The Secret Life of Pronouns

S
TOP FOR A minute and think about your last conversation, e-mail, or text message. You think you said something about dinner plans, your laundry, a strategy for the next sales meeting. And you probably did. But at the same time, you said much, much more. The precise words you used to communicate your message revealed more about you than you can imagine.

You, a, am, to, I, but, the, for, not …

Pronouns, articles, prepositions, and a handful of other small, stealthy words reveal parts of your personality, thinking style, emotional state, and connections with others. These words, typically called function words, account for less than one-tenth of 1 percent of your vocabulary but make up almost 60 percent of the words you use.
*
Your brain is not wired to notice them but if you pay close attention, you will start to see their subtle power.

Function words behave differently than you might think. For example, the most commonly used word in spoken English,
I
, is used at far higher rates by followers than by leaders, truth-tellers than liars. People who use high rates of articles—
a
,
an
,
the
—do better in college than low users. And if you want to find your true love, compare the ways you use function words with that of your prospective partners.

Although this book focuses on function words, it really isn’t about parts of speech at all. Rather, it’s about how these words serve as windows into people’s personalities and social connections. My training and early research bridged the areas of social, personality, clinical, and health psychology. Only through some accidental discoveries did I even notice the existence of these stealth words.

At first, the study of function words was a side venture. But as I delved more deeply into the topic, I started making some unexpected connections to leadership, mental health, brain function, and other issues. Soon, my students and I were spending time with computer engineers, linguists, FBI agents, lawyers, doctors, and marketing gurus, and with colleagues in history, political science, communications, and even accounting. And, most recently, we have been swept up in the social media frenzy—applying our ideas and methods to Twitter, Facebook, online dating, blogging, instant messaging, e-mail, and even the occasional old-fashioned telephone call.

This book is a little like a travel guide. It is organized around some of my favorite topics in psychology and the social sciences—personality, gender, deception, leadership, love, history, politics, and groups. The goal is to show how the analysis of function words can lead to new insights in each of these topics. At the same time, I want you to appreciate ways of thinking about and analyzing language. No matter what your personal or professional interest, I hope you come to see the world differently and can use this knowledge to better understand yourself and others.

A REVOLUTION IS under way in the analysis of language that will have a profound effect on the social sciences and humanities. The words that people generate in their lifetimes are like fingerprints. Increasingly, these words can be used to establish people’s identities and even their backgrounds. Language use, especially the use of function words, can signal people’s social networks and the roles they play in their families, in their neighborhoods, and at work. Wherever there is a word trail, a host of new computer-based methods can follow it. Shakespeare, Confucius, authors of ancient religious texts, politicians, and novelists have left behind a mind-boggling number of words that scholars from all disciplines can now study with new eyes and unprecedented tools.

Although the analysis of language is the focus of this book, it is really a work of psychology. Whereas linguists are primarily interested in language for its own sake, I’m interested in what people’s words say about their psychological states. Words, then, can be thought of as powerful tools to excavate people’s thoughts, feelings, motivations, and connections with others. With advancements in computer technologies, this approach is informing a wide range of scholars across many disciplines—linguists, sociolinguists, English scholars, anthropological linguists, neuroscientists, psycholinguists, developmentalists, computer scientists, computational linguists, and others. Some of the most innovative work is now coming from collaborations between academics of all stripes and companies such as Google.

If you are interested in the topics or approach of this book, there are a handful of very bright thinkers and writers whose work is accessible to a wide audience. Some who have influenced my approach the most include the sociologist Erving Goffman, the linguist George Lakoff, the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, the sociolinguist Deborah Tannen, and the anthropologist Anna Wierzbicka.

The contributions of many others have directly affected my thinking about the fundamental connections between word use and psychological state. Freud’s early work on slips of the tongue marked the first psychological acknowledgment that unintended words that pop out of our mouths can reveal hidden thoughts and feelings. Later psychoanalysts, such as Louis Gottschalk and Walter Weintraub, provided road maps on how to link seemingly innocuous words to deeper motivations and fears that patients were expressing.

Several computer-based text analysis systems presaged my own computer work, especially Philip Stone’s General Inquirer program in the 1960s. Any comprehensive story about the early days of text analysis also includes names such as Doug Biber, Herb Clark, Donald Foster, Howard Giles, Rod Hart, Robert Hogenraad, Hans Kordy, Klaus Krippendorf, Colin Martindale, Erhard Mergenthaler, and others.

