The Secret Life of Pronouns (12 page)

In the 1930s, another projective test—the Thematic Apperception Test, or TAT—was created by Henry Murray and Christiana Morgan at Harvard. Instead of requiring people to blurt out the first thing they saw in inkblots, the TAT encouraged people to make up stories based on a series of ambiguous drawings. The stories that come from the pictures were said to reflect a variety of underlying psychological issues in the participants’ lives. The drawing above is one of the standard TAT stimuli. People are typically asked to look at the picture for a few seconds and then describe what they think is occurring in the scene.

Try it yourself. If you would like to take this test before it is discussed below, go to www.SecretLifeOfPronouns/TAT. In the online version, you will receive computerized feedback based on an experimental method we are developing. Even if you don’t go to the website, look at the picture and make up a brief story that describes what is happening. What is each person thinking and doing? What has happened in the past and what will likely happen in the future?

One application of the TAT has been to examine basic psychological needs. Influenced by Murray, David McClelland developed a model that assumed we are all driven by three basic needs: a need for achievement, a need for power, and a need for affiliation. Using different TAT pictures, McClelland determined the strengths of each of the needs in influencing behavior. The picture you just saw is relevant to all three needs but was initially selected for assessing the needs for achievement and power. The online experimental test of the TAT has attracted thousands of people from around the world. Here are two responses to the drawing:

This is a story of the clash between Shirley, the conservative supervisor, and her new employee who has been with the firm for just a short time. Shirley is not happy with the enthusiasm that Sonia puts into her work as it tends to show her up and that is not a situation she enjoys as a supervisor … Shirley’s body is not relaxed showing where her concentration lies, not on the experiment but on the person she has come to despise because of the threat she is to her entrenched position. Sonia successfully completes her task … and she is rewarded with a position of experimental scientist in a new department … Shirley has never been recognized for the … loyal person that she has proved to be over the years with the organization.

—64-year-old male

Julie woke up early this morning knowing that it would be a hard day at the lab. Her mother was the one in charge and she was very strict, old fashioned, and thought that none of Julie’s ideas were ever worth her time … After a few moments of mixing chemicals … the beaker melted and the chemicals started foaming up all over the place, ruining everything they touched. Her mother screamed at her … but this time Julie was done taking that crap from her mom … She finally decided to tell her mom how she had felt all these years. Strangely enough, she listened … They both were relieved to finally talk things out and have a chance of having a good relationship.

—17-year-old female

There is a certain transparency in these and most TAT stories. The first story suggests someone who may feel threatened by younger people at his job and has a sense of powerlessness. In McClelland’s words, the story hints at an inhibited need for power. In fact, one way to detect inhibited power motivation according to McClelland is to see how frequently the person uses negation words such as
no
,
not
,
never
. The sixty-four-year-old gentleman who wrote the essay used
not
or
never
five times—which is quite impressive. Is it possible that the story reflects some of the same experiences that he is having in his life?

And, by the same token, do you think the seventeen-year-old female who wrote the second essay may be having some conflict with her own mother? Just a wild guess, of course. The second essay indicates that the writer is high in her need for affiliation and moderate in her needs for achievement and power.

The scoring methods for knowing people’s needs are a bit complicated. Historically, essays such as these were read phrase by phrase and scored by professionally trained raters. More recently, computer programs have been developed that systematically look for words that suggest needs for achievement (e.g.,
win
,
lose
,
succeed
,
fail
,
try
), power (e.g.,
threat
,
boss
,
employee
,
lead
,
follow
,
master
,
submissive
), and affiliation (e.g.,
love
,
friend
,
lonely
). Note that words that are opposite in meaning, such as
win
and
lose
, can both reflect the same need. People who are obsessed with achieving may alternately aspire to success and, at the same time, fear failure. People who are low on a need for achievement simply don’t think along the success-failure dimension.

Research on needs for achievement, affiliation, and power has yielded important findings. Those with an inhibited need for power, for example, have been found to have elevated blood pressure levels. David Winter, one of the leaders in the analysis of need states, has done elegant work on speeches of world leaders and accurately predicted leadership styles, possibility of declaring war, and other behaviors. For example, analyses of the first inaugural addresses by John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush indicated that both were inordinately high in need for power and affiliation. In Winter’s view, this can be a toxic combination where a powerful leader is inclined to rely on a tightly knit cohort of friends in making major decisions. In early 2001, after analyzing Bush’s first inaugural address, Winter warned that Bush’s language was consistent with a pattern of aggressiveness based on a tight group of followers who would be resistant to dissenting opinions.

