The Secret Life of Pronouns: James Pennebaker at TEDxAustin

I, You, Me, We, Us -- small words with the tremendous ability to illuminate who we are and how we're feeling.

Chair of the Department of Psychology at one of the largest universities in the country, Jamie delves into our use of language and how it can reflect -- and reshape -- our understanding of ourselves, our interactions with others and our underlying feelings of strength and empowerment.

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So some of the smallest
most insignificant work

is everyday cos reflect
a lot about who we are.

And I say this not
as a linguist,

or a computer scientist
but as a social psychologist.

And today I'd like
to tell you a story

that summarizes
a lot of the research

that my colleagues,
my students and I have done,

that have helped me
to come to this realization.

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

and how it is related
to physical health

and kept finding
that just completely perplexed me.

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

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

if they keep the events secret,

than if they actually
talk to other people.

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

is somehow toxic.

####this let me too

brunson experiment we brought people in the laboratory

and we asked them to write about

the most dramatic experiences they've had

especially if they kept a secret

and these are big trauma cedras things like right

they were like uh...

major public humiliations or failure

and the results that we got from this this study were stunning

we discovered that

harried

people write as little as fifteen minutes a day for three or four

consecutive days brought about

meaningful change in people's physical health

and even their immune function

translating up saying experiences into words

makes a difference

book why

since then there been hundreds of studies done by lab so all over the

world trying to answer this and they haven't come up with the single life as

a single explanation

by own approach was to actually

look at the essays that these people wrote

and try to figure out

was there something about the essays i can't predict who would benefit from

writing verses he wouldn't

i tried and i couldn't figure it out

so i gotta number psychologists and other experts to read and write hundreds

of these essays

and they couldn't fixya pattern either

units to try some other strategies cell

with the help of one of my graduate students partha francis we're on a

computer program

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

and calculate the percentage of words in the attacks that were positive emotion

words

negative emotion words

or words related to topics such as death or sex or violence or

religion or family

and as long as we are writing the computer program

i thought well let's go ahead and throw in some parts of speech pronouns

prepositions

because it was easy who cares

i go back

start to analyze these dramatic essays

squiggly discover that

the content of what people were writing about

hetnet didn't matter in terms of if they improved in their help they're not

instead

ulysses with these job boards pronouns and articles of prepositions and so

forth

that didn't matter

not think about this

here people are writing about

deeply disturbing issues

the actual topics that dealt with

tragedies devastation horrible things

the topics themselves in the words associate with those topics made no

difference

instead these little words like aryan vi and and didn't matter

i get looking for the obvious

but in fact

and i don't pay attention to what people were saying

but not how they were saying it

so how do i go about

analyzing watch versus how

well turns out that they're difficult classes of words that makes these makes

that look at this distinction whatever it is

if you're looking at what people are writing about you look at when park all

content word caesar now into the regular verbs it as yet since i'm a adverbs

you know that's stuff of thought this is the stuff of communication we were

trying to talk to somebody gogo

and search terms are all based on these content words

the other group of words are art class of words urgently cult

function works

at funship words

are made up of the most boring

words that you can imagine

they're made up of

pronouns army he she

prepositions to of four

auxiliary verbs and is have

out wake you up by-catch they'll have to wake up i keep talking about these

function worth dot

it turns out these function words

are really interested because first of all

there's only about five hundred

function words in english

so they account for far less than one percent of all the words we know we hear

weary

nevertheless they reflect fifty-five dist

to sixty percent of all the words that we

that we are surrounded with their everywhere

but we don't pay attention to them

in english and in other languages

there the shortest words there are a hand

when they're spoken or with your reading

pcf into your brain at the speed of less than two tenths of a second

meaning that they're processed essentially not consciously

but there's something even more interesting about that

they are social they are

profoundly social

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

you see in note on the ground

you pick it up and says

i am placing it on the table

well that kinda makes an skied it doesn't

