WEBVTT

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So some of the smallest
most insignificant words

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we use everyday, can 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 what I 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,

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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 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

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done by labs all over the world
trying to answer this

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and they haven't come up
with a single explanation.

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My own approach was to
actually look at the essays

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that these people wrote,
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 that text

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that were positive emotion words,
negative emotion words

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or words related to topics such as

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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, and articles,

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and prepositions and so forth,
that did matter.

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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" versus "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.

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These are nouns and regular verbs
and adjectives and some adverbs.

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These are the stuff of thought,
these were the stuff of communication.

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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";
auxiliary verbs: "am", "is", "have".

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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%

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of all the words we know,
we hear, we read.

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Nevertheless, they reflect 55% to 60%

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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".
There's 2 content words:

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"placing" and "table";

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all the rest are function words:
"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.

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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 now

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6 months later and say,
"What's this all about?"

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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,

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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 themselves
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,

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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

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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,

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"Well, somebody who's
self-centered, self-important,

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narcissistic, 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

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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 "I" words.

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Now, I discovered this
by analyzing emails,

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instant messages, natural conversations,

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business groups and so forth.

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And the effects were huge.

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I looked at these results and I thought,

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"Wow, this must be true for other people

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but it can't possibly be true for me."

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You know I love everybody equally.

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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

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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

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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,

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and we know that people who are depressed

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pay attention to themselves more

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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,

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analyzed their poetry,

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and initially I thought,
"Well, the big difference is

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in the degree that they use
negative, emotion words."

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Not true.

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Suicidal and non-suicidal poets

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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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(Laughter)

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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

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who later committed suicide.

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Listen to the way that
she uses the word "I"

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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 lids 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,

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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
distant, 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:

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throw away depression for just a second.

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Could we turn this entire thing
upside down

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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,

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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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half of whom were later exonerated,

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and the effects 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

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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,

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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

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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".

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We'd 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.

00:13:44.183 --> 00:13:48.244
And the more that two people are matching
in their function word use,

00:13:48.244 --> 00:13:50.041
the more they're on the same page,

00:13:50.041 --> 00:13:53.024
the more they're talking
about something in the same way.

00:13:53.024 --> 00:13:54.929
Now one place we started to look at this

00:13:54.953 --> 00:13:56.674
was with speed dating.

00:13:57.326 --> 00:14:00.771
Now, I should tell you
I love speed dating,

00:14:00.771 --> 00:14:02.336
(Laughter)

00:14:02.336 --> 00:14:04.866
I would never do it in a million years,

00:14:04.876 --> 00:14:05.956
(Laughter)

00:14:05.956 --> 00:14:08.195
but I encourage all of you
to go do speed dating

00:14:08.219 --> 00:14:09.460
and when you do,

00:14:09.460 --> 00:14:10.993
invite a researcher along

00:14:10.993 --> 00:14:13.576
because there is
no paradigm that is better.

00:14:14.666 --> 00:14:17.320
We've been involved
in speed-dating projects

00:14:17.320 --> 00:14:19.427
where people come in

00:14:19.427 --> 00:14:21.803
and in their 4 minute date,
we tape-record it,

00:14:21.803 --> 00:14:23.741
they know we are,

00:14:23.741 --> 00:14:26.819
and then we transcribe the way they talk.

00:14:26.819 --> 00:14:29.327
The more they match in their language,

00:14:29.327 --> 00:14:31.423
the more likely they are
to go out on a date.

00:14:31.447 --> 00:14:33.242
We can predict who will go on a date

00:14:33.242 --> 00:14:37.591
at rates slightly better than
the people themselves can.

00:14:37.591 --> 00:14:40.231
We've done studies
with young dating couples.

00:14:40.231 --> 00:14:43.622
To be in our study, they had to give us

00:14:43.622 --> 00:14:46.123
10 days of their instant messages or IM's.

00:14:46.723 --> 00:14:49.172
And then what we do
is we analyze their IM's

00:14:49.172 --> 00:14:51.621
with this style matching,

00:14:51.621 --> 00:14:54.070
and we do much, much better than they do

00:14:54.070 --> 00:14:56.499
at predicting if they'll be
together 3 months later.

00:14:56.523 --> 00:14:58.362
(Laughter)

00:14:58.362 --> 00:15:01.077
The fact is, is these words
are telling us how individuals

00:15:01.101 --> 00:15:03.551
and pairs of people are connecting.

00:15:03.551 --> 00:15:04.611
What about groups?

00:15:04.611 --> 00:15:07.051
Now this is an area
that we're now working at.

00:15:07.051 --> 00:15:08.575
We're looking at working groups,

00:15:08.599 --> 00:15:10.513
some are groups that we've worked with,

00:15:10.513 --> 00:15:12.037
people from the business school,

00:15:12.061 --> 00:15:14.495
we'd look at people in
the get-to-know-you groups,

00:15:14.527 --> 00:15:16.908
we do educational groups.
And what we're finding is

00:15:16.932 --> 00:15:19.836
by looking at a group of,
say, 5 or 6 people,

00:15:19.836 --> 00:15:22.598
we can now get a sense
of how productive the group will be,

00:15:22.622 --> 00:15:25.258
and also how cohesive the group will be,

00:15:25.258 --> 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
starting to get interesting:

00:15:30.912 --> 00:15:33.451
by tracking a group that's interacting

00:15:33.451 --> 00:15:35.770
and say they're all interacting online,

00:15:35.770 --> 00:15:39.551
we can have a computer monitoring
how the group is behaving.

00:15:39.551 --> 00:15:40.867
Imagine for example,

00:15:40.867 --> 00:15:43.544
you are in this group,

00:15:43.544 --> 00:15:46.211
and a computer coach comes to your group

00:15:46.211 --> 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 encourage others to talk?" (Laughter)

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 --> 00:16:27.912
Now, you can start to see
why I'm so excited

00:16:27.912 --> 00:16:30.244
about this world of function words,

00:16:30.244 --> 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 --> 00:16:53.355
How well they are connecting
with the people

00:16:53.355 --> 00:16:55.283
in their company or with their clients.

00:16:55.283 --> 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 --> 00:17:04.636
We've worked with the government

00:17:04.660 --> 00:17:06.688
to try to get a sense of terrorist groups

00:17:06.688 --> 00:17:09.813
and if they are likely to behave badly.

00:17:09.813 --> 00:17:13.155
We've helped people sort out
their love lives.

00:17:14.595 --> 00:17:15.978
You can start to see that

00:17:15.978 --> 00:17:19.721
by harnessing the power
of these function words,

00:17:19.721 --> 00:17:22.948
we can get a sense
of individuals and groups

00:17:22.948 --> 00:17:25.325
and how people are connecting.

00:17:26.305 --> 00:17:28.224
Now, what I would urge you to do,

00:17:29.185 --> 00:17:31.805
I'd like you to go home tonight

00:17:31.805 --> 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 is,

00:17:41.401 --> 00:17:43.306
first of all you learn a little bit more

00:17:43.306 --> 00:17:45.068
about your relationships with others,

00:17:45.092 --> 00:17:46.903
but more than anything,

00:17:46.903 --> 00:17:49.411
I hope you'll learn
a little bit about yourself.

00:17:49.411 --> 00:17:50.800
Thank you very much.

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