April 30th, 2012Top StoryWhat Your Pronouns Say About You (and Power)By Katie J.M. Baker
So what do pronouns tell us about our love lives? Well, it's all about how we subconsciously mimic the way other people speak when we're interested in them. Pennebaker and his team recorded and transcribed hundreds of speed date conversations, then fed those interactions into a "Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count" program along with information about how people thought their dates went. He told NPR that humans automatically use language in the same way when they're into each other:
Whenever I spend a lot of time around someone — boyfriend, platonic friend, whomever — I can't help mimicking their cadence and picking up their slang, and I've always been really self-conscious about it; am I not fully-formed enough to retain my own manner of speaking? But now I know I'm just really into them! But even more interesting to me is Pennebaker's research on power dynamics — he thinks it's possible to tell who has a higher social status or holds the power in any situation based on who uses the word "I" more often. You'd think it would be the person who thinks he's more important, but it turns out it's actually the person who feels more insecure. When we're fixated on how we're coming across, our language reflects our self-consciousness. Pennebaker said he was shocked when he realized that even he acts differently depending on who he's talking to; for example, here's how he corresponded with a young student:
Note how many times she uses "I" or "me," as opposed to Pennebaker:
Now look at his emails back and forth with a "famous professor":
Now he's the one talking about himself! And here's the professor's response:
There are some fun tools on Pennebaker's website, like a service that analyzes your tweets — apparently, I'm very upbeat but also very worried, and luckily "average" when it comes to "Spacy/Valley girl" — and an exercise where you can copy/paste emails or chats and get a Language Style Matching (LSM) score — the more that the two people are paying attention to each other in their interaction, the higher the LSM. (Remember "Love Calculator"? It's totally like that, but mature.) First, I put in an email exchange I had with a younger girl who asked me about going into journalism after she graduated. We scored a .74, which is below average — most LSM scores range between .75 and .95, with an average around .84. Next, I entered in a Gchat conversation I had with my best friend; we scored an .89, which is above average. The other day my friend told me she thinks that people who say they're not good at remembering names are so concerned with how they come off in social situations that they fail to pay attention to their surroundings. I'm horrible at name recall, and this article futher convinced me that it's probably because I think too much about myself when I meet someone for the first time. Pennebaker doesn't think we can use his research to change ourselves — "The words reflect who we are more than drive who we are," he told NPR — and I would feel like a wannabe pickup artist if I started constantly mimicking other people, but I doubt I'll ever write a professional email again without thinking about how much I use the word "I," and I feel like I might pay more attention to the way I talk about myself when I'm meeting people for the first time. Wait, I just said "I" like fifteen times. Okay, starting now! To Predict Dating Success, The Secret's In The Pronouns [NPR] Image via olly/Shutterstock. | From Our SponsorTop Stories
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