INFERRING PERSONALITY INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE LAB

Methods like the bottle and garden party test as well as the Rorschach and TAT are all aimed at inferring people’s behaviors or personalities from the ways they use words. The techniques are generally administered in controlled laboratory settings. People see the same pictures with the same instructions and are asked to write or talk about them in the same ways. When the situation is virtually identical from person to person, any differences we see in language should reflect differences in the people themselves.

One frustration for researchers is that it is not possible to know how their results generalize beyond the artificial constraints of the laboratory. For example, in the bottle study, those who wrote about the bottle’s shadow tended to be more artistic, better psychology students, and less obsessed with cleanliness and order. How can this be interpreted? In all likelihood, we have stumbled across a perceptual style that is only apparent when people are interpreting certain visual scenes. In other words, the bottle findings tell us something about how some people naturally detect nuances in the visual properties of objects. It could be something about that particular bottle in that particular lighting in that particular picture that causes some people to notice shadows and other people to write about other things.

More broadly, could we get the same information about people by just looking at their regular language? This might include their e-mails, transcriptions of conversations, blogs, or professional writing. The answer is yes. And this is the very essence of this book. People who are analytic or categorical thinkers tend to use articles, prepositions, and negations when describing a boring bottle, discussing a backyard party, or talking with their neighbor about Mrs. Gilliwitty’s stomach problems. Of course, the ways we talk and think change depending on the situations we are in. In formal settings, we all talk more formally; when at wild parties, we are apt to talk, well, more wildly. Nevertheless, we take our personalities with us wherever we go, and no matter what the setting, we will leave behind a partial copy of our function-word fingerprint.

USING WORDS TO UNDERSTAND OTHERS AND OURSELVES

Armed with the findings from this chapter, is it possible for you to “read” others better? Can the work on language help you to be a better or more effective person? Let’s go with a qualified “yes” to both questions.

Recall from the second chapter the story about Senator John Kerry’s aides urging him to use the word
we
more and
I
less in his speeches? His very bright group of advisers falsely assumed that a person who uses
we
in a speech makes listeners feel closer to the speaker. This should serve as an object lesson to anyone who wants to read others’ personalities by analyzing their language. The primary rule of word counting:
Don’t trust your instincts.

If you want to get a sense of other people by examining their language, you will actually need to count their words. You can do this by hand—but it is a slow and painful process. Or you can use a computer program. (A brief overview of some programs can be found in the notes section at the end of the book.) Of course, simply counting their words is just the first step in decoding their personality.

What do you want to know about other people? As outlined in this chapter, it is fairly easy to detect different thinking styles—whether formal, analytic, or narrative. Later chapters provide clues to detecting deception, dominance, ability to socially connect, and other dimensions. Capturing what grabs their attention through techniques such as the Meaning Extraction Method can be more difficult. Fortunately, our brains are much better at hearing content words than function words and so actual word counting may be less needed.

If you want to find out what themes guide people’s attention, listen to what they talk about. One friend of mine is insecure about his intelligence. He’s undoubtedly smart but in virtually every conversation he drops information to prove how smart he really is. The last couple of times I saw him, he mentioned how he performed on an intelligence test in an airline magazine, a colleague’s offhand comment about something smart he said, how smart people watched documentaries (oh, and he watches documentaries). This has been a guiding theme in this person’s life and it is evident in virtually all his interactions.

A second way to capture the themes most important to people is to watch how they guide the conversation. Years ago, I had dinner with two old friends—one who is an insightful clinical psychologist and the other an architect. In the middle of the conversation, the clinician casually noted to the architect, “It sounds like you are having some financial problems.” The architect was stunned by the clinician’s out-of-the-blue comment. But then he painfully admitted that he had recently lost his life savings due to a risky investment. I was surprised myself by the clinician’s comment because there was nothing I could discern in the conversation that hinted at the financial problems of my other friend.

Afterward, I asked the clinician what made him think that our friend had financial difficulties. He laughed because in his mind, it was obvious. Several times during the meal, the architect would change the conversational topic—and it always had something to do with money, some kind of financial loss, or investments. Neither the architect nor I saw the regularity of his switching topics. Indeed, I’ve since learned that when someone changes the conversational direction, it serves as a powerful marker of what is on his or her mind.

ANALYZING OUR WORDS TO KNOW OURSELVES BETTER

If you had access to all the words you used in a day, what could you learn about yourself? Through my language research, I’ve been able to answer the question for myself. And, at least for me, it has been quite helpful.

One way my laboratory team studies natural language is to record everyday speech in children, college students, married couples, and the elderly. One of my former graduate students, Matthias Mehl, was instrumental in developing a recording device called the Electronically Activated Recorder, or EAR. The EAR is a digital recorder that is programmed to come on for about thirty seconds once every twelve to fourteen minutes over the course of several days. Matthias, who is now an internationally respected researcher, spent thousands of hours perfecting the EAR so that it could withstand the punishment from its wearers.