WEBVTT

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So some of the smallest
most insignificant work

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is everyday, cos reflect
a lot about who we are.

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And I say this not
as a linguist,

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or a computer scientist
but as a social psychologist.

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And today I'd like
to tell you a story

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that summarizes
a lot of the research

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that my colleagues,
my students and I have done,

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that have helped me
to come to this realization.

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Now several years ago I was studying
the nature of traumatic experience

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and how it is related
to physical health

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and kept finding
that just completely perplexed me.

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Basically when people have
a major traumatic experience in their life,

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they are much more likely
to get sick after that event,

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if they keep the events secret,

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than if they actually
talk to other people.

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So, this really bugged me.
So keeping a secret it seems

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is somehow toxic.

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So this led me
to run some experiments

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where we brought people
in the laboratory

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and we asked them to write about

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the most traumatic experiences they've had,
especially if they'd kept them secret.

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And these were big traumas,
these were things like rape.

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They were like major public humiliations
or failure.

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And the results that we got
from this this study were stunning.

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We discovered that having people write
as little as fifteen minutes a day,

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for 3 or 4 consecutive days,

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brought about meaningful changes
in people's physical health

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and even their immune function.

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Translating up, saying experiences
into words makes a difference, but why?

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Since then there have been hundreds
of studies done by labs all over the world

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trying to answer this and they haven't
come up with a single explanation.

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My own approach was to actually look
at the essays that these people wrote,

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and try to figure out,

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was there something about the essays
that could predict

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who would benefit
from writing versus who wouldn't?

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I tried and I couldn't figure it out.

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So I got a number of psychologists
and other experts

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to read and write hundreds of these essays,

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and they couldn't see a pattern either;

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I needed to try some other strategies.

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So, with the help of
one of my graduate students,

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Martha Francis,
we wrote a computer program.

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And the idea of this computer program
was to go into any given text

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and calculate the percentage
of words in their texts

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that were positive emotion words,
negative emotion words

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or words related to topics such as death
or sex or violence or religion or family.

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And as long as we were writing
the computer program,

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I thought well let's go ahead and
throw in some parts of speech,

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pronouns, prepositions.
Why? Because it was easy, who cares?

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So, I go back, start to analyze
these traumatic essays,

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and quickly discover that the content
of what people were writing about

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didn't matter in terms of
if they improved in their health or not,

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instead, it was these junk words, pronouns,
articles, prepositions and so forth

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that did matter.
Now think about this.

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Here people are writing about
deeply disturbing issues

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and the actual topics that dealt with
tragedies, devastation, horrible things,

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the topics themselves
and the words associated

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with those topics made no difference.

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Instead these little words
like "I" and "the" and "and" did matter.

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I'd been looking for the obvious,
but in fact

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I'd been paying attention
to what people were saying,

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but not how they were saying it.

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So how do I go about
analyzing what verus how?

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Well, it turns out that they're
different kinds of classes of words

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that look at this distinction,
and one of them is

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if you're looking at
what people are writing about,

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you look at what are called content words.
These are nouns and regular verbs

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and adjectives and some adverbs.
These are the stuff of thought,

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these were the stuff of communication.
We were trying to talk to somebody.

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Google and search terms
are all based on these content words.

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The other group of words
are a class of words

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that are generally called
function words.

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And function words are made up
of the most boring words you can imagine.

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They're made up of pronouns:
"I", "me", "he", "she";

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prepositions: "to", "of", "for";
auxillary verbs: "am", "is", "have" â

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I'll have to wake you up if I keep talking
about these function words.

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But it turns out these
function words are really interesting,

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because, first of all, there's only about
five hundred function words in English,

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so they account for far less than 1%
of all the words we know, we hear, we read.

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Nevertheless, they reflect 55% to 60% of
all the words that we are surrounded with,

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they're everywhere,
but we don't pay attention to them.

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In English and in other languages,
they're the shortest words there are,

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and when they're spoken
or when you're reading,

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they zip into your brain
at the speed of less than 0.2 seconds,

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meaning that they're processed
essentially non-consciously.

