Pronouns: A matter of life and death
Image: James Pennebaker by Marsha Miller, University of Texas
In his recent book, The Secret Life of Pronouns, psychology professor James Pennebaker writes about how our use of pronouns reveals much about our social status, health, honesty … even our propensity to commit suicide!
Pennebaker found that emails he received from students were peppered with instances of ‘I, me, mine’. Conversely, his responses to the students had none of this intimacy. And Pennebaker’s letters to his superior, the faculty dean? More ‘I’s than a rancid potato.
His reasoning is that those in a subordinate position have the subconscious need to relate in a more personal way to those above them, whereas those wielding the whip hand don’t feel the same need.
While much of his argument has a whiff of ad hoc-ery to it, and there doesn’t seem to be any further practical application beyond ‘How interesting!’, there was one demonstration that resonated: Pennebaker conducted an automated pronoun analysis to detect deliberate lies in a printed document compared against the assessments of human readers. Humans detected untruths 52{ff6ca7b474dd05553048b910a34e7fba34d80f8847cae3051262c18ce766eaf5} or the time, but pronoun analysis of the printed document detected them 67{ff6ca7b474dd05553048b910a34e7fba34d80f8847cae3051262c18ce766eaf5} of the time. Not much use in a court of law, but still interesting.
This is a curious field of study without much immediate practical application but, because it relies so much on hard data, its potential in using language as a tool of diagnosis and interpretation is ripe with possibility that may skirt the high degree of subjectivity to which such interpretations often succumb.
