The Secret Life of Pronouns (28 page)

In reality, we don’t always click with our conversational partners. In most cases, one or both of the people are simply not interested in either the conversation or the person they are talking with. Sometimes, one of the conversational partners simply doesn’t want to hear what the other person has to say. For example, I was recently at a gathering where I ended up sitting next to two people, let’s call them David and Ahmed. Prior to the meeting, Ahmed had learned that David had made some disparaging remarks about Ahmed’s wife. David, who was unaware of Ahmed’s knowledge, started a friendly story about running into a mutual friend. During that time, Ahmed avoided eye contact with David and, as soon as David’s story was finished, snatched the conversational ball and began talking with me about a recent book he’d read. Whenever David attempted to join the conversation, Ahmed either ignored him or changed topic yet again. Afterward, when I asked David about the conversation, he was unaware that Ahmed had ignored everything he said and felt that the interaction had been fine.

The Ahmed-David conversation is a reminder that people are not always aware of their failure to connect with others. Much like the study with the dating couples, people may completely fail to click with one another as measured by LSM numbers but think that their interactions are normal. Our research finds that both partners in these dysfunctional interactions often fail to appreciate the problems. Perhaps the thought that the other person is subtly rejecting them is too threatening to acknowledge. Perhaps the person who is dismissing the other can’t see the process either. If only the two people had the LSM Detector with them.

CHAPTER 9

Seeing Groups, Companies, and Communities Through Their Words

M
ANAGEMENT CONSULTANTS SOMETIMES distinguish among I-companies, we-companies, and they-companies. To get a rough idea of an organization’s climate, they ask employees to talk about their typical workday. If employees refer to “my office” or “my company,” the atmosphere of the workplace is usually fine. People working in these I-companies are reasonably happy but not particularly wedded to the company itself. However, if they refer to “our office” or “our company,” pay special attention. Those in we-companies have embraced their workplace as part of their own identities. This sense of we-ness may explain why they work harder, have lower employee turnover, and have a greater sense of fulfillment about their work lives. And be very concerned if an organization’s employees start calling it “the company” or, worse, “that company” and referring to their co-workers as “they.” They-companies can be nightmares because workers are proclaiming that their work identity has nothing to do with them. No wonder consultants report that they-companies have unhappy workers and high turnover.

How people talk about their company is only one way to tap the group dynamics of an organization. By listening to the words people use within any group, several features about the group’s inner workings can be unmasked. Through e-mails, web pages, transcripts of meetings, and other word clues, we can measure how much group members think alike. It is also possible to profile groups in terms of their cohesiveness, productivity, formality, shared history, and, in some cases, their honesty and intentions to change.

This chapter may not be of relevance to some people. If you do not have any family, co-workers, or friends, or know anyone in any organization, neighborhood, or community, you can skip this chapter and jump to the next. Everyone else should keep reading.

WE-WORDS AS IDENTITY MARKERS

I learned about I-, we-, and they-companies from a consultant I sat next to on a flight several years ago. About the same time, couples researchers were discovering some similar patterns. In a typical study, married couples would be invited into the lab and encouraged to talk either about their marriage or about a problem in their relationship. Sparks would sometimes fly—sometimes in good ways, sometimes not.

In general, the more a couple used we-words when being interviewed about their marriage, the better. When couples used the warm-and-fuzzy
we
that said “my spouse and I,” it signified a healthier relationship and, in some studies, predicted how long their marriage would last. Interestingly, the use of we-words only predicts a good relationship if the members of the couple are in the presence of an interviewer. Other studies where married couples were asked to wear a digital recorder for several days failed to find any patterns with we-words. The use of we-words around just one other person often means “you” or “everybody but you.” A couple’s use of we-words when talking to a
third party
predicts a satisfying relationship. However,
we
use for couples talking only to
each other
rarely predicts the quality of the relationship.

In the laboratory, when talking about marital disagreements, we-words indicated a good relationship whereas the use of you-words suggested problems. The use of you-words, such as
you
,
your
, and
yourself
, were most apparent in toxic conversations—usually where the two participants were accusing each other of various shortcomings.

