Contrary to what you might think, new research by psychologist James Pennebaker suggests that people who use the pronoun I a lot actually tend to occupy the lower status in a conversation. In addition, Pennebaker and his associates found that people who are lying tend to avoid speaking in the first-person singular. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Use of First-Person Singluar”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
You might assume that someone who uses the pronoun I a whole lot is maybe the person in a group who has the higher status, or they’re the leader, or maybe they’re just narcissistic.
You’d think that, but you might be wrong, at least according to some new research by James Pennebaker.
He’s a psychologist. We’ve talked about his work on the show.
He’s the author of a book called The Secret Life of Pronouns, which he wrote based on all this crunching of linguistic data.
And he’s come up with some interesting stuff.
Recently, he analyzed the written communications of people in a lot of different situations.
And again and again, what he found was that people of lower status, people who are more unsure of themselves, were the ones who use the pronoun I more.
And I thought that was really interesting.
In one of the studies, he paired off college students, so two people were working on a complex series of problems, online only, so he could record all their language.
And then he interviewed them afterward.
And what tended to happen was that the people who were higher status, the ones that they regarded as sort of the leader of the two of them, were the ones who did not use the word I very much.
Isn’t that curious?
And does he have an explanation for that?
He thinks that it has to do with the fact that if you’re higher status, then you’re looking out at people and you’re thinking what they can do, what they’re supposed to do.
And if you’re lower status, then maybe you’re more self-conscious.
You’re thinking about what you should do.
It’s really curious.
And another interesting bit of research that he’s done lately has to do with lying.
And apparently, if you’re lying, then you tend to use the word I less.
And in this particular study, what he did was analyze the tweets of the Boston Marathon bombing suspect.
And the closer it got to the date that they had planned to do this, the fewer uses of I he used in the tweets that he was…
Oh, that’s really interesting.
Yeah.
It’s kind of a small sample size.
Yeah, right.
I would wonder if you could generalize that to a larger body and figure out if it holds true.
Yeah.
Well, I’m curious about all this research being generalized because who knows?
We leave evidence in our writing.
And since we live in a text-based world now.
Yeah, where we can crunch all that data.
Well, not only can we crunch it, but it exists in a way that it didn’t exist 20 or 30 years ago.
Yeah.
Now we have astounding things that we can learn about ourselves that maybe we didn’t know we were leaving behind.
Exactly.
Little data trails.
Yeah.
So it’s really interesting.
I would be curious to know if our listeners have somebody in the office who’s of higher status than everybody else, and if they use I less.
And I wonder if it can be inverted.
Is this one of those things, if I stop using the pronoun I, then I’ll start to feel more confident about myself at the office?
-huh.
That could be an implication of it.
Interesting.
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