In a pitch-dark space, if you scream out ‘I’, a spotlight will beam onto you, lighting up your outline in one brilliant flash.
‘You’ would be a demonstrative hand perhaps, or a finger pointed outwards. The dazzle is on someone else.
‘We’? That’s often like an all-encompassing embrace (except when it’s used to wipe off responsibility). ‘We’ are one. Everything the light touches is our kingdom, son. (Courtesy, Lion King)
Every single day, we express our thoughts in thousands of words – whether in spoken conversations, chats and posts on social media or professional communications. An average of 16,000 words a day, as per a 2007 study by US-based researchers published in the Journal Science. And, it turns out that just the way we knit our words together actually holds secrets about our mental health, relationships with others and social status. Sometimes, even if someone is lying or not.
What does my pronoun use say about me?
Did you know that the more we switch between using the pronouns ‘We, they, she, you,’ to first-person singular pronouns ‘I, me, my’ from one piece of writing to the next, is linked to better health – or that how much you and your partner use ‘we’ could reflect on your marital satisfaction?
Gulf News spoke to the world’s leading expert in this field, Dr James Pennebaker, an American social psychologist who is a pioneering researcher with more than four decades of research experience under his belt, also author of ‘The Secret life of Pronouns’. He says, “Language tracks where we are paying attention. By analysing pronouns, we can kind of get into the head of the speaker.
Language tracks where we are paying attention. By analysing pronouns, we can kind of get into the head of the speaker. When we use the word ‘I’, we are briefly paying attention to ourselves. In other words, by counting and looking at the use of these ‘I’ words, we can get a sense of are people self-focused or not self-focused?
“When we use the word ‘I’, we are briefly paying attention to ourselves. In other words, by counting and looking at the use of these ‘I’ words, we can get a sense of are people self-focused or not self-focused?”
And the same goes for pronouns that refer to other people. “If I’m talking about my friends, I will use words like ‘he’, ‘she’ and ‘they’ at higher rates. And if I’m not paying attention to any friends, or other human beings, I will not use third-person pronouns. So in a funny kind of way, just counting how frequently a person uses pronouns such as 'he' and 'she' tells us how much a person is interested in other human beings,” adds Dr Pennebaker.
These are some of the startling insights into our psychology that research into this field has brought us:
1. When people use ‘I’ words more
If you notice someone being unusually self-focussed, they may be undergoing an experience that requires more of their attention. Dr Pennebaker says, “If you are physically sick or in pain, you actually use ‘I’ words much more in your conversation, because your attention is being drawn inward….
“You’ll use ‘I’ words if you are depressed, and you’re feeling emotional pain, you’ll use ‘I’ words more.” This is as per a 2019 study by US-based researchers including Dr Pennebaker published in the Journal of Personality and Social psychology. Another study he had worked on with researchers also showed that there was more ‘I’ use in the essays of depressed college students than in the essays of those that were not depressed.
“But a computer can, and the computer is going to go, ‘Oh … that’s unbelievable.”
The computer in question used to be the EAR or electronically activated recorder – a tape recorder that would switch on for 30 seconds and off 12 minutes throughout the day, that participants in these early studies would wear. Later, a software would analyse the transcribed data.
2. The pandemic: When our language changed as a society
During the early days of the 2020 lockdowns worldwide, communities came together worldwide to express support for each other – remember the online events, fundraisers and celebrity videos? Back then, Dr Pennebaker and his team scoured city-level Reddit threads across the US, looking at the language of thousands of people to find out how it had changed.
Although the research is awaiting publication in a future paper, Dr Pennebaker tells us, “There was an increase in ‘we’ use. This is use of the words, ‘ we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’. Our use of ‘we’ words went from 0.5 per cent of everybody’s words to almost 0.8 per cent and that lasted for a month or two.”
And this effect, it seems, has lasted. “In a weird kind of way, ‘we’ words are much higher than they had been in the years before.”
3. If you want to be a leader, use ‘we’ not ‘I’
Back in 2014, a study that Dr Pennebaker had worked on with other US-based researchers published in the Journal of Language and Social psychology found that higher status individuals used ‘we’ more frequently than lower-status individuals in an organisation or group.
If I become the leader of the group, what will happen is, in most cases, I'll start using the word ‘I’ at much lower rates. And I'll start using ‘we’ at higher rates, but also ‘you’ and ‘they’. And the reason is, is if I'm responsible for other people, I'm looking out at the others and tracking how they are paying attention. I want to know what how they're thinking. In other words, I want to have an impact on them.
Dr Pennebaker says, “What’s so interesting about this is that when we're in a group, and all of a sudden, for whatever reason, if I become the leader of the group, what will happen is, in most cases, I'll start using the word ‘I’ at much lower rates. And I'll start using ‘we’ at higher rates, but also ‘you’ and ‘they’. And the reason is, is if I'm responsible for other people, I'm looking out at the others and tracking how they are paying attention. I want to know what how they're thinking. In other words, I want to have an impact on them."
