Here’s something a bit different for today’s post.  I always enjoy attending lectures at the Austin Forum, and this past Tuesday’s SRO crowd enjoyed one of the best of the year.  Dr. James W. Pennebaker, Chair of the Department of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin gave a presentation entitled “How our words reflect who we are.”

Dr. Pennebaker’s latest book The Secret Life of Pronouns reports on his extensive research in computational linguistics and in particular what our words say about who we are.  The book title may not sound like a thriller, but the implications of his work are profound to all of using any form of social media.  As one who writes more than 100,000 public words on this blog each year, plus some multiple of that in Tweets, Facebook posts, and Quora and Google+ musings, I was interested in his findings.  That’s not to mention the huge volumes of private words we all write via emails and texts and often create from transcribed voice messages.  Unlike nostalgic olden times, say the Jimmy Carter era, words linger in electronic media almost in perpetuity.  There’s no more tossing the old hand written letters into the trash.

Pennebaker’s research helps us understand why our writings correlate with how we get along with each other.  Some of his early research focused on the long-term toxicity of traumatic early sexual experiences, a grim topic but one too much in the current news.  His findings showed that the problems were greatest with those who kept their secrets and that divulging the details by writing about them actually improved health.  Using software he and colleagues developed to analyze word patterns, there was a demonstrated correlation between certain uses of words and more successful health outcomes.

I noted his comment that the most common word in the English language is I, yes I did.  His research subjects whose health improved the most changed often, from I to we.

So we continue….

Pennebaker described Content words vs Function words.  The latter are social and connected, words like a, the, at, etc.  He used the example a message that simply says “I will be here later.”  These are essentially all function words.  Where is here?  When is later?  There’s really no content in that sentence.

As a group the audience flunked some test votes on how men and women differ.  Men use “I” more, and women pay more attention to their internal states.  Men use articles because they precede concrete nouns that refer to things.  Women use more cognitive words to express complex relationships; men just say “carburetor busted.”

Pennebaker gave an example from the Bush v. Kerry campaign.  Bush used I a lot more.  Kerry, as you may recall, was perceived as cool, distant; he used we more often, and his advisers erred in telling him to increase that.  It became the “imperial we” and made him seem even more aloof.

Some interesting research projects:

Depressed poets use different language, about 1/4 of poets commit suicide and use I at a very high rate.  (Don’t yet let your children grow up to be poets!)

Before and after 9/11 , an analysis of a pool of blogs showed immediately afterward a big drop in I.  People distanced themselves individually from disaster and became part of we.  Positive emotions began to arise after about 6 days and quite literally showed us being brought together.

Truth tellers use I much more and more cognitively complex words. 

As I was saying…

To understand how a group gets along, see what words are used and realize that the higher status person uses I less.  An extensive analysis of emails revealed subordinates writing as I and their bosses responding as we.  Pennebaker’s research even showed that the higher the match in written word choices in a group, the more effective it was.

He also studied speed dating and found that his language analysis could better predict better successful matches better than participants could themselves.

At any rate, if you are brave you can test your own words with some demonstrations here.

You can even check your Tweets at this site.  As you see from the screen capture below, an analysis of my recent Tweets, which were mostly sports related around a college football weekend and Formula 1 news, shows that I am upbeat by Valley Girl spacy.

Here’s my chart:

Pennebake said that language is a reflection of a state of mind, not the cause of that state.  It’s more like speedometer than gas or brakes

What’s really cool about all this?  It shows that essay questions can be evaluated by machine about as affectively as by humans.  Your writing style can predict your love life and your odds of scholastic achievement.  (Lots of “connectors” help in a college entrance exam, so you can game the system by just typing “a” repeatedly.)

And, while much has been written on privacy issues with social media, we now learn that what you have already put into words can theoretically be used to evaluate you with respect to a job, a college admission, and maybe even a crime.  It won’t be long before we see a CSI episode that hinges on a pronoun. 

At any rate, I am what I’ve already written, or we are, not sure.

<Pennebaker photo from Austin Forum site>