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Episode: What's Hidden in Your Words
Author: Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam
Duration: 00:54:07
Episode Shownotes
I. Me. My. You. He. She. They. It. To. Of. For. These are all words we use without a second thought. But psychologist James Pennebaker says if we pay close attention to the patterns in speech and writing, we can understand profound things about others, and even ourselves.For more on
the relationship between language and our minds, check out this classic Hidden Brain episode: https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/watch-your-mouth/
Summary
In this episode of Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam and psychologist James Pennebaker explore how language patterns can reveal insights into our mental states and personality traits. Through studies on gender differences in word usage, the impact of testosterone on language, and the analysis of written diaries, they uncover how word choices, particularly function words, signify psychological conditions like depression and anxiety. The episode also highlights the predictive power of language style matching in relationships, illustrating that couples with similar linguistic styles are more likely to stay together, while changes in language before breakups can indicate rising emotional distress.
Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (What's Hidden in Your Words) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.
Full Transcript
00:00:03 Speaker_05
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. There was a time when most detective stories featured the brilliant insights of a genius.
00:00:12 Speaker_05
Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple noticed clues the rest of us didn't and solved mysteries using little more than their eyes and their intuition.
00:00:23 Speaker_05
In the story, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, Sherlock Holmes inspects a hat that was found next to a stolen gem. He tells his friend, John Watson, that the hat's owner is a smart, formerly wealthy man who recently turned evil.
00:00:41 Speaker_05
He is middle-aged, out of shape, recently cut his hair, and his wife no longer loves him. All of this from simply looking at the hat.
00:00:54 Speaker_05
In the real world, crime solving today relies less on sharp eyes and intuitive leaps, and more on the science of forensics. Suspects leave fingerprints at scenes of crime, and tiny strands of DNA can identify one person out of billions.
00:01:15 Speaker_05
In recent years, psychologists have gotten into the game. They have discovered another set of clues that can give us a window into a suspect's mind. The source of this hidden information? Language.
00:01:31 Speaker_05
The words we use in both speech and writing reveal a lot about us. They can give us insight into a potential criminal, yes, but also whether someone is depressed, when a person is lying, even how long a lover will remain in a romantic relationship.
00:01:53 Speaker_05
What your pronouns and prepositions really say about you, this week on Hidden Brain.
00:02:24 Speaker_02
Have you ever gotten a confusing message from a friend or family member?
00:02:28 Speaker_05
Maybe a text or email. You read it and realize, I have no idea what this person is actually feeling. If only there was a way to decipher what she really means. In recent years, scientists have tried to do exactly that.
00:02:43 Speaker_05
They find that if we pay close attention to the patterns in speech and writing, we can understand profound things about others and even ourselves.
00:02:52 Speaker_05
At the University of Texas at Austin, psychologist James Pennebaker has spent decades studying how the words we use can be an X-ray into our minds. Jamie Pennebaker, welcome to Hidden Brain.
00:03:04 Speaker_06
It's nice to be here, thank you.
00:03:06 Speaker_05
Jamie, early on in your career, you were studying how writing can help people get over traumatic experiences. But as part of that research, you noticed something. The language people use changed as their mental states changed.
00:03:19 Speaker_05
Can you tell me how this discovery unfolded?
00:03:23 Speaker_06
I was trying to figure out why is it that writing about an upsetting experience can improve people's health. And it occurred to me I needed a more objective way to look at essays. And so I looked for a computer program to analyze the text.
00:03:38 Speaker_06
And I ended up asking one of my graduate students to help put together a computer program that could analyze language.
00:03:45 Speaker_06
And it was that program that allowed us to all of a sudden start to see writing samples in ways that I had never imagined we'd be able to do.
00:04:01 Speaker_05
The computer program that Jamie developed could analyze a text, breaking it down by word choice, parts of speech, and meaning. Take the sentence, it was a dark and stormy night. The program would categorize the word it as a pronoun. It.
00:04:16 Speaker_00
It. It.
00:04:17 Speaker_05
The word was would be counted as a verb. Stormy. Stormy is an adjective. After developing this program, Jamie then brought volunteers into the lab and asked them to give him writing samples.
00:04:35 Speaker_05
He analyzed their writing through the computer program and then compared the results to the personalities of the writers. He came to several astonishing conclusions. One of the first was that men and women employ language differently.