by places on the table this to content words placing in table

all the rest of function worked

i am yet

on p

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

is it was i

no idea amma implies

present tense when was it written

no idea what it is

on v table v table

needs its a table that

dot author knew about

and they intended recipient of this note new about

but nobody else did and in fact

there's no only has meaning

to the uh... authored

and the recipient of the note

at a particular time in a particular location in fact if i took that no to

this all turn out six months later and say

what's this all about there's a good chance that the the off was safe

no idea

function of words are social

they tell us about the author they tell us about the relationship between the

author of the recipient

and relationship between the author

and the topic itself

is take heart of what i want to talk to you about today

by analyzing function words

we start to get a sense

of who people are quick to relationships are

how they think about theirselves

and how they

connect with others

whether a lot of function words

honestly i could talk for several hours about function words but i'm going to

spare you that it just focus on it

couple today to just give you a flavor of her

why they're so interesting

let's start off with pro downs of the storm up with third-person pronouns like

t-shirt ye bang

it turns out some people out there in the world used pronouns these

third-person pronouns at high rates

and other people at lower rates

what kind of person would use

well you have to think about pronouns as and all function words

in terms of

where our people paying attention

if you are using these third-person pronounced by different definition

you're paying attention to other people

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

at people who use these at high rates

are much more socially engaged

we can analyze emails tweets and so forth and get a sense someone's social

engagement just by looking at this

how about first-person singular part as a highly me in mind

okay

you see tential argument somewhat is attending to their thoughts feelings

behaviors

to themselves and subway would use these words more

what kind of person you think uses aren't words the most

you're sitting there you're speaking for them

well somebody who's

self-centered self-important narcissistic

uh...

hungry for power and highest status

you would be completely wrong

in fact the person who is

highest instead issues is on words the least

the new rephrase that

the hire anybody isn't status the less they use a high were ds

the lower so what is in status

the higher they use a spy works

i discovered this by analyzing emails

isdn messages natural conversations business groups and so forth

in the affects were huge

i look at these results and i thought

this must be true for other people but he can't possibly be true for me

you know i'd love everybody equally

isolated analyze my own emails

on the same as everybody else

alexey melt that i get from the undergraduate student

dear doctor pennebaker i would like to know if i could possibly meet with you

because i think i need to change my grades are right back

dear student thank you so much for your email

unfortunately uh... later which prices don't work well

i look at my email to the dean

dare denied jamie pennebaker and i would like to ask if i could do this and i

could get that like to do this in the team rice packed

dear jamie thank you so much for your email so forth

not everybody is being completely polite

nobody's putting anybody down

this is the language of power in status

it tells us where people are paying attention high status person

is looking out at the world the los esperamos to be looking more inwardly

what about others states

lets move beyond status

let's look at emotional states

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

if they're in pain

it could be physical pain or emotional pain

in fact you alive we look at people who are depressed we've done any studies on

this we know the people who are depressed

pay attention to themselves more and they used the word i'm more

that one of our very first time he's looked at the poetry of suicidal and non

suicidal poets that we get this research where we

with through analyzer poetry and initially i thought

whether big big differences in the degree that they use negative emotion

words

not true

suicidal and non suicidal poets all use negative motion words at high rates

i think it's part of it is part of the job description

the big difference was their use of the word on

suicidal poets used to work hard work

consider this poll on this is by sylvia plath you later committed suicide

despotic listen to the way that she uses the word i

and first-person singular

and this is the optus

and taking some lines from her poland not bad girls love song

eyes shut my eyes and all the world drops dead

i've missed my live and always born again

i think a major up inside my head

by fitting in return the way you said but i grow old and i forget renee

i think i made you up inside my head

you can almost see plan

embracing her sorrow her misery and so forth

and you can compare her writing with uh... other poets who write about in but

not suicidal poets who right about lost love

when they gave him almost see them holding at all

from a distance of their looking at it from aboard distance

third-person perspective

now there's a really interesting things head out uh...

