The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [90]
The matching of function words is called language style matching, or LSM. Analyses of conversations find that LSM occurs within the first fifteen to thirty seconds of any interaction and is generally beyond conscious awareness. Several studies suggest that LSM is apparent in some unlikely places.
Imagine, for example, that you were required to answer a series of open-ended essay questions as part of a class assignment. Imagine also that each of the open-ended questions was written in a very different style, ranging from very formal to extremely informal in style. Would you notice the differences in the writing styles of the questions? More important, would you change the ways you answered the questions by adjusting your answers to match each question’s language style? Surprisingly, you would likely not notice the differences in writing styles but you would adjust the style of your answers.
Working with my colleague Sam Gosling and graduate student Molly Ireland, we set up an online class writing assignment for several five-hundred-person Introductory Psychology classes. Students were forewarned that they would need to answer four separate brief essay questions about aspects of a class writing assignment. We never told the students that the different questions would be written using different language styles. For example, one particular essay question was written either in a pompous, arrogant style or, in another version, the same question was written in a chatty “Valley girl” style. Here are two samples where students were asked to write about a particular theory that had been discussed in the textbook:
Pompous instructions: Although your professors gave this topic rather minimal attention, cognitive dissonance is a common psychological phenomenon with which the vast majority of uninformed laymen will be familiar … generating an example should be simple enough once one has become reasonably familiar with this concept.
Valley girl instructions: OK, we might not have talked about cognitive dissonance much. Which I think is totally crazy cause it’s like, everybody should be able to see that cognitive dissonance is majorly relevant. Like, it’s seriously happening ALL the time, you know??… So OK, it’s your turn. I mean, like really try to think of an example of cognitive dissonance and tell me everything about it.
At the end of both questions, everyone read the same instructions:
In the space below, give a real-life example of cognitive dissonance, explaining what led to it and how it was resolved. Support your example with evidence from your book.
So, like, you get the idea of the differences between the writing styles of the two questions. Interestingly, the students provided equally knowledgeable answers no matter what the writing style. The only difference was that students who received the pompous question answered in pompous ways and those who read the Valley girl instructions wrote in the same freestyle informal lingo. Because everyone responded to four different essay questions, each written in a different style, many students later reported not even noticing the writing styles at all.
It’s hard to look at those two essay questions and not notice the striking differences in the ways they are worded. Nevertheless, we all naturally adjust to the speaker (or exam writer) we are working with. In fact, Molly ran another experiment where she gave people two pages from previously published novels. She then asked her participants to pick up where the original author left off and to write another page of the novel. For half of her participants, she explicitly told them to try to match the author’s writing style. Molly found that everyone, even those who were not explicitly told to do any language matching, naturally matched the writers’ original styles. In fact, when people were directly told to match styles, they were slightly worse at style matching.
Language style matching is much