00:04:51 Speaker_05
Jamie assumed that men are more likely than women to act in boastful ways. So he expected they would refer a lot to themselves. They would use a lot of words like I, me, and my. Jamie figured women would use words like we more often.
00:05:11 Speaker_06
The most striking early discovery was that looking at men and women, they used language in ways that made no sense to me. I found that women used I words, I, me, and my, at much higher rates than men.
00:05:34 Speaker_06
I expected big differences in the use of we, but in fact, men and women use we words at the same rates.
00:05:40 Speaker_03
We, we, us, our, our.
00:05:44 Speaker_06
And there were these other parts of speech that were just very different. And I had no idea what they meant. And over the years, we did more and more studies. And part of it was men and women are paying attention to the world differently.
00:06:01 Speaker_06
Women are looking and are more interested in other human beings. And by definition, if you're interested in human beings, you have to use pronouns.
00:06:08 Speaker_03
He.
00:06:09 Speaker_06
Words like he, she, they, we, I, et cetera.
00:06:13 Speaker_03
She. They.
00:06:15 Speaker_06
And if you're interested in objects and things, which men tend to be, you use nouns and articles. A, a, an, an, the, the. And prepositions, to, of, for. To, of, to, of, for, for.
00:06:31 Speaker_06
And so all of a sudden, I realized the world was way more complex than I ever thought.
00:06:42 Speaker_05
I confess I was skeptical about these conclusions. There are all kinds of pop psychology claims about gender differences that mostly rely on stereotypes about men and women. But then Jamie told me about another dimension of this research.
00:06:57 Speaker_05
It had an experimental quality to it. It tracked individuals getting supplements of testosterone, the primary male sex hormone.
00:07:05 Speaker_06
Testosterone seems to affect the way we see our worlds. And several years ago, working with Jim Dabbs and others who had been doing work on testosterone, we were able to study a person who was transitioning from female to male and was taking periodic
00:07:26 Speaker_06
injections of testosterone. I was studying this person's diaries over time and trying to find out when this person took the testosterone injections, did their language change?
00:07:39 Speaker_06
I was telling a friend of this and this friend was an academic and he was saying, wow, that's weird.
00:07:45 Speaker_06
I've been taking testosterone as well because he had moved to a farm and he was older by this time and he started taking testosterone to increase his upper body strength.
00:07:57 Speaker_06
And I asked him, would he mind sharing when he had taken these shots and also sharing his outgoing emails for the previous year.
00:08:06 Speaker_06
So for both of them, I could look at when they took shots, which was usually about once every three weeks, and how their language changed from before taking the testosterone to the three weeks afterwards. And I found the same kind of changes.
00:08:21 Speaker_06
And it was not what either of them expected at all. And that was when the individuals took the testosterone shots, they started using pronouns, he, she, they, et cetera, at lower rates.
00:08:39 Speaker_06
It's almost as though they became less interested in other human beings. Testosterone then didn't make people talk more about power or aggression or anger or anxiety or anything. There was no differences there.
00:08:53 Speaker_06
Only this lack of interest in humans after taking a testosterone shot.
00:09:01 Speaker_05
Jamie had discovered that the language people use reveals something about what is happening inside their heads. Words reflect not just what we are trying to communicate, but how we see the world, how we see each other.
00:09:18 Speaker_05
Fascinated, Jamie started using his language analysis tool to study other facets of human behavior. He quickly noticed a group of words that was extremely important, but these are not words most people would think are important.
00:09:33 Speaker_06
I focus a lot on a group of words called function words. These are the words you learned in high school. They're the most boring words in language. They include pronouns. He, she, they. Negations, no, not, never. Prepositions.
00:09:49 Speaker_04
To, of, for.
00:09:53 Speaker_06
Auxiliary verbs, am, is. All of these are words that don't have any solid meaning like a noun does or a verb or adjective does.
00:10:03 Speaker_06
I started to discover was it was these function words, which are telling us how people are seeing the world, how they're negotiating with others, how they're thinking about themselves and others.
00:10:14 Speaker_06
And with this, we can start to get a picture of their personality, if you like. So for example, I could go out to your listening audience, ask them to send me their last two or three emails that they sent out.