The people who have influenced me the most, however, have been my students and colleagues over the years. This book reflects the collaborative effort of dozens, even hundreds, of people. Those who have been most central to the current language project include Jenna Baddeley, David Beaver, Roger Booth, Martha Francis, Art Graesser, Carla Groom, Jeff Hancock, Molly Ireland, Ewa Kacewicz, Laura King, Matthias Mehl, Kate Niederhoffer, Keith Petrie, Nairán Ramírez-Esparza, Stephanie Rude, Yitai Seih, Richard Slatcher, Lori Stone Handelman, and Yla Tausczik. Bill Swann, Bob Josephs, and my other colleagues in the psychology department at the University of Texas at Austin have also been important in guiding my work.

This book would not have been possible without funding from the National Science Foundation, Army Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, and College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas. I’m especially grateful for the support of my book whisperer, Marc Aronson, agent, Deirdre Mullane, and editors at Bloomsbury Press, Peter Ginna and Pete Beatty.

Three people have influenced this book more than any. Cindy Chung has been at the heart of the language research with me for many years. Her ideas, feedback, and humor have made the journey a pure pleasure. Sam Gosling, my colleague and co-conspirator, has pressed me to think more broadly about personality and social processes. Finally, my wife, Ruth, has inspired, guided, and nudged me to think about stories, social relationships, and the real world in new ways every day. Her delicate fingerprints are on every page of this book.

CHAPTER 1

Discovering the Secret Life of the Most Forgettable Words

Good morning everyone! Have a fabulous day! Xoxo Paris :)

—PARIS HILTON, media personality

went to the mountains above Beirut yesterday to meet with Walid Jumblatt—the leader of the Druze—fascinating experience.

—JOHN MCCAIN, U.S. Senator

Hanging out with friends—“pom” martinis-getting ready to watch xmas special. 10 eastern 9 central. Going caroling afterward!

—OPRAH WINFREY, media mogul and television host

time to drink a bottle of wine and sketch for the new tour. st.louis was brilliant. there’s eyeliner on my knee, and blood on my elbow. shady

—LADY GAGA, singer and songwriter

O
VER 100,000 YEARS ago, our ancestors began talking. About 5,000 years ago, humans started writing. In the last 150 years, we adopted everything from the telegraph, radio, and television to e-mail, text messages, blogs, and other social media. The ways we connect with one another may have changed but we still are compelled to communicate our ideas, experiences, and emotions to those around us.

Beginning in 2006, we began to use Twitter. Anyone with a Twitter account can broadcast brief updates, or “tweets,” that can be instantly read by almost anyone. On a minute-by-minute basis, you can know what your friends or even world-famous celebrities are thinking. Many readers may wonder why people would want to do this. However, once you immerse yourself in the Twitter world, you can begin to appreciate some of its appeal.

Look back at the four tweets that begin this chapter. On a certain level, these tweets are no different from everyday communication. One can imagine overhearing similar things from someone at the next table in a restaurant. What are the different people telling others? Paris Hilton is simply calling out a greeting. John McCain is describing meeting an important person in Lebanon. Oprah Winfrey tells us about her plans for the evening. Lady Gaga wants us to know that she is getting into the spirit of her new tour.

But there is more in these tweets than their authors appreciate. Each entry is like a fingerprint. For example, if this were a multiple-choice test and people were asked to match the tweet with the author, most would make a perfect score on the test. Even if you had never heard of any of the authors, the mere label of “media personality,” “U.S. senator,” etc. would provide enough information to make educated guesses about who tweeted what.

The tweets also provide insights into each person’s thinking and personality. Hilton is relentlessly upbeat with her exclamation points and emoticons. McCain works to impress his readers with his big words and worldliness. Winfrey, the consummate salesperson, “drops” what time the Christmas special (which is actually
her
Christmas special) will be aired. And Lady Gaga conveys that she is a bit wild but also thoughtful and, judging by her use of pronouns, somewhat prone to depression.