We-words may even save your life. In one project, patients with heart failure were interviewed with their spouses. They were asked a series of questions, including “As you think back on how the two of you have coped with the heart condition, what do you think you have done best?” The more the spouses used we-words in their answers, the healthier the patients were six months later. The use of we-words by spouses indicated that they viewed their partner’s health problem as a shared problem that both were committed to fixing. When both members of the relationship were working together to cope with the illness, it reduced the physical and emotional stress on the patient.

We-words may even save your life if you are perfectly healthy. Analyses of commercial airline cockpit recordings have found that poor communication among the flight crew has contributed to over half of all airline crashes in the last century. In some cases, pilots established a toxic atmosphere that discouraged dissent. In other cases, one or more crew members were distracted and failed to listen to critical information from others. A recurring theme has been that the most effective crews are ones that are close-knit and feel they are part of a team. For example, Bryan Sexton and Robert Helmreich analyzed the language of flight crews during extended flight simulations. The more the crew used we-words, the fewer errors it made. In analyses of cockpit recordings of airline crashes, the ones characterized by clear human error are associated with much lower use of we-words compared to those caused by unavoidable mechanical errors.

Words such as
we
,
us
, and
our
can be powerful markers of identity. When people tell complete strangers about “our marriage,” “our business,” or “our community,” they are making a public statement about who they are and with whom they identify. “Our marriage,” for example, is a shared and joint entity. Similarly, “our business” and “our community” are groups that are a part of who we are.

THE EXPANDING
WE
: THE PERSON AND THE GROUP

The ways people think about themselves are constantly shifting. The shift between the use of
I
and
we
can be remarkably subtle and can occur almost instantaneously. In conversations, both speakers and listeners may not even consciously hear which pronouns are uttered. Nevertheless, the speakers’ use of
we
to refer to the listeners and themselves has psychological and social meaning.

You can get a sense of this shift in the following overheard conversation between two people talking about a real estate deal. Alex, about forty-five years old, is a lawyer who dabbles in real estate deals. Liz Ann, around forty years old, successfully got out of the stock market at its peak and has been involved in a number of investment projects.

ALEX:
I’ve
got a deal you might be interested in. It involves buying that property on Oak Street.

LIZ ANN: The last thing
I
need is another fight with the Darden Group.

ALEX: This isn’t with Darden. The original owners have approached
me
about selling it for tax purposes.

LIZ ANN: What are they asking? What would be
my
risk?

ALEX: Probably 350, with the usual side deals.
We
could offer 300.

LIZ ANN:
I’m
not sure this is the right time. But if
we
sidetracked Darden,
I’d
be happy.

Clearly the two people know each other and have worked together in the past. At the beginning of the brief conversation, the two are separate beings with their own agendas. They both use I-words each time they speak. In the next-to-last line, Alex tosses out “We could offer 300.” In Alex’s head, the two people have subtly morphed from two individuals to one group with common goals. The final line by Liz Ann suggests a possible acceptance of their shared identity. Even though Alex might not have consciously picked up Liz Ann’s use of
we
, his brain likely detected that she was leaning toward investing in the Oak Street property.

The use of we-words often signals that a person feels a part of the group. Experienced workers in sales jobs are often attentive to the ways people shift in their use of we-words. As suggested by the real estate conversation, when a customer starts tossing in we-words to refer to the salesperson-customer relationship, an important emotional bond has developed. If you are the one doing the selling, can you speed this relationship up by using we-words yourself? Probably not much. The premature use of we-words, much like the language of a politician, is often perceived as disingenuous and manipulative.

The sense of “groupness” is often illusory. Sometimes people feel that they are a solid part of the group they are in, and at other times, while around the exact same people, they feel detached, alienated, or alone. By tracking people’s use of we-words and I-words, it is possible to detect their perceptions of group identity. The same language analyses can also tell us about the groups themselves.