00:10:30 Speaker_06
And people who use a high number of pronouns like he, she, they, you, et cetera, those people are more socially connected. They're more interested in other human beings.
00:10:44 Speaker_03
She is one of those people who will maintain composure in the situation.
00:10:48 Speaker_00
I can't believe he did that. You're super smart. You're funny. You know what you're doing. I trust you.
00:11:00 Speaker_06
Or another interesting one is people who are anxious. Now, a person who's anxious will use anxiety-related words, words like worry, upset, nervous.
00:11:12 Speaker_06
But they're also very much self-focused, and they tend to use pronouns like I, I, me, and my, I refer to as I words, at much higher rate than people who are not anxious. And in fact, all of us, when we're anxious, we start using more I words.
00:11:33 Speaker_06
And the same thing is true of depression. any emotion that makes us look inward, we will start using I-words more. And even if we're physically sick or in pain, we use I-words more. In other words, I-words are reflecting self-focus.
00:11:53 Speaker_05
I mean, what's striking here, Jamie, is that I think when most people think about language, they think about words that have an affective quality. I'm excited, I'm happy, I'm sad, I'm moody.
00:12:05 Speaker_05
But what you're really finding is that it's almost the connective tissue between words that actually reveals the inner workings of our minds.
00:12:13 Speaker_06
That's exactly the way I think about it, is these words, what I love about them is they're invisible. We can't hear them.
00:12:21 Speaker_06
control them very well, but they are revealing parts of ourselves that we just didn't know that we were, you know, that we were spilling those beans.
00:12:35 Speaker_05
What is striking about these function words is how few there are and how often we use them.
00:12:41 Speaker_06
There are not that many in the English language. There are only about 200 common ones, but we use these function words at very high rates. For example,
00:12:49 Speaker_06
These pronouns, prepositions, and articles, et cetera, account for about 60% of all the words we say, we hear. Wow. The majority of words you and I have spoken have been function words in this conversation, and we don't even know it.
00:13:05 Speaker_06
I confess I was skeptical about these conclusions. They're invisible. We can't hear them.
00:13:11 Speaker_05
We can understand profound things about others and even ourselves.
00:13:18 Speaker_06
All of these function words together are so powerful because they are telling us about our social orientation if we're looking inward.
00:13:29 Speaker_06
A lot of it is telling us where we're paying attention and how we're thinking and what our connections with others are.
00:13:39 Speaker_05
So one thing that I want to point out and flag is that the differences in the rate at which these words are used can be subtle.
00:13:46 Speaker_05
So it's not as if you can listen to someone's conversation intuitively and pick up the fact that they're using more of these kinds of function words or fewer of these function words.
00:13:57 Speaker_05
In some ways, these have to be analyzed almost at a statistical level.
00:14:02 Speaker_06
That's right. A good example is people who are depressed use I words at higher rate than when they're not depressed. And when they're depressed in, let's say, a regular conversation, they might use maybe 6% of their words might be I words.
00:14:20 Speaker_06
If they're not depressed, it could be 4% or 5%. Now it sounds like the difference between 4% and 6% is trivial, and on one level it is, but as it happens, it's a huge statistical effect because people don't vary a lot in terms of their use of these.
00:14:39 Speaker_06
So it is a really powerful marker that we just can't hear.
00:14:45 Speaker_05
On one level, given that language is a product of the mind, it's not surprising that our words should reflect the patterns in our thinking. But Jamie is reverse engineering the process.
00:14:57 Speaker_05
He is looking at our words and inferring what is happening in our minds. Used this way, words become a sort of x-ray into our thinking. Jamie cautions that this is a diagnostic tool, not a magic wand.
00:15:12 Speaker_06
You're probably wondering, Well, if I could get people to, let's say, if we know that I words are associated with depression, could we get a depressed person to stop using I words and they'd be happy? By the way, the answer is no.
00:15:27 Speaker_06
It does not work that way.
00:15:30 Speaker_05
Yeah, so it's not as if you can actually manipulate the words you're using temporarily and suddenly dramatically change your mind states.
00:15:37 Speaker_05
It's really the words that you're using automatically, almost unconsciously, that are really telling you something about what's happening inside your head.
00:15:44 Speaker_06
That's exactly right. So for example, one thing that happens is when people assume a leadership role, they use I words less, but they tend to use we words, we, us, and our more.