If we started analyzing more tweets from each of these people, we would begin to get a much richer sense of their motivations, fears, emotions, and the ways they connect with others and themselves. Each person uses words in a unique way. Some people, like Lady Gaga, tend to be highly personal in the ways they communicate—they are self-reflective in their use of words such as
I
and
me
. Others, like John McCain, reveal that they have a great deal of trouble in connecting to others. In fact, if you would like to try out a quick personality analysis tool based on peoples’ Twitter feeds, try out the experimental website that my colleagues and I created, www.analyzewords.com.

Often, some of the most revealing words that we use are the shortest and most forgettable. Pronouns (such as
I
,
you
,
we
, and
they
), articles (
a
,
an
,
the
), prepositions (e.g.,
to
,
for
,
over
), and other stealth words broadcast the kind of people we are. And this is the story of this book.

It has been a long road from our ancestors’ uttering their first sentences to Paris Hilton’s tweeting her greetings. Due in large part to the current technological revolution, we now have the tools to analyze tweets and Facebook updates, e-mails, old-fashioned letters and books, and the words from everyday life. For the first time, we are able to use computers to determine how everyday words can reflect our social and psychological states.

Who, for example, would have ever predicted that the high school student who uses too many verbs in her college admissions essay is likely to make lower grades in college? Or that the poet who overuses the word
I
in his poetry is at higher risk of suicide? Or that a certain world leader’s use of pronouns could reliably presage whether he’d lead his country into war? By looking more carefully at the ways people convey their thoughts in language we can begin to get a sense of their personalities, emotions, and connections with others.

WHEN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND LANGUAGE MEET

Before describing the secret life of words, it may be helpful to say a bit about the author. That would be me. I’m a social psychologist whose interest in words came about almost accidentally. As you will see, the focus of this book is really on people rather than language per se. Words and language are, of course, fascinating topics. Through the eyes of a social psychologist, words are even more intriguing as clues to the inner workings of people.

By way of background, my early career dealt with health, emotions, and the nature of traumatic experiences. In the early 1980s, I stumbled on a finding that fascinated me. People who reported having a terrible traumatic experience
and
who kept the experience a secret had far more health problems than people who openly talked about their traumas. Why would keeping a secret be so toxic? More importantly, if you asked people to disclose emotionally powerful secrets, would their health improve? The answer, my students and I soon discovered, was yes.

We began running experiments where people were asked to write about traumatic experiences for fifteen to twenty minutes a day for three or four consecutive days. Compared to people who were told to write about nonemotional topics, those who wrote about trauma evidenced improved physical health. Later studies found that emotional writing boosted immune function, brought about drops in blood pressure, and reduced feelings of depression and elevated daily moods. Now, over twenty-five years after the first writing experiment, more than two hundred similar writing studies have been conducted all over the world. While the effects are often modest, the mere act of translating emotional upheavals into words is consistently associated with improvements in physical and mental health.

IN SEARCH OF A THEORY TO EXPLAIN THE POWER OF WRITING

Why does writing work? Some scientists suggest that repeatedly confronting painful emotions eventually lessens their impact—we adapt to them. Another group points to the unhealthy effects of rumination and unfinished business. Many people who have a traumatic experience keep replaying the events in their minds in a futile attempt to make sense of their suffering. The never-ending thoughts about their emotional upheavals can disrupt their sleep and make it impossible to focus on their jobs and their relationships. Writing about the trauma, according to this view, allows people to find meaning or understanding in these events and helps to resolve their emotional turmoil.

The answer isn’t simple. I’m now convinced that when people write about traumatic events, several healthy changes occur simultaneously, including changes in people’s thinking patterns, emotional responses, brain activity, sleep and health behaviors, and so forth. Discovering why writing is effective for one person may not explain why it works for someone else.

What the early writing researchers failed to consider was that people were using words to describe their personal upheavals. Perhaps the key to expressive writing was buried in what people actually say in their essays. The stories people wrote were powerful and oftentimes haunting. In almost every project, participants wrote about physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, divorce, drug and alcohol problems, suicides, terrible accidents, and feelings of failure, humiliation, and suffering. Not only was there a wide range of powerful stories but the ways people wrote about them differed widely. Some people used humor, others were full of rage, yet other stories were written in a cold, detached, and matter-of-fact way.

