The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [63]
It is easy to imagine creating a system to automatically analyze letters of recommendation. Many companies might be interested in this product. This is both an intriguing and an unsettling idea. For a computerized system to work efficiently, multiple letters of recommendation would need to be collected from each letter writer. It is likely that the computer would do as well or perhaps slightly better than human readers. The real problem is that letters of recommendation are currently not very diagnostic in predicting students’ future performance. A computer program may help in the selection process but the danger is that company executives may start taking the program’s results too seriously. Remember that language analyses are all probabilistic and recommendation letters are often a small part of the decision to hire someone.
THE LANGUAGE OF LYING, LIARS, AND SCOUNDRELS: IN SEARCH OF THE LINGUISTIC LIE DETECTOR
The line between self-deception and all-out deception is not entirely clear. Is the self-deceptive student who claims that the death of his father was not a problem actually trying to deceive his family or friends into thinking he was stronger than he really was? Is the self-deceptive writer of letters of recommendation being deceptive by attempting to influence the people who receive the letters? If there is a linguistic fingerprint for self-deception, is it similar to one that might emerge when people are actively lying to others?
The prospect of a linguistic lie detector has intrigued parents, spouses, teachers, car buyers, people in law enforcement, and just about everyone else for generations. In theory, developing such a system should be possible. Sigmund Freud, for example, suggested that people’s true feelings sometimes leak out and can be seen through subtle speech errors, such as slips of the tongue. Slips of the tongue are most likely to occur when a person is thinking of one thing but having to talk about something else.
Once you start paying attention, slips of the tongue are surprisingly common—in natural conversation, e-mails, online chats, and even formal lectures and speeches. Just last week a friend who works in an office with a domineering boss sent me a message from work: “Are you free for coffee after work? I’d like to have a quit talk with you.” What she meant to say was a “quick talk” rather than a “quit talk.” When we met, I opened our conversation with “So tell me why you want to quit your job.” My friend was amazed at my brilliant psychological insight.
There are many other ways that the words we use can reveal our deceptions. In 1994, Union, South Carolina, residents were horrified to learn that the car of one of their neighbors, Susan Smith, had apparently been hijacked on a nearby country road with her young children still in it. Smith claimed that an African-American male had forced her from the car and had sped away. For over a week, Smith made powerful appeals to the hijacker on national television to return her children. Before she was an official suspect, Smith told the reporters, “My children wanted me. They needed me. And now I can’t help them.”
The FBI agents on the case paid particular attention to that statement. Why had she used past tense when talking about her children? Only someone with knowledge of her own children’s death would talk of them in the past. Several days later Smith confessed to the drowning of her children by driving her car into a lake. Her motive was to