The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [66]
“Test 1, 2, 3, 4,” Alec Baldwin says, clearing his throat. “Test 1, 2, 3, 4.” The star of such films as The Hunt for Red October and Glengarry Glen Ross holds the microphone a few inches away from his mouth and stares at it with a sense of pride. “This bus has a microphone,” he says to the few of us who have gathered to watch his debut into grassroots politics.
—New Republic, December 8, 1997
Compare this with the beginning of his final and completely fabricated story:
Ian Restil, a 15-year-old computer hacker who looks like an even more adolescent version of Bill Gates, is throwing a tantrum. “I want more money. I want a Miata. I want a trip to Disney World. I want X-Man comic book number one. I want a lifetime subscription to ‘Playboy,’ and throw in ‘Penthouse.’ Show me the money! Show me the money!” Over and over again, the boy, who is wearing a frayed Cal Ripken Jr. t-shirt, is shouting his demands.
—New Republic, May 18, 1998
In his fake stories, Glass is far more flamboyant in his writing style than when writing about true events. You can sense his excitement in confabulating experiences that can’t possibly be true. You feel his pride and his ownership of the story—even his excitement from creating such daring and deceptive stories. In his completely fabricated stories, Glass uses I-words both in his fake quotations and as the “impartial” author at dizzying rates. When lying, Glass exudes earnest pride and self-focus, the way most people do when they are telling the truth.
CATCHING FALSE ATTITUDES AND BELIEFS
People in sales, candidates for political office, administrators, and many others in positions of authority sometimes proclaim beliefs that we later discover were not entirely true. The art of espousing deceptive beliefs is practiced by more than just politicians and crime bosses. How many of us have proclaimed attitudes that we didn’t believe in order to curry favor with an attractive, powerful, or potentially helpful friend? We should be ashamed of ourselves. Fortunately, our abilities at self-deception are sufficiently intact that we know that the real problem is when other people are deceiving us by their deceptive statements.
Attitudes About a Hot Topic: Abortion and Choice How well can a computer program detect if people are expressing their true beliefs about an emotional topic? Several years ago, Matt Newman, Diane Berry, Jane Richards, and I ran a series of experiments to answer the question. We recruited about two hundred students and asked them to provide us with two opinions on the highly emotional topic of abortion—one that they believed and another that they did not believe. Some of the students were asked to write the two essays at home and to mail them in to us at a later time. Another group simply typed out two essays in a laboratory cubicle in the psychology department. And yet another group was asked to state their true and false beliefs out loud while they were videotaped.
If you are like most people, you have a fairly well-articulated view of the abortion issue. Some readers believe it is a woman’s choice and others are against its ever being performed. Imagine now that you are asked to write a persuasive essay supporting your belief as well as an essay that argued against your true belief. It might be a distasteful task but most people can do it.
Can human judges tell which is your true belief? We recruited several students to read each of the four hundred essays and guess if each one was the writer’s true belief or not. The student judges were accurate 52 percent of the time—where 50 percent is chance. In other words, it can be difficult for a reader to discern people’s true beliefs on the abortion issue.
The computer did a far better job, accurately