The study also says, “Our findings also corroborate previous research suggesting that those who attain status are seen as more likely to contribute to group success and are more focused on others….”
4. For couples, how pronouns are used shed light on relationships
A 2009 study published by US and Israel-based researchers published in the Journal on Psychology and Ageing found evidence that pronoun usage is related to emotional quality of marital interaction and marital satisfaction. Using more ‘We’ words or ‘we-ness language’ that reflect ‘shared responsibility and partnership’ were linked to higher levels of positive emotional behaviour, and low levels of negative emotional behaviour.
Not only that, but using words that separate like ‘me’ and ’you’ more were linked to high levels of negative emotional behaviours and more dissatisfied marriages, especially for older couples.
5. When someone is lying
When someone is lying, they may refer to themselves using ‘I’, ‘we’ and to others (‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’) less, as per a 2003 study by Australia and US-based researchers, including On the other hand, using ‘I’ more was linked with honesty.
“A person who’s lying tends to use ‘we’ more or use sentences without a first person pronoun at all. Instead of saying ‘I didn’t take your book,’ a liar might say ‘…that’s not the kind of thing that anyone with integrity would do’. People who are honest use exclusive words like ‘but’ and ‘without’ and negations such as ‘no’, ‘none’ and ‘never’ much more frequently,” Dr Pennebaker had said in a 2011 interview with the Harvard Business Review.
6. Women use ‘I’ and ‘he, she and they’ words more (an anecdote from the 1990s)
Back in the 1990s, when the internet had just come into action, there was a new computer system called America online that allowed people to access the internet from their homes.
Dr Pennebaker says, “It was a huge deal. it had all of these discussion groups, or these chat rooms. And so, you could go to one on sports or one on dating or one on movies. There were millions of them – and there were people all over the world on it. So you could be in these discussion groups of 22 people and talk about anything. It was exhilarating.”
He began analysing these chats on a computer program and found out, much to his surprise that women used ‘I’ words more. “And that's consistent across culture, across time. This is true in every language I've studied, that women use ‘I’ words more than men do.”
When giving talks across the world, he would also ask people who they thought used ‘I’ words more – and the answer was always ‘men’. He says, “The fact that we have been listening to men and women talk since we were born, across all of these cultures, and we talk to men and women every day. And all of us always thought that was it – it was the men using ‘I’ words. Now, that's kind of interesting. It really defies everything we know and believe about language.”
In a 2011 interview with Harvard Business Review, he said about this finding, “Women are more self-attentive and aware of their internal state… Women also use more third-person pronouns— ‘he’, ‘she’, and ‘they’ — because women talk more about people and relationships, and they’re better at managing them. And in many ways, relationships are more complex.”
7. War and peace in pronouns
Keep your friends close and watch the pronouns and function words (which includes prepositions and articles) of your enemies. It turns out that analysing their language use may help experts predict political moves by a leader.
While studying natural language use, Dr Pennebaker had studied the press conferences of US presidents as they were all available online. He had looked at the language of George W. Bush a few years after his term as President, and noticed unusual activity.
He says, “I found a really interesting phenomenon with him in that if you looked at the way that he used ‘I’words, he uses them at a relatively high rate and spoke to the press a lot. And ‘I’ words are generally associated with coming across as more personal and honest and so forth.
“I looked at his ‘I’ words over a long period of time, and then all of a sudden, they dropped from an average of about four per cent of all his words down to two per cent. This was a really interesting phenomenon because, it didn't make any sense.
“I went and I discovered that his drop in the ‘I’ words corresponded with almost the week that he decided to go to war. So, over the next several months, he was planning to go to war… but in his mind, if what he was doing was behaving the way we all do when … we don’t want other people to know our plans. And so he was psychologically distancing himself. “
8. Unusual pronoun use means something has changed
“It is an important signal. When you listen to somebody and they don’t use ‘I’ or they are using ‘we’ in strange ways, or you ask them some question, and they avoid the answer by not using the pronouns the way you expect, that is a signal that something is off,” adds Dr Pennebaker.
9. In the future, analysing your language like this could predict university performance
In the future, your university entrance essays could be analysed to predict your grades. Dr Pennebaker says, “We can analyse it for use of articles and prepositions and pronouns. And with that, we can predict how well they do at university and predict their grade point average, four years later at a pretty good rate. And it’s almost amazing, but what we’re doing is that we’re able to get a snapshot of how that person thinks.”
How to analyze your own pronouns
If you’re interested in finding out what your pronoun use reveals about you, Dr Pennebaker recommends recording your own day-to-day language and analysing transcripts of your communications – whether email, zoom call, letters or recordings of your speech to find out interesting tidbits. You can also try out online language style tests like the TAT (Thematic Apperception test) and perceptive language test, as per the website secretlifeofpronouns.com.
He says about his research, “At least once a month, I stumble across something I never would have predicted in a million years.”
