The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [88]
You will notice that the same pronouns—I, we, and you—are linked to status, power, self-confidence, arrogance, and leadership. This isn’t to say that all of these constructs are the same. As recent research by organizational psychologists suggests, people can achieve high status without having direct power over others. Effective leadership sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t involve arrogance or power. Whereas other word categories may be able to distinguish power from status, both can be thought of as markers of a social hierarchy.
What this means is that if you happen to be at a future cocktail party with Gandhi, Stalin, Einstein, and Emilio Barzini from The Godfather (but not that pimp Tattaglia), you can bet that you will likely use more I-words than any of them.
CHAPTER 8
The Language of Love
HOPEFULLY, YOU SHOULD now be convinced that function words reflect psychological states. Sadly, I’ve been keeping something from you: Word use rarely occurs in a vacuum. In most cases, when we use words we are talking or writing to another person, and at the same time, they are talking or writing to us. Most language use occurs among people in ongoing social relationships. What this means is that we can begin to use our word tools to investigate more than solitary individuals—we can begin to study human relationships.
Think what this means. The way that you and your lover, your parent, your boss, and your mortal enemy talk with each other provides important clues to the nature of your relationships. And not just the way you talk—the ways you and your friends e-mail, post updates on your respective Facebook pages or Twitter entries, inform us about your entire social network.
Social relationships have their own personality. One friend in my social network is someone I often talk to about personal and emotional topics, and when we meet, we always eat Mexican food; another friendship is characterized by our arguing and joking over beers. Even my e-mails to and from my two friends reflect the kinds of interactions we have during our periodic lunches. These different relationships have gone on for years and are both warm and fulfilling. If I were to analyze the language of these interactions, each would have its own fingerprint, its own conversational personality.
By inspecting the language of close relationships, a picture of the relationships themselves begins to emerge. Not only can we look at relationships over months or years but we can also track how two people are connecting with one another on a minute-by-minute level. For example, it is possible to tell how engaged two people are with one another by analyzing how similarly they talk with one another.
Consider this brief snippet of an IM interaction between two college students who are very much in love:
HER: I’m glad I can at least talk to you now, but I want to see you so badly. I hate being apart from you
HIM: . I wish there was a heart-melting smiley … I love you
HER: Seriously though … I’ve always been the type of girl that I could go long periods of time and it wouldn’t be that I wouldn’t … think about you, it’s just that the distance wouldn’t get to me … but today, I felt like I was going crazy not seeing you! Like when I say I missed you like crazy … I mean CRAZY!!!!I love you too
HIM: I do love you … so much
Both members of the couple are closely attentive to each other and repeat many of the same words and phrases. Compare the words of intense love with words of intense, well, outrage. For several years, a daytime television talk show, The View, has commanded a large audience in the United States. The hosts are a group of smart and often opinionated well-known women with backgrounds in news, comedy, and politics. Over the years, occasional bitter disagreements have erupted that were both political and personal. On May 23, 2007, a long-simmering tension between the