3 Takeaways - The Secret Life of Words - What Our Words Say About Us and What We Can Learn From Others Words: Dr. Jamie Pennebaker (#85)

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

Ever wondered if we could predict people’s actions through their words? Renowned social psychologist and linguist Dr Jamie Pennebaker shares how words can give away our secrets, feelings and inner state of mind from Putin’s language which predicted his invasion of Ukraine to poets whose use of the word “I” can predict a higher risk of suicide. Dr. Pennebaker’s groundbreaking research in computational linguistics analyzing and counting the frequency of words, shows that our most forgettable words, such as pronouns I, me and my, can be the most revealing.  He explains what the words Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Joe Biden use (and even the ones they don’t use) reveal about their inner feelings and the “tell” that predicted Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.  He also talks about how American Presidents have become more likeable and less analytical, the differences in men’s and women's words, and how writing about traumatic experiences can help people heal and improve their physical health. This podcast is available on all major podcast streaming platforms. Did you enjoy this episode? Consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts.Receive updates on upcoming guests and more in our weekly e-mail newsletter. Subscribe today at www.3takeaways.com. 

Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers. And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Thoman. Hi, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Welcome to another episode. Today I'm excited to be with Jamie Pennebaker. He's a social psychologist and a language expert. He's found that our language reveals secrets about our feelings, our state of mind, and our connection with family and friends. The most revealing words turn out to be the little three letter words, pronouns and prepositions, the forgettable words. Who would have predicted

that as Jamie says, the high school student who uses too many verbs in her college admissions essay is likely to get lower grades in college, or that the poet who overuses I in his poetry is at higher risk of suicide, or that leaders use of pronouns such as I, you, we, and they can predict whether they'll lead their countries into war, or even that a tweet by a famous person would be so extraordinarily revealing. I'm excited to learn what our forgettable words tell us about ourselves, well-known people, and leaders such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping. I'm also excited to learn what our language about COVID and Black Lives Matter reveals now and how we can Use Words to Improve People's Mental Health. Jamie, welcome and thanks so much for our conversation today.

Thank you. It's nice to be here. It's a pleasure to be with you. Let's start with some examples of tweets by some famous people. Could you give some examples? I would have thought that a tweet was so short that one could read very little into it. You can get some information. It would be best, of course, as a good scientist to get dozens, hundreds, thousands of tweets from the same person. I have three or four right here. We'll start off with Paris Hilton. Good morning, everyone, exclamation point. Have a fabulous day, exclamation point. XOXO, Paris, with an emoji after that. From that, we can tell this is a person who is not conveying anything deep or meaningful,

that these are all very positive words. There's nothing personal. She's not revealing anything about herself. And it's also intriguing that she really loves punctuation, which that kind of punctuation is a little bit like furious hand waving. Let's go from one end to the other end of the spectrum from John McCain's. Went to the mountains above Beirut yesterday to meet with Walid Jumblak, the leader of the Druze. Fascinating experience. That was it. And his first word was went to the mountains and went was in small letters. This is very formal writing. And it's interesting because I think he's trying to come across as evil by dropping the word I. But what he is doing

is he's psychologically distancing himself from both the experience and also from the audience that he's writing to. When he wrote this in probably the year 2010, my guess is he was just being introduced to Twitter and was probably not particularly comfortable with that method of communication. Or Lady Gaga. Time to drink a bottle of wine and sketch for the new tour. St. Louis was brilliant. There's highlighter on my knee and blood on my elbow. Shady. I love that one. That's very much Lady Gaga.

A mixture of a really rich vocabulary, not completely personal, but somewhat personal, but also very rich and personal in the sense of she's bragging a little bit about her recent show. And she's talking about the act of creativity. And at the same time, signaling about her condition by her bloody elbow, et cetera. So each one of these quotes, you get a really different picture of these people. And the pictures are pretty accurate in terms of Paris Hilton versus John McCain versus Lady Gaga. I will have to be much more careful and thoughtful about my tweets. Somehow, I don't believe your tweets would match any of these people very well.

They might not match any of them, but I'm scared to think what they show about me. What they'll do is they will show about you, which people who know you already know about you. Hope so. Jamie, you've analyzed Vladimir Putin's language. What does it reveal about him? And can you tell anything about his intentions, for example, in Ukraine? Putin's intentions are always difficult to pick out specifically. One thing that language is good at is telling us if a person is letting go and being relatively frank and honest versus they are holding back. And a leader who has plans to do something very significant, and let's say in Putin's case, he doesn't want other people to know about it,

his language and other people's language when they do that becomes more deceptive. And one aspect of deceptive language is you are trying to hide yourself from others. And one way we can see this is the use of first person singular pronouns, I, me, and my. In fact, we found this with George Bush prior to going to war in Iraq, that several months beforehand, just about the time that he officially decided we'd go to war, his language, George Bush's language, dropped in I words by almost in half. I was curious if the same thing was true with Putin prior to going into Ukraine. And the Kremlin maintains all of his annual press conferences and other press conferences, and they are translated. I was able to go back and look at his use of i words for the last 20 years and he's

