Wordwatchers: Language and Personality

I am always looking for ways to better understand people and their true intentions/personality. Recently, I discovered a scientist who has actually configured a way to mathmatecally evaluate someone's personality based on the words they use. Truely amazing and scary stuff.

I found Doctor James W. Pennebaker. He is Professor and Chair Department of Psychology The University of Texas Austin, Texas. He believes that the words we use reflect who we are. Word choice can serve as a key to people's personality and social situations.

Since the mid-1990s, he, his students, and colleagues have been exploring the psychology of word use.



Before reading further, you might want to try one or more brief demonstrations that will give you an appreciation of language use, measurement, and personality.

Here is a link to his analysis of the current democratic contenders for office: Obama-vs-Clinton: Who is more syntactically complex?

Click on this link for some awe inspiring tests that influenced my decision to write this blogg:

The Online Research Consortium

Go ahead, be skeptical, but what the heck..we are all here to have fun and figure ourselves out. This blows the zodiac out of the water~

What words should we pay attention to?

Very broadly, there are two types of words: content and style. Content words include nouns, regular verbs, and most adjectives and adverbs. Style words include pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles, and auxiliary verbs. The content words tell us what a person is saying; style words convey how they are saying it.

Style words, then, can be powerful indicators of people’s psychological states. They require a certain social skill to both use and interpret.

In a conversation, if one person refers to “her table”, both people must remember who the “her” is. Similarly, the difference between “a table” and “the table” conveys a subtle difference in the relationship between the speaker and the table in question.

What can the analysis of words tell us about people?

For starters, style-related words can signal basic social and demographic categories, such as:

Sex. In general, women tend to use more pronouns and references to other people; men are more likely to use articles, prepositions, and big words.

Age. As people get older, they tend to refer to themselves less, use more positive emotion and fewer negative emotion words. Older people also use more future tense and fewer past tense verbs.

Social class. The higher the social class, the less likely one uses 1st person singular pronouns and the less one uses emotion words.

Style-related words can also reveal basic social and personality processes, including:

Lying vs telling the truth. When people tell the truth, they are more like to use 1st person singular pronouns. They also use more exclusive words like except, but, without, excluding. Words such as this indicate that a person is making a distinction between what they did do and what they didn’t do. Liars have a problem with such complex ideas.

Dominance in a conversation. Analyze the relative use of the word “I” between two speakers in an interaction. Usually, the higher status speaker will use fewer “I” words.

Social bonding after a trauma. In the days and weeks after a cultural upheaval, people become more self-less (less use of “I”) and more oriented towards others (increased use of “we”).

Depression and suicide-proneness. Public figures speaking in press conferenecs and published poets in their poetry use more 1st person singular when they are depressed or prone to suicide.

Testosterone levels. In two case studies, it was found that when people’s testosterone levels increased rapidly, they dropped in their use of references to other people.

Basic self-reported personality dimensions. Multiple studies are now showing that style-related words do much better than chance at distinguishing people who are high or low in the Big Five dimensions of personality: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

Consumer patterns. By knowing people’s linguistic styles, we are able to predict (at reasonable rates), their music and radio station preference, liking for various consumer goods, car preferences, etc.

And much, much more. ..