important theory within psychology about depression

and people who are depressed arf

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

and part of this is a also tend to be

extremely uh... honest

there often

today are it

they're they're many study showing that they

have this deficit in they're not able to have

a positive illusions about ourselves

those of us who are depressed

get by every day but holding these insane illusions about the life

but these people

are brutally honest

now this made me wonder

throwaway depression for just a second could return this entire thing upside

down to find out if depressed people

or if we could use the computer program

linguistic lie-detector let me for anybody so

in fact we did some studies for we bra people no lab we do some to lie or tell

the truth

we analyze court transcripts of people who are all found guilty half of whom

were exhausted later exonerated

and the affects rectly quite impressive

we did a pretty good job at telling to someone who is telling the truth verses

lying in one of the best words

was he uses the word i'm people who tell the truth

used the word i border pony what they're saying liars

pertaining to hold off distancing themselves

lie detection depression

status are all something so we can look at but one of the things that i'm most

interested now is looking at groups looking at the relationship between two

people can you tell how to people

forget who won't bite

by analyzing the weight they're using function worked with each other

and the answer is yes we look at the percentage of each class of words and we

come up with the metrics mccall language style matchy

and the more that two people are matching their function word use

the more there on the same page

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

now what i said we started to look at this was with speed dating

not going to tell you

love speed dating i've really it just

i would never do it in a million years

but anchorage all of you to go do speed dating it when you do

invite a researcher along because there is no carradine

it is better

we've been involved in st speed dating projects where

people coming in

and in there for a minute date we tape-recorded they know we are heavily

transcribe the not the way they talk

the more they match in their language

the more likely they are to go out on a date we can predict who will go on a

date at rates slightly better than the people themselves here

we've done studies with young dating couples where we uh...

they had to be in our study they have to give this ten days of the instant

messages our audience

and what we do is we analyze their audience with its this style matching

and we do much much better than they do have prediction if they'll be together

three months later

the fact is his these words are telling us how individuals and

pairs of people are connecting

what about groups now this is an area that were network you know we're looking

at working groups summary groups that we've uh... work with people in the

business school would look at uh... people you get to know you groups

we do at occasional groups and what we're finding his bike looking at group

of say five a six people we cannot get a sense of how productive the group will

be and also how cohesive the group

simply by looking at the style matching

but here's where things are starting to get you christine

bite tracking a groups this interacting and say they're all interacting online

we can't have a computer of monitoring how the group is behaving imagine for

example

you are up

in this group

and a computer approach

comes to your group every now and then

anna message comes and says

you guys are not paying attention to one another

you need to be you'd be more attentive to what the other people are saying or

you guys for the last few minutes have strayed off topic

try to get back on topic or that loud mouth in the group the computer comes in

missus

joan for the last five minutes you said fifty percent of the words when she

stand back

any courage others to talk

we have now created a program that does the s

and we've now tested out with hundreds of groups and that we are getting very

very promising results

now you can start to see

why a m so excited about this world the function works

that we're not taking this in all these in

directions that uh... i'd never would've thought about

we've been looking at it in terms of looking at historical records can you

tell if a particular uh... explorer committed suicide tourist murdered we've

got a project on that

can you look at a company and get a sense of how their internal

communications are working how well they are connected with the people in their

company or with their clients we look at that to corporate uh... earnings reports

or the quarterly phone calls to get a sense of the internal groups dynamics of

the company we've worked with the government to try to get a sense of

terrorist groups and how if they are likely to behaved badly

we help people sort out their love lives it

you can start to say that

bike harnessing these

east the power of these function words we can get a sense of individuals and

groups and help people are connected

now but i wouldn't hurt you to do

i'd like you to go home

tonight

and i want you to start looking at your emails here tweets year high amps or

whatever

added doing that

what i hope you start to see is

first of all you learn a little bit more about your relationship with others but

more than anything

i hope you learned a little bit of about yourself