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But there's something
even more interesting about them,

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they are social,
they are profoundly social.

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Let me give me an example,
let's say you're walking along,

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you see a note on the ground,
you pick it up and it says,

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"I am placing it on the table."

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Well, that kinda makes sense,
kinda doesn't.

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"I'm placing it on the table" â there's
2 content words, "placing" and "table";

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all the rest are function words:

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"I", "am", "it", "on", "the".

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Now the reason this doesn't
make sense to most of us is

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who was "I"?
No idea.

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"Am" implies present tense.
When was it written?

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"It"? Pfft, no idea what "it" is.

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"On the table", "the table"
means it's a table

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that the author knew about

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and the intended recipient
of this note knew about,

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but nobody else did. And, in fact,
this note only has meaning to the author

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and the recipient of the note

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at a particular time,
in a particular location.

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And, in fact, if I took that note
to this author 6 months later and say,

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"What's this all about?" there's
a good chance that the author will say,

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"No idea."

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Function words are social,

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they tell us about the author,
they tell us about the relationship

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between the author and the recipient

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and the relationship between
the author and the topic itself.

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And this is the heart of what
I want to talk to you about today.

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By analyzing function words
we start to get a sense

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of who people are,
what their relationships are,

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how they think about theirselves
and how they connect with others.

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Yeah, there're a lot of function words,

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and honestly I could talk
for several hours about function words,

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but I'm going to spare you that
and just focus on a couple today

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to just give you a flavor
of why they're so interesting.

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Let's start off with pronouns, and
let's start off with third-person pronouns

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like "he", "she", "they".

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Now it turns out some people
out there in the world

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use these third-person pronouns
at high rates

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and other people at low rates.

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What kind of person would use them?

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Well, you have to think about pronouns
and all function words

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in terms of
where are people paying attention.

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If you are using
these third-person pronouns,

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by definition you're paying attention
to other people.

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You care about other people,
you're thinking about other people,

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and people who use these at high rates

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are much more socially engaged.

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We can analyze emails,
tweets and so forth

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and get a sense of someone's
social engagement just by looking at this.

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How about first-person singular pronouns,
"I", "me" and "my"?

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OK, using the attentional arguments

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someone who's attending
to their thoughts, feelings,

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behaviors, to themselves in some way
would use these words more.

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What kind of person
do you think uses "I" words the most?

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I hope, you're sitting there,
you're thinking, "Well, somebody who's

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self-centered, self-important,
narcissistic,

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hungry for power and high in status."

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You would be completely wrong.

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In fact the person who is highest
in status uses "I" words the least.

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Let me rephrase that,

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the higher anybody is in status,
the less they use "I" words;

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the lower someone is in status,
the higher they use a "I" words.

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Now, I discovered this
by analyzing emails,

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instant messages, natural conversations,
business groups and so forth.

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And the affects were huge.
I looked at these results and I thought,

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"Wow, this must be true for other people
but it can't possibly be true for me."

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You know I love everybody equally.
So I go in and analyze my own emails.

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I'm the same as everybody else,

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I look at the email that I get
from an undergraduate student,

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"Dear Dr Pennebaker, I would like to know
if I could possibly meet with you

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because I think I need to change my grade."

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And I write back, "Dear Student,
Thank you so much for your email.

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Unfortunately, the way
the grade systems work, blah, blah, blah."

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I look at my email to the dean.

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"Dear Dean, I'm Jamie Pennebaker
and I would like to ask you

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if I could do this and if I could do that
and I could do this."

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And the dean writes back,
"Dear Jamie,

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Thank you so much for your email..."
and so forth.

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Now everybody is being completely polite,
nobody's putting anybody down.

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This is the language of power in status;

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it tells us where people
are paying attention.

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A high status person is
looking out at the world,

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the low status person tends
to be looking more inwardly.

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What about others states?

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Let's move beyond status,
let's look at emotional states.

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You would think that someone would be
paying more attention to themselves

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if they're in pain. It could be
physical pain or emotional pain.