fairly consistent in the rate of using first person singular however starting about a month or two before going into ukraine his first person singular words i words dropped probably 30 or 40 percent unlike any other time i'd seen in other other words, this was a really powerful tell of his, I predicted, would go into Ukraine. These numbers were sufficiently striking that I felt that it might be valuable just to post a blog about it because this information really validated many of the things that the Biden administration had been talking about. Fascinating. One thing that's also interesting is that the fact that about December 15th was his last big press conference, and there was no hint that he had made a final decision.

It wasn't until his smaller press conferences or interviews with the press in late January, early February, that we saw these big changes. So that is fascinating. Had anyone analyzed his language months before he invaded Ukraine, there fact, I would say that the data suggests that. His eye word shift didn't occur until about a month before he went into Ukraine, maybe two months. So interesting. Yeah, no, I must admit that I am fascinated by this myself. What does Xi Jinping, China's leader, what does his language tell you about him? Xi, I found to be much more interesting and complicated. You're the one who has educated me that his speeches are all straight, pretty much without notes. And his press conferences, his language is exactly the same. I have just assumed that he was reading something word for word, but he clearly isn't. He is the most analytic person I've ever seen. He is incredibly logical, formal, etc. And ironically, over the

years he has been prime minister, he's gotten even more analytic. He doesn't use I words at all. In other words, he is distant and quite cold in terms of his kind of having to work through questions. So we saw with Putin, Putin is always trying to understand. He's using words like think, wonder, believe. That's not the way that she is. He is, he knows the answer to any question that is asked. So he's very different in that way. He's not warm. His emotion words in terms of true emotion are lower than anything I've seen. I think the one thing that really comes out is he's very risk averse. He is always talking about the dangers of one thing versus another. So his mindset is very different than either Putin or any of the American presidents.

So interesting. And yet from his words, you believe that his confidence is very high? I would say exceptionally high. There's a number of words that can connote kind of a moralistic worldview, essentially judging others along some kind of moral dimension. And he's very high in that as well, much more than any other person I've seen. Jamie, I know that you have spent a lot of time analyzing the speech and words of U.S. presidents from Washington to Trump and Biden. Can you talk about the U.S. presidents, please? The primary project that I've done this with is

Kayla Jordan and Ryan Boyd, who have really driven the ship on this. And the project has gone back and looked at all U.S. presidents in terms of inaugural addresses, union messages, the personal papers, as well as press conferences, which started in the station with FDR. And with them, you find two dimensions that are the most interesting. One is this analytic thinking that I was talking about, which is really reflecting a complexity of thought and logical, formal, rigid speaking. And it was very high in the days during the first 10, 15 U.S. presidents. And then getting to the middle of the series,

moving up to maybe Teddy Roosevelt, all of a sudden this level, this analytic thinking started to drop. Every year, the presidents became less analytic. When it got to Trump, it hit a new low. But ironically, and this shocked me when we started this project, the person who was the second lowest

in analytic thinking, formal logical thinking, was Barack Obama, which to me, it didn't make any sense. But then if you go and you listen to Obama, the way he speaks is very simple. He tells very simple stories. We know that he's a gifted thinker, but in his public presentation, he is very simple to tell stories. He's not formal logical and he's not much different than Trump and George Bush. And the presidents before him were also low in analytic thinking. And as it happens, Biden is as well. At the same time, we look at something called clout. Clout is made up of a number of parts of speech.

We know that over time, and clout is that sense of when a person walks into a room, they feel completely confident, completely comfortable. They are looking around at others. They're trying to figure out who they want to talk to. It's not power, but it's just a sense of confidence in the room. And what you see is in the early days from George Washington, essentially almost to Teddy Roosevelt, clout was at pretty low levels. And then again around Roosevelt, they started climbing president after president. And the two highest ones, very highest one is Trump. The second highest one is Obama of all U.S. presidents.

