The Secret Life of Pronouns (23 page)

In reading over hundreds of interactions such as this, it is fascinating to watch the unfolding of the status hierarchy. “Innocent” status-related questions include asking the other person about their parents’ occupation, last vacation, exercise habits, ethnicity, living location on campus, grade in the psychology class, and others. Not surprisingly, the person with high status in a particular domain usually is the one who asks a question about it. Notice how the higher-status Brittany is the one who asks about the other person’s year in school and major.

Assessing each other’s status is not unique to English-speaking college students. It is something that happens around the world. In fact, some societies have much simpler rules in assessing status. In South Korea, for example, relative age is one of the most strict determinants of who is higher in the social hierarchy. If the age is the same, wealth or income is assessed next. In these societies, it is common for people to directly ask one another about their lives, which, in the West, might be viewed as impolite. On a recent trip to South Korea, for example, I sat next to a Korean man roughly my age. Within the first ten minutes of the flight, he started a conversation asking me about my age. When it was clear that we were exactly the same age, he asked what my yearly income was. When I answered, he smiled warmly and simply said, “We make about the same.” I got the impression that his income was far higher, which made him somewhat more comfortable in talking with me afterward.

PEGGING STATUS HIERARCHIES IN THE NIXON WHITE HOUSE

Laboratory experiments to study status are pale imitations of the natural social processes that often take months or years to develop. In real-world organizations, the person who has emerged as the boss is likely to be someone who has been groomed for years and has the respect of others within the group. On occasion, an opportunity arises to capture natural conversation among well-known individuals with known levels of status. When this happens, we can begin to see the overall social hierarchy of the group. One of the best natural experiments of relative status emerged through tape recordings made a generation ago. The recordings were released as part of the famous Watergate scandal that shook the United States and resulted in the resignation of a president.

Two years after his 1968 election as president, Richard M. Nixon had a secret recording system installed in his office in the White House. Only a couple of his staff knew about it, and based on the recordings, he himself was rarely inhibited by the presence of the hidden microphones. After serving for four years, Nixon ran for reelection against a Democratic candidate who hopelessly trailed in the polls from the very beginning. Partly because of the paranoia that ran rampant in the Nixon administration, some of his high-level aides approved a number of illegal activities to help ensure Nixon’s reelection. One scheme was a late-night break-in of the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate office building in Washington, D.C. The burglars, some of whom worked in the White House, installed listening devices on the phones of the election strategists. Because of the vigilance of a single night watchman, the burglars were caught by the local police as they left the building.

Because the burglary was so peculiar, very few people could imagine that it had been initiated by responsible people in the White House. In the first months after the break-in, few took it seriously and its occurrence had no discernible impact on the election four months later. However, two young reporters from the
Washington Post
newspaper, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, doggedly pursued the story until Nixon’s closest aides began to be implicated. The Watergate scandal made headlines from early 1973 until Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.

The turning point in the investigation occurred when it was revealed by a midlevel White House staffer, Alexander Butterfield, that the White House taping system always recorded conversations when Nixon was present. In the subsequent months as their legal problems mounted, the White House released several of the transcribed recordings to the public. When the final one (also known as the “smoking gun” tape) was made public in the summer of 1974, Nixon was forced to resign.

The most pertinent tapes involved Nixon’s conversations with his lawyer John Dean, his chief domestic adviser John Ehrlichman, and his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman. The recordings, which were published in the spring of 1974, have been a treasure trove for historians and for language analysis researchers like me. Of the initial transcripts, we were able to analyze fifteen conversations where Nixon had one-on-one conversations with Dean, Ehrlichman, or Haldeman. For each conversation, we compared Nixon’s words with those of his aides.

Consistent with the lab studies, the high-status Nixon used far fewer I-words than his aides. Overall, 3.9 percent of Nixon’s words were first-person singular pronouns, compared to his aides’ 5.4 percent. Nixon also used more we-words (1.4 percent versus 0.8 percent) and you-words (3.4 percent versus 1.8 percent) than his aides.

Closer inspection of the transcripts suggested that Nixon had very different relationships with the three men. In their conversations, Nixon’s use of the first-person singular was significantly lower when talking to Dean and Ehrlichman than in his interactions with Haldeman. These pronoun patterns suggested that Nixon distanced himself much more from Dean and Ehrlichman, but that Nixon and Haldeman spoke to each other as equals. This is a great hypothesis, but is it true?

Of the four men, only John Dean was still alive when we began analyzing the Watergate transcripts in the early 2000s. He consented to an e-mail interview with me about Nixon’s relationships with the three aides. Haldeman and Nixon had known each other since the early 1950s and, in Dean’s words, were peers in running the White House. “They were not friends however. [Haldeman] once said that [Nixon] had no idea how many children he had, and they only shook hands once—the day [Nixon] fired him.” But ultimately “it was a partnership.”

Dean’s own relationship with Nixon was formal and respectful. Interestingly, Dean characterized Ehrlichman, who was often in “over his head” with respect to Washington politics, as arrogant yet insecure. In listening to the Watergate tapes himself, Dean was impressed with the degree to which Ehrlichman was making a power play in the hopes of getting Haldeman’s job. In his interactions with Nixon, Ehrlichman was overly solicitous, almost groveling. Nixon’s reaction was that of even greater psychological distance than with Dean, with whom he had a more formal relationship.

