
Our Use of Little Words Can, Uh, Reveal Hidden Interests - nosecreek
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/09/01/344043763/our-use-of-little-words-can-uh-reveal-hidden-interests
======
bnegreve
> _We use "I" more when we talk to someone with power because we're more self-
> conscious._

Isn't it simply because you need to introduce yourself and provide a bit of
context when you write an unsolicited email? That seems to be a reasonable
explanation for the two examples from the post...

~~~
jakevoytko
Most of the sentences can be trivially rewritten without the use of "I", but
the author still chose to use it anyways.

    
    
      I have been contacting a large group of people and many
      have specifically asked if you were attending.
    

Versus..

    
    
      Many people on the contact list have specifically asked if
      you are attending.
    

And likewise, there are sentences the "more powerful" person could have
written with the word "I", but did not.

    
    
      The idea of a reunion is a nice one
    

Versus..

    
    
      I think the idea of a reunion is a nice one

~~~
mr-ron
What about the initial email, just dropping the I? I get email like this a lot
in the professional world, and for whatever reason I've found myself sensitive
to it:

    
    
        Dear Dr. Pennebaker:
    
        Was part of your Introductory Psychology class last semester. 
        Enjoyed your lectures and learned so much. Received an
        email from you about doing some research with you. 
        Would there be a time to come by and talk about this?
    
        Pam

~~~
GrinningFool
It has the minor problem of dropping a significant, not-to-be-assumed part of
every sentence.

I see that commonly in three scenarios: 1) irc 2) from people who learn to
write English as a second language 3) from people with whom I have a familiar
relationship - generally rendering the pronoun unnecessary.

~~~
mr-ron
I get it a lot in unsolicited requests and workplace emails. Perhaps as a
misguided effort to be more professional. Or a subconscious realization of the
topic of the article.

An example of an email I got just today:

    
    
        Hi <mr-ron>,
    
        Saw your company's ad on a taxi yesterday, checked out your product,
        and was wondering who you are using for colocation.
    
        Regards,
    
        <person i will not be responding to>

~~~
GrinningFool
Really odd. It's always seemed to me that "like", "um", and "uh" were often
used as filler words to 'distance' yourself from the thing being discussed.

This seems even further in that direction - instead of distancing the author,
it removes him entirely from the discussion.

------
Udo
There are severe misconceptions in this hypothesis, or at least in the
examples that are being presented.

When you are _introducing yourself_ , you have to refer to yourself
explicitly. You are trying to convey information about who you are and what
your background is. That's not a sign of low status, it's a necessity to
transport essential context. If you try to leave that information out, or if
you just omit the pronoun, your introduction will inevitably sound broken or
unfriendly.

I'm guessing the reason why this is being conflated with low status by the
professor is simple: if you're high-status, other people initiate contact a
lot more often than you do. And when they initiate contact, they need an
introduction, whereas you are already known to them.

At a fundamental level, this hypothesis as it's being described muddles
correlations and causes.

Secondly, I'd like to point out that clearly marking certain points as opinion
does _not_ come from a perspective of inferiority or uncertainty. Especially
in a setting where discussion is warranted, such as here on HN, it's an
appropriate signal.

When I refer to myself and my perspective, I'm not asking you to disregard my
point of view, I'm inviting you to see things from where I'm standing, and I'm
also inviting you to present other perspectives without either of us being
pressured to lead with assertions like " _WRONG! Here 's how it really is:
[text]_". Instead, you are afforded the option to respond with " _My
experience has been different. Here 's why: [text]_".

~~~
mcguire
There are several papers on Pennebaker's home page[1] that may provide more
information than the NPR article. "Pronoun Use Reflects Standings in Social
Hierarchies"[2] specifically surveys 5 studies, only a couple of which would
obviously have the problem you describe. But there are a lot of caveats
involved.

Speaking of correlation and causation, inferiority can definitely result in
points marked as opinions or as uncertain. Depending on the setting, of
course. In my experience, anyway.

[1]
[http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/HomePage/Faculty/Pennebaker/H...](http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/HomePage/Faculty/Pennebaker/Home2000/JWPhome.htm)

[2]
[http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/HomePage/Faculty/Pennebaker/R...](http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/HomePage/Faculty/Pennebaker/Reprints/Kacewicz_Status_2013.pdf)

------
analog31
>>> What you find is completely different from what most people would think.
The person with the higher status uses the word "I" less.

