The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [65]
• Fewer verbs. There are a number of different types of verbs that can serve different functions in language. When a person uses more verbs it generally tells us that they are referring to more active and dynamic events. For a person who has had a trauma in the past, much of it is over. If you are writing about an imaginary trauma, you are living it as you tell about it. In addition, imaginary traumas cause people to ask themselves, “What would have happened? How would I have felt?” Discrepancy verbs such as would, should, could, and ought were used at particularly high rates in the imaginary traumas.
• More self-references: I-words. Recall that I-words signal that people are paying attention to themselves—their feelings, their pain, themselves as social objects. By the same token, the use of first-person singular pronouns implies a sense of ownership. Not surprisingly, people writing about their own traumatic experiences were more acutely aware of their feelings and, at the same time, embraced their traumas as their own.
These language dimensions do a very nice job in distinguishing the real from the imaginary essays the participants wrote. Using some elegant statistics (a cross-validation strategy), we can estimate that our word categories would accurately classify 74 percent of essays as either real or imaginary. This is an interesting case because no deception was involved.
Real Versus Fabricated Stories: The Case of Stephen Glass In 1995, the magazine the New Republic hired a young and promising writer, Stephen Glass, who had just graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Within a few months, he began publishing comments and then full-blown articles on a wide range of topics. Between December 1995 and May 1998, Glass published forty-one high-profile and often beautifully written articles. His colleagues and readers often marveled at his ability to find such interesting people to interview and to draw such colorful quotes from them.
Glass, it seems, was able to get such great stories and quotes by just making them up. When he was finally caught by the magazine’s editors, he was fired. An investigation revealed that at least six of his articles were completely invented, another twenty-one were partially fraudulent, and the remaining fourteen were likely trustworthy. An excellent movie on the Glass scandal was eventually made, Shattered Glass. And, in an ironic twist of fate, Glass ended up going to law school, presumably in search of truth and justice.
Is it possible that Glass left a linguistic fingerprint on his fabricated stories? Using our computerized text analysis program, I checked them out. By and large, the language analyses found that the completely fabricated and the likely true stories were quite different from each other and the partially fraudulent fell somewhere between the two. Glass’s real or likely true stories were characterized by the use of the following word categories:
• More words, more details, more numbers
• Fewer emotion (especially positive emotion) and cognitive words
• Fewer verbs
• Fewer self-references: I-words
Sound familiar? With the exception of self-references, Glass’s honest stories used language that was similar to people writing about their own traumas. His fabricated stories had virtually identical language fingerprints to the study where students wrote about imaginary traumas.
The one interesting and very important exception was the use of I-words. Recall that people writing about their own traumas used I-words at higher rates than people writing about