The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [9]
The analysis of words tells us how people are thinking and, at the same time, gives us a way to guide their thinking in the future. Words can be both mirrors and tools.
AS INTERESTING AS our findings about expressive writing were, they are, by now, but a footnote to the many ways that we’ve come to use LIWC. When Martha Francis and I first developed the program, our goals were modest: identify healthy writing by looking at words. But our timing was propitious. Without computer technology and the availability of large text databases, linguists might have studied the words and psychologists or physicians might have studied health, but no one would have naturally put the two together.
Now anyone can access millions of words from thousands of people in no time at all. As someone who loves to play with numbers and statistics, I had discovered the perfect playground in LIWC. Late at night I would often find myself analyzing text files just to see who used what kinds of language. For example, most of the expressive writing studies included both women and men. Were there any differences between the sexes in the way people used language? Yes, there were differences—big differences—but they didn’t make any sense. So I did what anyone does when trying to sort out a problem late at night: I just ignored it. But then I would run another batch of text files the next day and find the same odd word differences between men and women. I won’t tell you the findings now because it would ruin the thrill of chapter 3, but trust me, the effects are big, unpredictable, and, once you think about them, make perfect sense.
As I played with more and more data sets, recurring word patterns kept popping up. Not only were there differences in the ways women and men used words but there were big differences as a function of people’s age. And social class. And emotional state, level of honesty, personality type, degree of formality, leadership ability, quality of relationships, and on and on. Word use was associated with almost every dimension of social psychology that I had ever studied. Particularly intriguing was that most of the word differences were associated with the most common and forgettable words in the English language.
Thirty years ago, had someone said that one of the high points of my professional life would be discovering the secret life of pronouns, I’m pretty sure I would have changed careers. Now I’m convinced that by understanding how and when we use these function words, we get a much better sense of the social and psychological processes affecting all of our behaviors, from our relationships with friends and family members to our ability to communicate effectively with people in business and the larger world.
If a friend’s language changes unexpectedly, we may be able to determine if he or she is depressed, angry, or deceptive. If you are an archivist or investigator, your ability to decode function words can help in identifying the true author of a text or the possible motive behind the writing of the text.
Most interesting for me, however, is that the analysis of the words we use in speaking and writing can be extraordinarily useful in helping us to understand ourselves. In the chapters that follow, you will see many examples where I have analyzed my own e-mail, letters of recommendation, and daily speech patterns in talking with friends and family members. By looking closely at words, I’ve discovered ways of improving my relationships with my family and friends, of being a better teacher, and of becoming a better leader.