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Taken together, both nonverbal cues and language can signal relative status in both formal and informal groups. To outsiders watching a group of people interact, the various types of cues typically reveal themselves periodically in an interaction. The problem is that the cues may appear briefly and then disappear. One person who is the leader may speak more loudly, have a more open body language, and use the words we and you for just a few moments—perhaps just long enough for others at the meeting to notice. If previous research is any guide, most observers will be able to identify the status hierarchy of a group at rates somewhat better than chance. With computer analyses of the group’s language, however, you will be far more successful.

DISCOVERING YOUR OWN STATUS THROUGH YOUR CORRESPONDENCE

Let’s get personal for a minute. What is your status compared to your friends? Are you intimidated by some friends more than others? Do you really want to know? The best way to appreciate status in human relationships is to see it in your own dealings with others.

It’s surprisingly simple. Look at the last ten e-mails that you sent to someone and compare them with the last ten they sent you. Calculate the percentage of I-words each of you used. If you have a great deal of time, you can do the same with the you- and we-words that you both used as well. Statistically, I-words are the most trustworthy. Here’s the rule: The person who uses fewer I-words is the person who is higher in the social hierarchy. If the two of you are about the same in I-word usage, you probably have an equal relationship.

We know this because of an e-mail study that Matt Davis and I conducted a few years ago. We recruited ten volunteers—some graduate students, undergraduates, and even a couple of faculty who let us analyze their incoming and outgoing e-mail to and from about fifteen people. Matt wrote a computer program that scrambled all of the e-mails so that they were unreadable and preserved the anonymity of the e-mailers and what they actually said.

In addition to the e-mails themselves, we asked each of our volunteers to rate each of their fifteen correspondents along several dimensions: sex, age, how well they knew them, how well they liked them, and similar questions. The pivotal question was about relative status. That is, for each of the fifteen correspondents, the volunteers made judgments in response to the question:

Evaluate this correspondent in terms of relative status:

All correspondents were rated for their relative status on the seven-point questionnaire. So if the volunteer was a graduate student, they might rate a senior professor as a 6 or a 7 and a high school student as a 1 or a 2.

The results were clear-cut. The person with the higher status used fewer I-words, more you-words, and more we-words. This was not a subtle finding. For most of the people, the effects were quite large.

As I pondered the findings, I kept asking myself if I did the same thing. You should know that I have always harbored the illusion that I am a very egalitarian guy. I have tried to treat undergraduates, graduate students, staff, people in the community, and my superiors in the academic world with respect. Certainly these analyses would not show large status effects in my e-mail. I’m the egalitarian guy, remember? I analyzed my data and that was the day I abandoned my I-treat-everyone-the-same self-view. The analysis of my words revealed the same status differences as others in our study. Some edited examples:

Dear Dr. Pennebaker:

I was part of your Introductory Psychology class last semester. I have enjoyed your lectures and I’ve learned so much. I received an email from you about doing some research with you. Would there be a time for me to come by to talk about this?

—Pam

Dear Pam—

This would be great. This week isn’t good because of a trip. How about next Tuesday between 9 and 10:30. It will be good to see you.

Jamie Pennebaker

Pam, as you may guess, had been a first-year