One final analysis with the I-words is noteworthy. The Watergate tapes that were released in 1974 were recorded from June 1972 (soon after the break-in) through July 1973, when the scandal was front-page news most every day. Remember that people who enjoy very high status and high self-esteem and who tend to be overconfident generally use I-words at very low levels. And in his interaction with his aides in June through about November 1972, Nixon’s rate of I-word usage ranged between 2 and 4 percent. However, as the scandal continued to develop and Nixon’s status began to erode, his use of I-words increased month by month. By the last recordings in July 1973, his average I-word usage with his aides hovered around 7 to 8 percent of all his words. In other words, as Nixon’s political world began to crumble, he became less dominant and powerful in all his dealings with others.

The Watergate transcripts point to our ability to distinguish the social hierarchy of Nixon’s aides through Nixon’s own eyes (or, perhaps, mouth). We can infer that he was most responsive and open to what Haldeman may have said compared to others such as Ehrlichman. Interestingly, the pronoun analyses can’t tell us about the relative hierarchy among the aides themselves. Nixon may have conferred more status on Dean than Ehrlichman inside the Oval Office. However, when Dean and Ehrlichman were together in other settings, it is possible that Ehrlichman could have had more status than Dean. Only through analyses of different groups of people can we begin to uncover the complexities of a group’s status hierarchy.

Finally, there is a large difference between status and liking. As Dean pointed out, there is no evidence that Nixon and Haldeman particularly liked one another. Respecting another person and liking them is not the same.

THE LANGUAGE OF LEADERSHIP

Can the research on status be extended to our understanding of leadership? Is it possible to identify good leaders by the ways they use words? Can leaders become more effective if they change the ways they use words? Surprisingly few studies have examined the language of leaders. Even fewer have studied the words of people in everyday life in order to predict what kinds of leaders they might be in the future.

ASSUMING A LEADERSHIP ROLE AFFECTS THE LEADER’S LANGUAGE

Within small groups, leaders do, in fact, talk differently than followers. Ethan Burris from the Red McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas and his colleagues conducted a project where about forty groups of business students worked together on a group task. Each of the four-person work groups were told that they represented a small consulting firm that was to offer advice to a fictitious company to improve its customer service division. The task was complex and required each small group to work together to achieve a solution.

The Burris project stands out because he dictated who the leader would be. He told each group that he had chosen the best possible leader based on an analysis of each student’s personality test scores. In truth, he made the leadership assignment randomly, akin to drawing one of the people’s name out of a hat. What is important, however, is that the groups truly believed that their leader was skilled.

Each group’s interactions were tape-recorded and transcribed. The results were consistent with everything we have found before. Those who were assigned leadership roles ended up using I-words the least and you-words and we-words the most. In other words,
people’s language changes once they adopt a role
. I can’t emphasize enough how important this finding is. Almost every other study that has been conducted with leadership and language was based on people who were already the leaders or who already had high status. This study indicates that the words reflect the leadership role. In other words, most people if thrust into a high-status leadership position will likely start to talk like a leader.

DOES A PERSON’S LANGUAGE PREDICT THEIR FUTURE LEADERSHIP ABILITY?

Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent annually in predicting and selecting the future leaders in industry, government, the military, and other large organizations. Most consulting firms that specialize in leadership selection and the companies they consult with make many of their decisions on intuition and/or questionable research methods. Even the very best scientifically grounded methods in selecting leaders are far from perfect in their hit rates.

Reliably selecting leaders is very difficult. The biggest problem is that a person could be a brilliant leader in one setting but terrible in another. In the past, I consulted with a company where the corporate head was unable to lead his management team in a direction that satisfied anyone. This same person had been a brilliant leader in a very different company just two years earlier. He hadn’t changed in his approach, intelligence, or abilities. The only thing that had changed was the setting.

A second problem that consulting firms face is in building assessment tools. For example, some firms give prospective leaders a raft of questionnaires. Others have people undergo grueling interviews or problem-solving tasks. Yet others just send their prospective leaders into a company and have them give a talk, shake a few hands, and undergo a series of meetings with the relevant people in the organization. By themselves, each of these methods is only slightly better than a flip of the coin in selecting between two candidates with similar backgrounds.

If we know that there is a particular language profile for effective leaders, can we use natural language to select future leaders? In reality, it is too early to tell. Word analyses can help us determine how people think, relate to others, and view themselves. They will be far less helpful in predicting how people will react in completely novel settings with an unpredictable group of people with different motivations and backgrounds.

DOES A DOMINANT LANGUAGE STYLE MAKE A PERSON A BETTER LEADER?

After almost a hundred years of group research, scientists in psychology, sociology, and business now appreciate that different groups work effectively depending on the task, the group structure, and the people in the group. In the Burris project, for example, the more the leader used high-status language, the more likely it was that the group would come up with objectively better results. The effects were not large, however. In another project with a looser group structure, just the opposite was found: Dominant language by the leader resulted in the groups’ performing worse.

We return to the same problem of the tension between a leader’s characteristics and the job that needs to be accomplished. Dozens of studies have shown that if a company, a sports team, or an entire country is generally productive, with very little infighting and not facing any major threats, leaders who are warm and friendly are particularly effective. Such leaders would probably not exhibit extremely dominant language. However, if the organization is facing a series of hardships from outside as well as conflicts from within, most people want a stronger, no-nonsense leader who will get the job done. A no-nonsense style often includes a leadership style marked by clear chains of command and an agreed-upon social hierarchy.