Here's a hypothesis. The higher status person has learned to express their
thoughts in a way that makes them seem more objective and authoritarian -- and
less susceptible to negotiation or debate. The implicit assumption is that
your words convey opinions, but their words convey facts.

~~~
akerl_
I'm not sure how that holds up against the example shown, where the same
professor fell at different levels on the scale depending on whether he was
talking to someone lower or higher on the status hierarchy.

If the language shift was a learned skill that developed as part of performing
the roles of the higher status, wouldn't two people of high status converse
using similar rates, even if one of them is relatively higher than the other?

~~~
PeterWhittaker
Implicit in your second paragraph are the notions of absolute status and of
mutual recognition of absolute status.

I'd suggest social status is always relative and is likely assumed by
participants prior to their initiating an interaction: The student used lower
status language when writing to the professor, who used lower status language
when writing to the famous professor.

~~~
akerl_
I'm saying the same thing you said. The hypothesis in the comment I was
replying to is that speaking with fewer of the noted words is a skilled
learned as part of reaching higher status, presumably because speaking that
way allows you to better wield your station.

That isn't shown in the evidence, because the evidence in the article shows
that the speech used is indeed relative.

~~~
thinkersilver
Not necessarily. It has little to do with learning to speak in a higher status
manner. The comment box doesn't allow for a clear concise explanation but the
language shift is something that the brain does on a subconscious level. A
person's emotional state is related to how they see themselves in relation to
their world at that moment. The 'language shift' is a manifestation of that.
It is a tell in a way, the same way different clusters of body movements are,
unlike body language, though, it is something that goes undetected by either
party and hence can't be actively expressed or detected. That's why the LWC
software was built. Check out the book that Pennebaker wrote. It does a better
job explaining this than the article does and it will clear any confusion.
Pennebaker doesn't provide an explanation for why their's a need to be more
personal when assuming a lower status or when experiencing emotional trauma
but he does provide plenty of evidence for the relationship.

------
anigbrowl
_In fact, says Pennebaker, even in our native language, these function words
are basically invisible to us. "You can't hear them," Pennebaker says. "Humans
just aren't able to do it."_

There's an entire class of people who make a profession out of being able to
do that reliably. They're called actors, and they're not the only people who
are good at this. This sort of hyperbole in discussions of science may engage
some readers but probably alienates at least as many more.

 _An earlier version of this story ran on NPR in 2012._

Wow - just 3 or 4 new sentences tacked onto the end. I wish they had put this
warning at the beginning of the article rather than the end.

~~~
CmdrKrool
Writers, too, and folks with social anxiety. Two classes of people who think
very carefully to every little word they use and the subtle tonal effects and
interactions of the tiniest details.

I suppose this article is more about listening/reading than speaking/writing,
but I reckon most people would easily be able to notice a difference between
the example professor and student messages, and put it down on first thoughts
to formality. And we certainly notice when people communicate with a level of
formality that greatly differs from what we expect from them.

The article says that this might be used for contentious stuff like being able
to tell if people are lying, detecting their gender, or economic status. I
have my doubts to be honest, and fear the consequences of applying this stuff
naively. I suppose if their results check out... but the article doesn't go
into that, instead saying the "most interesting work" is about power dynamics.
Well that to me is the bleedin' obvious part.

Anyway yes, when I reached that categorical 'puny humans' put down I rolled my
eyes and started to scan the rest.

------
chippy
Anyone have a working free link to academic article this is based on?

The sagepub.com registration is non functional for me... it probably only
works in IE...

Edits - Here it is for you lucky Athens users:
[http://jls.sagepub.com/content/33/3/328.full.pdf+html](http://jls.sagepub.com/content/33/3/328.full.pdf+html)

------
aaron-lebo
The author says that you can't intentionally modify your language to change
who you are, but there's not much depth to that section.

I can't help but to wonder if you really can "fake it until you make it". _If_
you force yourself to write in a more "powerful" manner, could that not cause
people to perceive you as such and therefore boost your confidence to where
you really are that person?

~~~
chippy
It is possible.

