plans to not work on Christmas. When Scrooge’s nephew drops by to invite Scrooge to Christmas dinner, Scrooge replies:
What else can I be … when I live in such a world of fools as this?… What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in them through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will … every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas” on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.
Self-deception at work? Indeed. Dickens later lets us see a younger Scrooge whose childhood was difficult but who was close to his sister and had warm ties to his first mentor in the business and especially an old girlfriend whom he lost. We see that he was actually a decent human being who now hides his emotions in his greed. During the night of Christmas Eve, a series of ghosts appear at Scrooge’s bedside. Horror and havoc ensue. And by Christmas morning, the real Scrooge emerges. As soon as he awakens, he opens his window and exclaims:
I don’t know what to do!… I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world!
He eventually runs to his nephew’s house, where dinner with Bob Cratchit’s family is about to begin:
Now, I’ll tell you what, my friend … I am not going to stand this sort of thing any longer. And therefore … I am about to raise your salary … A merry Christmas,