The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [62]
SELF-DECEPTION IN LETTERS OF RECOMMENDATION
Most university faculty members write a large number of letters of recommendation every year. These letters are for undergraduates trying to get into a graduate or professional school and for graduate students trying to land jobs. In addition to writing letters, we also read letters of recommendation—for people applying for graduate school and jobs. Over the years, my colleagues and I have noticed that it is very difficult to distinguish among letters. They all seem to be quite positive. Is there a way to sort out the genuinely positive letters from the pro-forma positive letters?
I like to think of myself as an honest, straightforward person. When I sit down to write a letter of recommendation, it is important that what I say is truthful but also portrays the student in a positive yet fair light. One thing I’ve noticed is that as I start writing a letter I gradually start to see more and more positive things about the student. By the time I have finished, I come away with the belief that there is absolutely no doubt that the student I’m writing about is perfect. Ouch. That sounds a little like self-deception. In talking with colleagues, many report the same feelings.
Is it possible to use language analyses to tell which of my letters are real and which ones are self-deceptive? To find out, I analyzed about two hundred letters of recommendation that I had written. To begin, I went back and rated how I truly felt about the student’s potential. This rating was made often several years after writing the letters and was not tainted by the post-writing self-deceptive glow. I then simply correlated the word use in my letters with my ratings. Four reliable patterns emerged.
In my letters for the students I truly felt would do the best, I tended to:
• Say more, use longer sentences and bigger words. The better I felt they would ultimately perform, the more words I wrote. Longer letters reflect the fact that I had more to say about the student. My sentences were also more complex.
• Use fewer positive emotion words. This shocked me. The more potential I believed the student had, the less likely I was to use words like excellent, nice, good, and happy. As I went back to the original letters, the reason became clear. For people best suited for graduate school or a particular job, I tended to give specific examples of their accomplishments. For people not as suited, I tended to wave my hands a bit more and simply say they were great at what they did.
• Provide more detailed information. I noticed that in the stronger letters, I paid more attention to what the students had done rather than just talk about the students themselves. For the promising students, I spent a disproportionate amount of time describing their work and their contribution to whatever projects they worked on. To do this, I used more words that referenced time, space, and motion. Relatively few of my sentences used pronouns like he or she because I was focusing on the projects as opposed to the people.
• Pay little attention to the potential reader of the letter. Recall that the ways people use pronouns reveals where they are paying attention. Apparently, when writing letters for somewhat weaker students, my mind would float to the reader and away from the student. I included phrases like “as you can see from the candidate’s résumé …” or “I’m sure you will agree that …”
The language analyses indicated that my letters of recommendation said more than I thought they did. I suspect that I’m similar to most earnest