What this means is, and I think it's interesting that these things started to change with Teddy Roosevelt. That was kind of the beginning of mass media as we know it, and also the change in the electorate. And what was happening is I think presidents realized they had to sound much more likable, much more confident. And that's who we vote for. We are suckers for someone who tells a simple story we can go out and get a beer with, but they are confident and show leadership skills, which is frankly a little bit creepy because there is a lot of research in psychology that when people are extremely confident, they make much poorer decisions and that we should be very frightened. You mentioned the early presidents like President Washington. Could you give an

example of how his speech, for example, compared to a current president? Well, as it so happens, I have a file right here that I can go to. So this is the very first inaugural address, and I'm sure you're going to be just blown away by the oratory. Here we go. Among the vicissitudes incident to life, no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order and received on 14th day of the present month. On the one hand, I was summoned by my country, whose voice I could never hear but with veneration and love from a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection. And in my flattering hopes with an immutable decision as the asylum

of my declining, this sentence, by the way, goes on for another 10 minutes. I'll just stop there. You get the idea. It is formal, distant, but he does use the words I and me and my at surprisingly high rates. So I think for him, it was a very personal message. But for us, I think we are horrified. And somebody talking like that when they're running for president of the United States, you think they'd get 2% of the vote? They'd have to work at it. What can you read into President Biden's language? Biden is very early to tell because I only have three press conferences that he's actually done in his first year.

I would characterize him as somebody who is working through issues. He is really surprisingly emotionally distant. He doesn't use positive or negative emotion words at very high rates. He uses social words, especially in references to family. He uses I words at fairly high rates, meaning I think he comes across as fairly authentic. I wish I could tell you more, but I just don't have enough data on him just yet. Okay, time will tell. How do women use words compared to men? Very differently.

And it really boils down to what men and women talk about. And analyzing hundreds of thousands, millions of texts, on average, women tend to talk about other people more than men do. Men generally talk more about objects and things compared to women. It's not all the time. Women use I words more than men. Women use all pronouns more. Pronouns would be words like I, me, and my, or it could be you, or it could be we, us, and our, and he and she weren't such as that.

So women use pronouns generally more than men do, but especially those I words. There's a big difference in articles, A, N, and D. The only reason that's interesting is A, N, and D hang around with other nouns, nouns being word labels. So car, table, things like that are nouns. And we often will refer to the table, a table, and so forth. Men use those words at much higher rates than women. One other thing that there's a huge difference on are what we call cognitive words. And I've mentioned these before. Cognitive words and cognitive process words are words like realize, understand, know, meaning, because, cause, effect, would, should, could. All of those are words that are broadcasting, I am thinking about something. And it is a working through process.

When you're trying to work through a complex problem, male or female, you use those words. Women use these words more than men do. And it's partly because of what they're talking about. If I'm talking about how to screw in a light bulb as an object and thing, I'll say, well, you get the base of the lamp and you'll explain it. If I'm talking about I is Julia who lives next door dating Rodrigo and everybody knows that she likes Fred a lot more. Why is that happening? And it's a really complex issue. I'm going to have to work through that. And in a funny way, talking about other people is also you're talking

about more complex issues. Human relationships are a lot more complex than a life. If men talk more about things like light bulbs and they categorize their things by counting them or naming them or organizing them in some way, and women talk more about social things and use more cognitive words, which you've said are words like think or understand or realize, then men just by the choice of what they're talking about and how they talk about it are talking about it with much more certainty, where the women are not talking about things with so much certainty so does that mean that men come across as more certain i would think about it a little bit differently i think you can talk about the light bulb with certainty or not an example i like is talking about the

weather outside if i ask you what the weather's like outside you could say i think it's kind of cold or you could say it's cold and women are much more likely to say i think it's cold than men and part of that is an awareness of perspective because when you say i think it's cold what you are signaling is there are multiple perspectives here. It is possible you might think that it's actually somewhat warm, but I just want to signal that there is no certainty here. And so male or female could talk about it's that style of how you say something. And even if me speaking as a male and talking about why the woman next door is dating the guy that she is it's very likely i'll just say well she's doing it because of this and as

my wife likes it how can you say that you have no knowledge of this and she's pointing out that i'm speaking with certainty over which something i have no knowledge. How can you tell by the little forgettable words if someone is anxious or depressed? There's been a lot of work on this over the last several years. And obviously, if I'm saying I'm worried or depressed, we can immediately pick that up. Some of the best predictors

are first-person singular pronouns, I, me, and my. And in fact, the very first study I did with this was looking at suicidal versus non-suicidal poets and analyzing their poetry. And I was expecting that the suicidal poets would talk a lot about death and sadness and depression and misery and dark colors and so forth. That wasn't true at all. The biggest marker that separated them was that suicidal poets used the word I at much higher rate. And later we did several studies with people who were clinically depressed or not depressed, or we tracked people when they were in a depressive state versus not. And when they were in depressive states, they used the I words much more.