Robert Anton Wilson in one or two of his books gives an exercise similar to
this - consciously choosing to remove all absolutes from your conversations.
Something like never saying "I am tired" but rather "I feel tired" and not
saying "That is bad" but rather "That activity has badness in it" or something
like that! Edits - it's called E-Prime and mentioned in another comment in
this thread.

The point is that it would be possible to do it, but it would be very
difficult and initially very strange.

~~~
anigbrowl
RAW's 'Quantum psychology' is probably the best distillation of those ideas.
At first sight it seems like a bunch of hand-waving hippy nonsense, but
underneath are some actionable and practical techniques for improving critical
thinking and self-directed neuro-linguistic programming (though I can't
remember whether he uses that specific term).

------
mnarayan01
I'm not a fan of the examples as both have the "lower status" person
initiating the conversation. This further makes me wonder if looking at this
in terms of word-level usage is going to miss the true causation sources.
Consider "I think this article has problems" versus "This article has
problems". The former seems (to me) to be much less confrontational than the
latter, but I don't think that's really a function of the appearance of the
word "I".

Going back to the examples, maybe the usage of personal pronouns is not
directly related to the status of the email participants, but instead, is
based upon who initiated the email. If the person with lower status is more
likely to initiate the email (seems plausible, particularly in academia), then
you might see the same results.

~~~
zacharycohn
If a "higher status" person and sees problems, they're going to tend to be
direct and say "There are problems here."

If a "lower status" person has to tell someone there are problems, using "I
think" softens it and sounds less like an order, which would be weird coming
from low-to-high status.

~~~
1337biz
Problem is that such "absolute" statements are often frowned upon around here,
e.g. people who consider their personal opinions as universal viewpoints.

~~~
aaron-lebo
I have observed in my own writing especially online, that I'm very quick to
prefix almost everything with "I think", "in my opinion", and qualifiers like
"maybe" and "probably". I've gotten in the habit because I'm aware what I say
is just my opinion and not a universal viewpoint, on the other hand when you
write like that your writing comes off as extremely deferential, mealy-
mouthed, and lacking conviction.

Just about everything people write is an opinion, so why not write in a manner
that skips those formalities and gets straight to the point? It might come off
as more absolutist, but should make for better writing.

Of course, there are times that you should use a qualifying "I think" or "in
my opinion", but when they are absolutely necessary isn't clear to me.

~~~
chubot
Yeah I had a writing teacher that informed me that you don't need to write "I
think" in front of everything -- that is implicit because you are the author.

"I think" is only for the purposes of softening a statement, which is
sometimes (but not always) what you want.

Another tip that I got as a high-schooler was to not use "very" or
"extremely". That also "dilutes your prose" (his words, which were apt). That
came up in a recent NY Times Book Review. If you put "very" in front of every
adjective, you sound like a high school student who hasn't been corrected yet
:)

~~~
lmm
> Another tip that I got as a high-schooler was to not use "very" or
> "extremely". That also "dilutes your prose" (his words, which were apt).

A generalized version of this is to never use an adjective/adverb/etc. unless
it in some sense contradicts the thing it's applied to. There's no sense just
trying to intensify the thing you've already written; the modifier should add
new information.

------
thedevopsguy
There is some confusion around the article and it may be because of the way it
is written. but here's a brief summary. Hope this helps to clarify:

* The theory/hypothesis is not saying avoid pronouns.

* It's about relative frequencies not absolute.

* The pronoun frequency is looked at in different scenarios:
    
    
       1. between two people who don't know each other 
    
       2. between two people who do know each other 
    
       3. pronoun frequencies of an individual in a diary, blog over a period of time.
    

* The frequency of pronouns in spoken or written language is an unconscious activity. It's something that is hard to fake, unlike body language.

* The words being compared/counted are primarily social identifiers vs determiners and articles.

------
sanxiyn
I am curious about similar studies for non-English languages. Especially,
whether being a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-
drop_language](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language) changes
anything (my guess is it should).

~~~
anon4
Then you just have to look for verbs inflected in first person singular as
opposed to some impersonal inflection.

~~~
mchaver
A lot of pro-drop languages actually don't inflect for person (Japanese,
Korean, Chinese, Thai).

------
hnriot
I was thinking as I read this that someone should capture the essence in nltk.

------
zuck9
Does it count in difference between native speakers and non-native speakers?

------
blazespin
Yet another example of how actions speak louder than words.