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In fact, if we look at people
who are depressed,

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we've done many studies on this,
we know that people who are depressed

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pay attention to themselves more
and they used the word "I" more.

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In fact one of our very first studies
looked at the poetry

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of suicidal and non-suicidal poets.

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Now we did this research where
we went through, analyzed their poetry,

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and initially I thought,
where the big difference

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in the degree to which
they use negative and emotional words.

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Not true.

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Suicidal and non-suicidal poets all use
negative emotion words at high rate.

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I think it's part of the job description.

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The big difference was
their use of the word "I",

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suicidal poets use the word "I" more.

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Consider this poem, this is by Sylvia Plath
who later committed suicide.

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Listen to the way that she uses
the word "I" and first-person singular.

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I'm taking some lines from her poem
"Mad Girl's Love Song".

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I shut my eyes and
all the world drops dead;

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I lift my lid[s] and all is born again.

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(I think I made you up inside my head.)

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I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.

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(I think I made you up inside my head.)

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You can almost see Plath

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embracing her sorrow,
her misery and so forth

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and you can compare her writing
with other poets, non-suicidal poets

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who write about lost love.

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When they do, you can almost see them
holding it off from a distance,

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so they're looking at it from
a more distance, third-person perspective.

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Now there's a really interesting,
important theory within psychology

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about depression.
And people who are depressed

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are thought to be people who are
very high in self-awareness or self-focus.

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And part of this is
they also tend to be extremely honest.

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In fact there are many studies showing
that they have this deficit

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and they're not able to have
positive illusions about ourselves.

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Those of us who aren't depressed
get by every day

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by holding these insane illusions
about the life.

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But these people are brutally honest.

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Now this made me wonder,
throw away depression for just a second.

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Could we turn this entire thing upside down
and find out if depressed people

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or if we could use a computer program
as a linguistic lie-detector.

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I mean for anybody.
So in fact we did some studies,

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where we brought people in the lab,
we induced them to lie or tell the truth,

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we analyze court transcripts of people
who were all found guilty,

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the half of whom were later exonerated,

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and the affects
were really quite impressive.

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We did a pretty good job at telling

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if someone who was telling
the truth versus lying,

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and one of the best words
was the use of the word "I".

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People who tell the truth use the word
"I" more, owning what they're saying.

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Liars are tending to hold off,
distancing themselves.

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Now, lie-detection and depression, status
are all some things that we can look at,

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But one of the things that I'm most
interested in now is looking at groups,

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looking at the relationship 
between two people.

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Can you tell how two people
are getting along

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by analyzing the way that they're
using function words with each other?

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And the answer is yes. We look
at the percentage of each class of words

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and we come up with the metric
that we call language style matching.

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And the more that two people are matching
in their function word use,

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the more they're on the same page,

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the more they're talking
about something in the same way.

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Now one place we started to look at this
was with speed dating.

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Now, I should tell you I love speed dating,
I would never do it in a million years,

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but I encourage all of you
to go do speed dating and when you do,

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invite a researcher along because
there is no paradigm that is better.

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We've been involved
in speed-dating projects

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where people come in and in
their four minute date, we tape-record it,

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they know we are,
and then we transcribe the way they talk.

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The more they match
in their language,

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the more likely they are
to go out on a date.

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We can predict
who will go on a date

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at rates slightly better than
the people themselves can.

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We've done studies
with young dating couples.

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To be in our study they had to give us
10 days of their instant messages or IM's.

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And then what we do is we analyze
their IM's with this style matching

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and we do much, much better
than they do

00:14:54.070 --> 00:14:58.122
at predicting if they'll be
together 3 months later.

00:14:58.122 --> 00:15:00.928
The fact is, is these words
are telling us how individuals

00:15:00.928 --> 00:15:03.551
and pairs of people are connecting.

00:15:03.551 --> 00:15:06.547
What about groups. Now this is an area
that we're now working at.