THE GROWING SENSE OF GROUPNESS: FROM ME TO US

The longer people talk with others, the more they use we-words and the less they use I-words. As we get to know others, we let down our guard and start to accept them. The pattern of increasing we-words and decreasing I-words emerges across a wide array of groups.

Speed-dating is the perfect place to start. Think back to the speed-dating project in the last chapter where strangers met for ten consecutive four-minute “dates” back-to-back. Even in these ridiculously short meetings, people’s use of we- and I-words changed quickly and predictably. Minute-by-minute in the brief speed-dating sessions, I-words for both people dropped and we-words increased.

The
I
-drop/
we
-jump effect can be seen far outside the dating context. In some studies, students visit a psychology laboratory and end up talking to a complete stranger for fifteen minutes in a get-to-know-you setting. In the first five minutes, both participants typically talk a little about their backgrounds, their majors, and where they live. Because both people are describing themselves, they tend to use I-words at relatively high rates. During the next five minutes, they talk less about themselves as they begin to establish common ground between them. By the final five minutes, their use of I-words drops between 10 and 50 percent compared to their starting levels. At the same time, their use of we-words increases anywhere from 20 to 200 percent. The patterns are even stronger in online get-to-know-you chats between two strangers.

The same shifts occur in larger groups. In a business school experiment with four-person groups, people worked on a complex group-decision task for thirty minutes. Same results: People in the groups decreased their I-word usage by 19 percent and increased their we-words by 39 percent from the first ten minutes to the last ten minutes.

More interesting are shifts in we- and I-words in real-world groups that last over hours, days, months, and even years. The airline cockpit project discussed earlier found similar patterns. The longer a crew is together, the more the group uses we-words.

And the
I
-drop/
we
-jump effect extends to bigger groups over much larger time frames. One project involved eighteen engineers, economists, and computer experts working on a complex online national defense project over almost two years. Another included around twenty professional therapists who met twice a year for three years as part of their professional training. Another project tracked the lyrics of the Beatles over their ten years of singing together. For all these groups, I-word usage dropped month by month, year by year, just as we-word use increased.

What does all this mean? The more time we spend with other people, the more our identity becomes fused with them. We may not necessarily like or trust them but as our history becomes intertwined, we see ourselves as part of the same group. An interesting corollary of this phenomenon happens as we age. By and large, the older we get, the more time we have spent with virtually everyone around us. One might even predict that older people would use fewer I-words and more we-words than when they were younger. And it’s true. In a study of language use among almost three thousand people, those over the age of seventy used 54 percent more we-words and 79 percent fewer I-words than adolescents.

BRINGING “US” TOGETHER: WHEN EVENTS CREATE GROUP IDENTITY

Gradually adopting the identity of a group is a natural process that we rarely notice. One minute in a conversation our opinions are sprinkled with
I
and the next with
we
. It just happens. There are other times, however, when the ways we identify with a group change quickly and dramatically.

The simplest examples can be seen with our allegiances to sports teams. One of the most clever social psychology experiments to demonstrate this was run in the mid-1970s by Robert Cialdini and his colleagues. Students who were attending universities with top-ranked football teams were called in the middle of football season as part of a survey purportedly dealing with campus issues. In the previous weeks, their home football teams had won a major game but also had lost another. After a few preliminary questions, the interviewer asked about one of the two pivotal games in the season, “Can you tell me the outcome of that game?”

If their team had won, they usually answered, “We won.” But if their team had failed to win the game, their answer was more likely “They lost.” Taking partial credit for your team’s winning is a form of basking in reflected glory. Basically, we want to be close to groups that are successful and distance ourselves from losers.

The sense of wanting to belong to a powerful group may have its roots in evolution. Most social animals seek the protection of a group when they are threatened. Even the appearance of an outsider can make people more aware of their own social network. In the same football project, Cialdini’s interviewers sometimes claimed that they lived in the same town as the respondents. Other times, the interviewers reported that they were from out of state. In other words, half the time the participants thought they were talking to someone like them whereas the other half they believed that they were being interviewed by a football foreigner. The us-them effect was much stronger when talking with the outsider. When reminded of competing groups, our own membership in a successful group becomes more important.