And it makes sense because when you're depressed, your attention is being drawn to yourself. And it's the same as if you're physically sick, you use I words more. Your attention is being drawn inward. And if you are standing in front of a mirror, you use I words more. There have been studies where people write an essay in front of a mirror or not in front of a mirror. And it's much more self-focused if you just write it in front of a mirror or not in front of a mirror, and it's much more self-focused if you just have to write it in front of a mirror. Can words be used as tools to improve people's health? I'll answer that two ways. The first is by trying to change your use of these little

three-letter words. The answer is no. I don't think it'll make any difference. But the more interesting answer is the reason I got into the whole world of language was because in my earlier life, I was doing research on how people cope with traumatic experiences. And I discovered that people who had traumas but kept them secret were much more likely to become ill than if they had similar traumas and they talked to others. And it made me wonder if we brought people in the lab and had them talk or write about traumatic experiences, would their health change? And the answer was yes. So I began a series of projects years ago where people would come in the lab. They would be asked to either write about traumatic experiences

for four days or superficial topics for four days. And then we would track their health by student health center visits. And we found in multiple studies that when people were asked to write about traumatic experiences, they went to the student health center at about half the rate as people who wrote about superficial topics. So there have been over 2,000 studies published using this method. It's called expressive writing. And that's what got me into the language world. I was trying to figure out what is it about their writing that is bringing about such profound changes in their physical health. That's why it's a complex answer. When we spoke last week, you told me you were in Playland as a social psychologist. Now, what are you seeing in terms of COVID?

The Playland that I'm in is a Playland of moving to the world of big data. I've been doing a lot of work on social media. What that allows, the platform I love the most is Reddit. Reddit for a social scientist like me is like, oh my God, it's wonderful. And I would urge all your viewers and listeners to immediately go to Reddit and start using it because I can always use the data. And what I'm able to do, what anybody can do is to actually download all the conversations that have ever occurred in that group. And everybody has a handle. This name is their handle.

And what we can do is track how any given handle, any person talks in this group versus how they can talk in that group or some other group. So we can actually track people as they are in one gathering with one group of friends or acquaintances or another one is a political group or whatever. So what we've been able to do with, say, COVID, we looked at just city reddits. So Austin has one, New York has one. We got about 20, 25 cities. And we simply track how these cities changed in the way they use words in the city level reddit. And every city, there are hundreds of thousands of posts and tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people who are posting in this. And we're able to go back more than 10 years for most of these cities. So we can track almost on a daily basis how people in that city are, say, using I words, I, me, and mine. So you can look at the levels of I over the last several years, and you'll see that, you know,

it bounces up and down week by week. And then all of a sudden COVID hits, and all of a sudden you see I words go up like crazy and stay elevated for months. Or the same thing with anxiety works. Or the analytic thinking that I've talked about. It was striking what happened there. We tracked analytic thinking for all this time. And then COVID hit and analytic thinking across the country and all the cities dropped tremendously. Almost as though the cultural IQ dropped for several months.

And it's slowly been coming back. But what's been so exciting about this is these new methods give us kind of an insight in terms of how people are thinking, how they're connecting with others, how their social lives are changing. People are expressing all of this, and we have so much data that we can now see signals that I don't think we would ever be able to look at in the past. So if I asked you to name the major changes that you've seen due to COVID, what would they be? We published our first article. Ashwini Ashok Kumar was the first author a couple of months ago. We're now working on a much bigger, we're waiting for March to do the last survey. But in the first months, the biggest effects was that people's social worlds

turned upside down. And even references on Reddit, they reduced greatly their references to friends, to neighbors, to state, to country, but in increased references to family. People weren't going out. And we found, again, huge increases in anxiety levels. Ironically, in the first several months, anger, which went against what everybody thought would happen until George Floyd's murder. And at that point, the culture turned upside down and the level of anger in the society exploded. And also discussions of race jumped in ways that we hadn't seen in the previous 12 years of Reddit. Before I ask for the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today, is there anything else you'd like to mention that you haven't touched upon? As you can tell, I could talk about almost

anything for quite a while. I think I'll stop and try to walk away safely now. Okay. Well, you can't walk away until you say your three takeaways. What are they, Jamie? I should tell you, I struggled with the takeaways because there's takeaways in life. And then there's takeaways that I can contribute based on my work. And I thought I'd go with my work because you've had such remarkable people on your show who can provide a much richer perspective. But in terms of my work, the first takeaway is the beliefs we have often blind us to the realities in the world, that beliefs trump facts, that if we believe something fervently, we can't see the world in an objective way. And this is true for people on the

left, people on the right. It's true for religious beliefs or scientific beliefs. That's one of the things that as a scientist, I kind of love the fact that our rich beliefs can be good sometimes. They account for the power of placebos, but they can be terrible sometimes where we see the dangers of nationalism. All of them are these really rich beliefs. The second is putting experience into words changes the experience and it simplifies it and it allows us to extract meaning in ways we couldn't and this of course comes from my work on expressive writing

putting things into words helps us understand them and this can be traumas or it could be how light bulbs look or more about that neighbor. And the last one is essentially a summary of today's talk, which is the words we use in everyday life reflect who we are. I'll call those the three takeaways. Jamie, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed your book, The Secret Life of Pronouns. Well, thank you so much. I'm honored to be on your show. And thank you for the nice things you said about my book.

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