The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [82]
Unlike e-mails or letters, when talking with others, the words fly out of our mouths with very little forethought. Despite these very different forms of social interaction, the same general word categories can identify social status in conversations as in written communications. Several studies have now been conducted with college students and, in a manner of speaking, in the White House with top administration officials.
In one of the first studies linking pronoun use to status in natural conversations, my graduate student Ewa Kacewicz invited students to participate in a get-to-know-you task. Pairs of strangers entered a room and talked about anything that interested them for ten minutes while they were videotaped. The conversations were fairly standard—where are you from? What’s your major? How do you like the university? At the end of the conversation, the two people went to separate rooms where they each evaluated the interaction. Both tended to agree on which person had more status and who tended to control the interaction more.
The findings from Ewa’s project and others like it have been clean and consistent. High-status people use we-words and you-words at high rates and use I-words at low rates. In fact, this same pattern emerges when people are chatting with each other on the Internet. What is most striking, however, is how fast the social hierarchy emerges in the conversation. In Ewa’s first study, the two people who were going to have an interaction met just as they were going into the laboratory. They were asked not to talk until both were seated and the video cameras were turned on.
Within the first minute of the conversation, the social hierarchy was established. I suspect that the two people had a rough sense of the hierarchy within seconds of seeing one another. Perhaps they noticed each other’s height, weight, attractiveness, clothing, or general bearing. Whatever it was, their relative use of pronouns was fixed almost immediately.
When two strangers meet and chat on the Internet, you would think that it would take a little longer for the hierarchy to emerge. Surprisingly, it doesn’t take much longer. The Internet project was part of a large classroom exercise that I conducted with my colleague Sam Gosling and graduate student Yla Tausczik. Hundreds of students were asked to go online at particular times where they were randomly connected with another person. They were simply asked to chat about anything they wanted for fifteen minutes. At the end of the fifteen minutes, they completed a questionnaire about the conversation.
Just like the face-to-face natural conversation project, the status differences were apparent in the first three minutes of the interaction. This amazed us because there were no physical appearance cues, voice tone, or anything else that could prejudge status for the two participants. How was it possible for the two people to tacitly agree who was more dominant so quickly?
Reading some of the online transcripts helped to understand the process. Early in the conversation, both participants tossed out cues about themselves and, at the same time, fished for cues about the other person. Some participants would also make subtle moves that diminished the other person’s stature. Here is an example of two females at the beginning of their conversation. Person B (Brittany), whose comments are in bold, is the one who both agree was more dominant when they completed questionnaires at the end of the conversation:
A: hello, is anyone here?
B: I am. Hi.
A: oh hey
B: I’m Brittany
A: what are we supposed to talk about? I’m Chris, nice to meet you.
B: dont take this the wrong way,