The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [64]
ON THE SURFACE, building a linguistic lie detector should be simple. Find a large number of instances where people tell the truth and compare their word use with instances where people lie. The problem is that there are dozens of ways that people can deceive. Some are intentional, others are not. Some are large lies with life-changing consequences if the liar is caught, others are no more than parlor games. Some lies involve creating elaborate stories whereas others may simply involve omitting or adding some crucial information to an otherwise true story. Lies also differ in their ultimate goals, which may include gaining status, money, or sex; avoiding shame or punishment; or just having fun. Perhaps most important is the context in which lies are told. A person who is being interrogated by the police is likely to use words differently than the same person who is trying to get an elderly couple to buy some nonexistent ocean-side property. Although the work on linguistic lie detection is in its early stages, some exciting language patterns are beginning to emerge.
CATCHING FALSE STORIES
One reason for Susan Smith’s downfall was that her stories about her missing children didn’t match her language use. Telling a false story is harder than you might think. A convincing lie requires describing events and feelings that you have not directly experienced. In a sense, you don’t “own” a fictional story in the same way you do a true one. Similarly, when constructing a false story you have to make an educated guess about what realistically could have occurred.
Real and Imaginary Traumas In the 1990s, Melanie Greenberg, Arthur Stone, and Camille Wortman at the State University of New York at Stony Brook ran a wonderfully creative expressive writing study to see if there were health benefits to writing about imaginary traumas. The authors first enlisted approximately seventy people who reported having had a major traumatic experience in their lives. Half of the people who came to the lab wrote about their own traumas. The essence of each trauma was then summarized in a few lines. Soon, the other half of the participants visited the lab, but this group did not write about their own traumas. Instead, each was given a brief trauma summary from someone who had already written about a trauma. The new group was told to imagine that they had experienced that particular trauma and to write about it as if it had happened to them.
Half of the essays, then, were people’s real traumas and the other half were imagined traumas. Both sets of essays were surprisingly powerful. In fact, the researchers discovered that writing about an imaginary trauma was almost as therapeutic as writing about a real one. In reading the essays it is often impossible to know which ones were real and which ones were made up.
However, computer analyses of the two sets of essays revealed a large number of striking differences. First, people writing about their own real traumas simply wrote more words than people writing about imaginary traumas. They were able to supply more details about what they did and didn’t do. They also used first-person singular pronouns more—words such as I, me, and my. Real stories also included fewer emotional words—both positive and negative emotions—than imaginary stories. Finally, the real stories used fewer verbs and cognitive (or thinking) words than the imaginary ones.
This jumble of effects is not that surprising. Consider the meaning of each of the language differences. Writing about real experiences is associated with:
• More words, bigger words, more numbers, more details. If you have experienced a real trauma in your life it is easy for you to describe what happened. You can describe the details of the experience without having to do much thinking. Some of the details include information about time, space, and movement.
• Fewer emotion and cognitive words. If you have lived through a trauma, your