If a group of clinical psychologists or just regular people read these essays, could they decipher what dimensions of writing predicted improved physical health? We tried this and the answer was no. The stories were too complicated and even the most conscientious readers couldn’t agree about which elements of people’s heartbreaking stories were most meaningful. Some other approach was needed to unlock the reason behind the effectiveness of expressive writing.

THE COMPUTER REVOLUTION AND THE BIRTH OF LIWC

It was 1991 and the revolution in computer technology was well under way. There had been some major breakthroughs in the computerized analysis of language in research that had been done at Princeton, Harvard, and MIT in the 1960s and 1970s. Surely, with this new technology, I could get a computer program that could analyze my trauma essays. No judges, no heartache. I could get some answers with the press of a button.

Unfortunately, no simple computer programs were available at the time. “How hard could it be to write such a program?” I asked myself. By a happy coincidence, a new graduate student who had been a professional programmer had just joined my research team. “Martha,” I casually told her, “I’ve got a great idea for a new program that should only take about three weeks to develop.” Martha E. Francis turned out to be a creative programmer with a flair for social psychology, though she had no idea what she was getting into. Although the guts of the program were written very quickly, the “three-week project” took on a life of its own. In three years, we finally rolled out the first version of a computer program we called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, or LIWC (pronounced “Luke”).

The idea behind LIWC was that the words people used—whether in a trauma essay or everyday speech—would reflect their feelings and that by the simple process of counting these words we could gain insights into their emotional states. We assumed that angry people would use anger-related words; sad people would use sadness words. In writing about a trauma, the emotional states of our participants should be reflected in their selection of emotionally relevant words.

So, in developing the LIWC program, we created a series of word dictionaries designed to capture different psychological concepts. For example, we built an anger dictionary, now made up of over 180 words, that comprised numerous words related to anger, such as
hate
,
rage
,
kill
,
slash
,
revenge
, etc. We also included word stems such as
kill
so that any word that starts with the letters K-I-L-L, such as
killer
,
killing
,
kills
, and
killed
, would be counted as well. We then went on to build dictionaries for sadness, anxiety, positive emotions, and other mood states.

The trauma essays differed in multiple dimensions beyond their emotional tone. To cast a fairly broad net we developed other lexicons that measured the occurrence of other types of words, such as the use of different types of pronouns (e.g., first-person singular—such as
I
,
me
, and
my
), articles (
a
,
an
,
the
), different types of thinking-related words that signal cause-effect thinking (
cause
,
because
,
reason
,
rationale
), and so forth. Before we knew it, we had created almost eighty different dictionaries that we felt would include nearly all of the types of words people commonly use in everyday language.

The reason it took almost three years to get LIWC running was because of the painstaking process of building each dictionary. We employed an army of students who evaluated every word that was part of any dictionary. For example, should the word
frustration
be included in the anger dictionary? Panels of student judges had to all agree that it was related to anger (in this case, it was).

Thanks to Martha’s programming skills and the thousands of hours spent by our student judges, LIWC was eventually ready to go. The final program instantly analyzed computer-based text or document files and calculated the percentage of words associated with each dictionary. The most recent version of LIWC can analyze thousands of individual digital files in a matter of seconds. Although our initial studies all focused on trauma essays, we eventually moved to poems, novels, blogs, Twitter feeds, letters, IMs, transcripts of conversations, and any other documents that contain words.

To appreciate how a word-counting program works, let’s look at the first two sentences of Lewis Carroll’s
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
:

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversation?”

So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.

LIWC would begin its analysis by first counting all the words in the text, which, in this case, is 113. It would then look at each word separately to determine if it was included in any of the existing dictionaries. So, for example, LIWC would first see the word
Alice
but would find no such word in any of its dictionaries. It would then move to the word
was
. Voilà! The word
was
would be in several dictionaries, including the verb dictionary, the auxiliary-verb dictionary, and the past-tense verb dictionary. The count for each of those dictionaries would now be 1. As LIWC proceeded in its task, it would then locate the next word,
beginning
, in the time dictionary;
to
in the preposition dictionary; and so forth. Finally, after evaluating all 113 words in the text and assigning each of them to the relevant dictionaries, LIWC would then calculate the percentage of total words that are linked to each dictionary. So, for example, in this passage, about 7 percent of all the words are personal pronouns, 9 percent are articles, and 3.6 percent are words related to emotion.

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