00:15:06.547 --> 00:15:10.303
We're looking at working groups,
some are groups that we've worked with,

00:15:10.303 --> 00:15:14.166
people from the business school, we look
at people in the get-to-know-you groups,

00:15:14.166 --> 00:15:16.746
we do educational groups.
And what we're finding is

00:15:16.746 --> 00:15:21.006
by looking at a group of say 5 or 6 people,
we can now get a sense

00:15:21.026 --> 00:15:25.512
of how productive the group will be,
and also how cohesive the group wil be,

00:15:25.521 --> 00:15:27.969
simply by looking at the style matching.

00:15:27.976 --> 00:15:30.912
Now here's where things are
beginning to get interesting:

00:15:30.912 --> 00:15:36.151
by tracking a group that's interacting
and say they're all interacting online,

00:15:36.151 --> 00:15:39.551
we can have a computer monitoring
how the group is behaving.

00:15:39.551 --> 00:15:46.262
Imagine for example you are in this group
and a computer coach comes to your group

00:15:46.262 --> 00:15:50.190
every now and then,
and a message comes and says,

00:15:50.190 --> 00:15:53.296
"You guys are not paying attention
to one another,

00:15:53.296 --> 00:15:57.396
you need to be more attentive to what
the other people are saying," or

00:15:57.396 --> 00:16:00.396
"You guys for the last few minutes
have strayed off topic,

00:16:00.396 --> 00:16:03.716
try to get back on topic,"
or that loud mouth in the group,

00:16:03.716 --> 00:16:07.566
the computer comes in and says,
"John, for the last 5 minutes

00:16:07.566 --> 00:16:11.142
you said 50% of the words,
why don't you stand back

00:16:11.142 --> 00:16:13.884
and courage others to talk?"

00:16:13.884 --> 00:16:17.199
Well, we have now created
a program that does this,

00:16:17.199 --> 00:16:20.602
and we've now tested it out
with hundreds of groups

00:16:20.602 --> 00:16:24.703
and we are getting very promising results.

00:16:24.703 --> 00:16:30.256
Now you can start to see why I'm so excited
about this world of function words,

00:16:30.256 --> 00:16:33.665
that we're now taking this
in all these directions,

00:16:33.665 --> 00:16:36.249
that I never would've thought about.

00:16:36.249 --> 00:16:39.533
We've been looking at it in terms
of looking at historical records.

00:16:39.533 --> 00:16:43.876
Can you tell if a particular explorer
committed suicide or was murdered?

00:16:43.876 --> 00:16:45.611
We've done a project on that.

00:16:45.611 --> 00:16:48.056
Can you look at a company and get a sense

00:16:48.056 --> 00:16:51.307
of how their internal communications
are working?

00:16:51.307 --> 00:16:55.001
How well they are connecting with the people
in their company or with their clients?

00:16:55.001 --> 00:16:59.752
We look at corporate earnings reports
or the quarterly phone calls

00:16:59.752 --> 00:17:03.112
to get a sense of the internal
group dynamics of the company.

00:17:03.112 --> 00:17:06.478
We've worked with the government
to try to get a sense of terroist groups

00:17:06.478 --> 00:17:09.813
and if they are likely to behave badly.

00:17:09.813 --> 00:17:14.595
We've helped people sort out
their love lives.

00:17:14.595 --> 00:17:19.874
You can start to see that by harnessing
the power of these function words

00:17:19.874 --> 00:17:26.336
We can get a sense of individuals
and groups and how people are connecting.

00:17:26.336 --> 00:17:32.343
Now what I would urge you to do,
I'd like you to go home tonight

00:17:32.343 --> 00:17:34.557
and I want you to start looking
at your emails,

00:17:34.557 --> 00:17:37.728
your tweets, your IM's or whatever,

00:17:37.728 --> 00:17:41.401
and in doing that what I hope
you start to see,

00:17:41.401 --> 00:17:45.182
first of all you learn a little bit more
about your relationships with others,

00:17:45.202 --> 00:17:49.643
but more than anything I hope
you learned a little bit about yourself.

00:17:49.658 --> 00:17:50.800
Thank you very much.

00:17:50.977 --> 00:17:56.459
(Applause)