Psychologist James Pennebaker reveals the hidden meaning of pronouns

Psychologist James Pennebaker reveals the hidden meaning of pronouns(scientificamerican.com)

103 points by jericsinger 14 years ago | 23 comments

hugh3 14 years ago |

There's some interesting gems in here:

One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status. The effects were quite robust and, naturally, I wanted to test this on myself. I always assumed that I was a warm, egalitarian kind of guy who treated people pretty much the same.

I was the same as everyone else. When undergraduates wrote me, their emails were littered with I, me, and my. My response, although quite friendly, was remarkably detached -- hardly an I-word graced the page. And then I analyzed my emails to the dean of my college. My emails looked like an I-word salad; his emails back to me were practically I-word free.

JamesBlair 14 years ago | |

Especially when you connect it back to the discussion of gender on the first page:

Most people assume that men use I-words and cognitive words more than women and that women use we-words, emotions, and social words more than men. Bad news. You were right if you guessed that women use social words more. However, women use I-words and cognitive words at far higher rates than men. There are no reliable differences between men and women for use of we-words or emotion words (OK, those were trick questions). And men use articles more than women, when you might guess there’d be no difference.

dill_day 14 years ago | |

Interesting, but I think there are some good comments (at the article) too -- pointing out that it also just seems to make sense -- like,

Undergraduates write to professors with singular first person pronouns because they are often requesting information, or this sort of thing... understandable then that there's less reason for I, me, and my in the professor's response (and easy to imagine similar situation in other relationships).

Still, a cool article. Interesting research.

TeMPOraL 14 years ago | | |

Also, (at least where I'm from) there's an expectation that as an undergraduate, you'll address professors using proper tone. This way, you end up writing lots of "I'd like to ask (...)", ", "is it possible for me to", etc. The writing gets full of fixed-phrases with lots of "I" and "me" - the author's "I-word salad". And academics I know tend to reply directly, without any formally required style of writing, so their communcation is more natural.

ColinWright 14 years ago |

I commented when this was submitted yesterday, the bit that struck me was this:

   ... we can predict people’s college performance
   reasonably well by simply analyzing their college
   admissions essays. Across four years, we analyzed
   the admissions essays of 25,000 students and then
   tracked their grade point averages (GPAs). Higher
   GPAs were associated with admission essays that
   used high rates of nouns and low rates of verbs and
   pronouns. The effects were surprisingly strong and
   lasted across all years of college, no matter what
   the students' major.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2895701

mrb 14 years ago | |

What if the same prediction could be made on motivation letters sent by candidates to potential employers? If I were Google, I would hire this guy. He would fit perfectly in their candidate selection effort of using automated tools to process resumes & motivation letters...

ajuc 14 years ago |

I wonder, if they checked some languages that includes pronouns in verbs.

For example in Polish pronouns are mixed with verbs - you say "szła" (she went), "pójdzie" (he will go) or "idę" (i am going), you can add pronouns "ona szła", "on pójdzie", "ja idę", but that's only stylistic choice.

Most people rarely use pronouns (it's considered verbose, and sometimes egocentric to add "ja" (I) when you don't have to).

I suppose in Polish usage of pronouns would not predict anything, because it is not determined by structure of text (like in English), but by stylistic choices of speaker.

pavel_lishin 14 years ago | |

Ditto in Russian - I suspect this is true of most slavic languages, and if I had to guess, romantic ones.

(Apparently, one of the hardest things for someone learning Russian from English is the almost total lack of the verb "be" - you can say "I am." in Russian, but it's almost a nonsense sentence.)

wazoox 14 years ago | | |

Pronouns are hardly used in Spanish (in Spain at least "me voy"). They are optional in Italian too ("sono contento").

adamzochowski 14 years ago | |

Minor nitpick (correct me please).

'szła' is closer to "she was going"

'poszła' is closer to "she went"

ghotli 14 years ago |

I think it's prudent to add to the conversation that the Japanese language has a rather significant difference in the way that pronouns are used.

