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.

So this led me
to run some experiments

where we brought people
in the laboratory

and we asked them to write about

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

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

They were like major public humiliations
or failure.

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

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

for 3 or 4 consecutive days,

brought about meaningful changes
in people's physical health

and even their immune function.

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

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

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

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

and try to figure out,

was there something about the essays
that could predict

who would benefit
from writing versus who wouldn't?

I tried and I couldn't figure it out.

So I got a number of psychologists
and other experts

to read and write hundreds of these essays,

and they couldn't see a pattern either;

I needed to try some other strategies.

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

Martha Francis,
we wrote a computer program.

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

and calculate the percentage
of words in their texts

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 were writing
the computer program,

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

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

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

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

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

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

that did matter.
Now think about this.

Here people are writing about
deeply disturbing issues

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

the topics themselves
and the words associated

with those topics made no difference.

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

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

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

but not how they were saying it.

So how do I go about
analyzing what verus how?

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

that look at this distinction,
and one of them is

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

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

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

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

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

The other group of words
are a class of words

that are generally called
function words.

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

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

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

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

But it turns out these
function words are really interesting,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

meaning that they're processed
essentially non-consciously.

But there's something
even more interesting about them,

they are social,
they are profoundly social.

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

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

"I am placing it on the table."

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

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

all the rest are function words:

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

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

who was "I"?
No idea.

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

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

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

that the author knew about

and the intended recipient
of this note knew about,

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

and the recipient of the note

at a particular time,
in a particular location.

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

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

"No idea."

Function words are social,

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

between the author and the recipient

and the relationship between
the author and the topic itself.

And this is the 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,
what their relationships are,

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

Yeah, there're a lot of function words,

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

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

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

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

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

Now it turns out some people
out there in the world

use these third-person pronouns
at high rates

and other people at low rates.

What kind of person would use them?

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

in terms of
where are people paying attention.

If you are using
these third-person pronouns,

by definition you're paying attention
to other people.

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

and people who use these at high rates

are much more socially engaged.

We can analyze emails,
tweets and so forth

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

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

OK, using the attentional arguments

someone who's attending
to their thoughts, feelings,

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

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

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

self-centered, self-important,
narcissistic,

hungry for power and high in status."

You would be completely wrong.

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

Let me rephrase that,

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

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

Now, I discovered this
by analyzing emails,

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

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

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

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

I'm the same as everybody else,

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

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

because I think I need to change my grade."

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

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

I look at my email to the dean.

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

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

And the dean writes back,
"Dear Jamie,

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

Now 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.

A high status person is
looking out at the world,

the low status person tends
to be looking more inwardly.

What about others states?

Let's 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, if we look at people
who are depressed,

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

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

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

of suicidal and non-suicidal poets.

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

and initially I thought,
where the big difference

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

Not true.

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

I think it's part of the job description.

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

suicidal poets use the word "I" more.

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

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

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

I shut my eyes and
all the world drops dead;

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

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

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

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

You can almost see Plath

embracing her sorrow,
her misery and so forth

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

who write about lost love.

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

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

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

about depression.
And people who are depressed

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

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

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

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

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

by holding these insane illusions
about the life.

But these people are brutally honest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

the half of whom were later exonerated,

and the affects
were really quite impressive.

We did a pretty good job at telling

if someone who was telling
the truth versus lying,

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

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

Liars are tending to hold off,
distancing themselves.

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

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

looking at the relationship
between two people.

Can you tell how two people
are getting along

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

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

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

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

the more they're on the same page,

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

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

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

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

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

We've been involved
in speed-dating projects

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

they know we are,
and then we transcribe 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 can.

We've done studies
with young dating couples.

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

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

and we do much, much better
than they do

at predicting if they'll be
together 3 months later.

The fact is, is these words
are telling us how individuals

and pairs of people are connecting.

What about groups. Now this is an area
that we're now working at.

We're looking at working groups,
some are groups that we've worked with,

people from the business school, we look
at people in the get-to-know-you groups,

we do educational groups.
And what we're finding is

by looking at a group of say 5 or 6 people,
we can now get a sense

of how productive the group will be,
and also how cohesive the group wil be,

simply by looking at the style matching.

Now here's where things are
beginning to get interesting:

by tracking a group that's interacting
and say they're all interacting online,

we can have a computer monitoring
how the group is behaving.

Imagine for example you are in this group
and a computer coach comes to your group

every now and then,
and a message comes and says,

"You guys are not paying attention
to one another,

you need to 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 and says,
"John, for the last 5 minutes

you said 50% of the words,
why don't you stand back

and courage others to talk?"

Well, we have now created
a program that does this,

and we've now tested it out
with hundreds of groups

and we are getting very promising results.

Now you can start to see why I'm so excited
about this world of function words,

that we're now taking this
in all these directions,

that I never would've thought about.

We've been looking at it in terms
of looking at historical records.

Can you tell if a particular explorer
committed suicide or was murdered?

We've done 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 connecting with the people
in their company or with their clients?

We look at corporate earnings reports
or the quarterly phone calls

to get a sense of the internal
group dynamics of the company.

We've worked with the government
to try to get a sense of terroist groups

and if they are likely to behave badly.

We've helped people sort out
their love lives.

You can start to see that by harnessing
the power of these function words

We can get a sense of individuals
and groups and how people are connecting.

Now what I would urge you to do,
I'd like you to go home tonight

and I want you to start looking
at your emails,

your tweets, your IM's or whatever,

and in doing that what I hope
you start to see,

first of all you learn a little bit more
about your relationships with others,

but more than anything I hope
you learned a little bit about yourself.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)