"The first person pronouns (e.g. watashi, 私) and second person pronouns (e.g. anata, 貴方) are used in formal situations. In many sentences, when an English speaker would use the pronouns "I" and "you", they are omitted in Japanese. Personal pronouns can be left out when it is clear who the speaker is talking about."

There are a lot of gems on this wikipedia page that have other interesting correlations.

Such as: "Social standing also determines how a person refers to themselves, as well as how a person refers to the person they are talking to."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pronouns

espeed 14 years ago |

Much to my surprise, I soon discovered that the ways people used pronouns in their essays predicted whose health would improve the most. Specifically, those people who benefited the most from writing changed in their pronoun use from one essay to another. Pronouns were reflecting people’s abilities to change perspective.

On my home page the tagline says, "Your perspective guides your thoughts, your choices, your trajectory." I believe your ability to change perspective is one of the keys to life so this idea that you can use pronouns as a signal for one's ability to change perspective is fascinating to me. As Alan Kay was fond of saying at Xerox PARC, "A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points."

da_dude4242 14 years ago |

>Much to my surprise, I soon discovered that the ways people used pronouns in their essays predicted whose health would improve the most. Specifically, those people who benefited the most from writing changed in their pronoun use from one essay to another. Pronouns were reflecting people’s abilities to change perspective.

Not surprising if you consider this idea has already been entertained. Freud's "Ego", "Super Ego", and "Id" are Latin translations for I, We, and It. Pronouns

Neo-Freudian techniques like Voice Dialogue are training in examining phenomena from all pronoun perspectives. A training tool for horizontal perspective fluidity.

lawlit 14 years ago |

Can they analyse the bible ? (or any holy book for that matter)

hugh3 14 years ago | |

The Bible is written in three different languages (Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek) so running any sort of analysis would be difficult, and in any case I'm not sure what it'd tell us.

Running an analysis on the translation into English would rather depend on what translation you were using. For instance the King James Bible is rather heavy on the now-obsolete "thee/thou" forms, whereas a modern translation isn't.

mvzink 14 years ago | | |

Perhaps analyzing translations themselves would be fruitful. Compare them to other translations, or to other works by the same authors (for the translator-authors), etc.

mahmud 14 years ago | |

The Quran uses the royal-we consistently. It's an entirely big fat condescending lecture cum morality tale.

One of my favorite verses reads "We have created man in the greatest form, we then made him the most deformed" (speaking of decaying corpse)

لقد خلقنا اﻻنسان في احسن تقويم. ثم رردناه اسفل السافلين

abdulhaq 14 years ago | | |

No, poor mistranslation there. "We have certainly created man in the best of stature; Then We return him to the lowest of the low, Except for those who believe and do righteous deeds, for they will have a reward uninterrupted." "The Fig" 95:4-6

cturner 14 years ago | | |

Until I'd read that I'd not realised what a powerful play the royal we is. It's an attempt to craft the identity of the listener into the project of the speaker. In its own way a hack - it makes for our reasoning via our language processing.

zemanel 14 years ago |

I had noticed in the past that i use 'I' a lot, i do.

zemanel 14 years ago | |

post-lunch "let me explain that for you" edit:

Given that i have a self-centered personality, for several reasons, possibly starting at being an only child, i have noticed on several texts i have written, like e-mails and other things, that i have a tendency to use the word "I" a lot, possibly more than required.

Having noticed his, i've done experiences of writing texts, avoiding the "I" as much as possible and noticed a reasonable change in both communication and "personal" emotions.

For example, re-phrasing "I believe that ..." to "A possible solution would be ..."

... we can predict people’s college performance reasonably well by simply analyzing their college admissions essays. Across four years, we analyzed the admissions essays of 25,000 students and then tracked their grade point averages (GPAs). Higher GPAs were associated with admission essays that used high rates of nouns and low rates of verbs and pronouns. The effects were surprisingly strong and lasted across all years of college, no matter what the students' major.