00:15:58 Speaker_06
In other words, you take on the mantle of leadership, and you are now looking out at others. You're not paying attention to yourself, which, by the way, is what most of us think.
00:16:08 Speaker_06
But years ago, we did some studies where we were able to induce people to use we words more. Did they become leaders? No. Did they feel more connected to others? No. It made no difference.
00:16:21 Speaker_06
But if we induce them to become leaders, they then started using I words less and we words more.
00:16:36 Speaker_05
So about a decade ago, Jamie, you became fascinated by the story of an explorer in rural Australia. Tell me the story of Henry Hellyer.
00:16:46 Speaker_06
So Henry Hellyer was a British explorer. He was born in the late 1700s in England and then emigrated to Australia. And he was interested in discovery. And he went to Tasmania.
00:17:00 Speaker_06
Tasmania is an island about the size of England in southern Australia, about 150 miles from the Australia mainland. And he had written en route on this trip. He had written several long journals. He had written lots of letters and so forth.
00:17:18 Speaker_05
So Henry Hellyer was known as a very clever and intelligent man, and he also wrote about his adventures as he was having them. One entry he noted on August 9, 1827 went, we have had a very stormy night.
00:17:31 Speaker_05
Just before dark, the men saw a tree falling directly towards my tent. I had just time to run out, being apprised of the danger by their shouting. And the next instant, my poor tent and porch of bark were laid prostrate.
00:17:45 Speaker_05
Had it been dark, I could not have escaped. So it sounds like he was having a real adventure here, Jamie.
00:17:51 Speaker_06
He was. And his relatives who got these letters picked that up as well. But then things, two or three years after that, started to go oddly. There seemed to be some tension between him and the other men on his party. He then died.
00:18:10 Speaker_06
And in the years afterwards, there were increasing questions about this. Was it suicide? Was he murdered? And I'll be honest, I had never heard of Henry Hellyer.
00:18:27 Speaker_06
But I often get emails from people all over the world who have some interesting case they're trying to work on. And one of the people that I heard from was a woman by the name of Gwyneth Daniel, who was interested in Hellyer.
00:18:40 Speaker_06
And she wanted to know what I thought of his letters. And were his letters consistent with suicide?
00:18:54 Speaker_05
Jamie analyzed Henry Hellyer's letters. He put them through his computer program and counted the function words and non-function words. He also drew on some earlier work he had done comparing two groups of poets.
00:19:08 Speaker_05
The first group was writers who had died by suicide. The writers in the second group were roughly comparable to the first group but had not died by suicide. Did the first group refer more often to depression and death in their poems?
00:19:21 Speaker_06
In fact, there was virtually no difference in their content. The big differences surrounded pronouns, specifically I-words, that suicidal poets used I-words at much higher rates in their poetry than non-suicidal.
00:19:36 Speaker_06
That was what I was interested in looking at Helyer's writing. If he was depressive, In his writing over time, did his use of I-words start to increase? And that's what we looked at. And indeed, they increased dramatically.
00:19:51 Speaker_06
In the first two or three years of his explorations, his average number of I-words was about 1% of all of his words. He was so immersed in the world around him.
00:20:03 Speaker_06
And in the last year, in the last maybe three or four writings, they've averaged a much higher rate between 8% and 10% of all of his words. He was deeply, deeply self-focused, which tells me there was a very good chance he died of suicide.
00:20:27 Speaker_05
Jamie had discovered that the words people use can give us insights into their minds. When we come back, Jamie applies his research to a complicated murder case.
00:20:41 Speaker_05
First, though, a quick note to say that if you or someone you love is struggling with suicidal thoughts, there are people who can help. You can call, text, or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988. That number, again, is 988.
00:20:58 Speaker_05
You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.
00:21:10 Speaker_02
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.
00:21:13 Speaker_05
At the University of Texas at Austin, James Pennebaker has spent many years studying what our choice of words can reveal about us. He's found subtle differences in how we use words when we are happy, depressed, angry, or friendly.
00:21:28 Speaker_05
Often, words we think of as insignificant provide important clues about our inner states of mind. Jamie, a few years ago, you received a request asking for your expertise in a murder case in Australia that involved a woman named Kathleen Fulbig.
00:21:44 Speaker_05
Now, Kathleen and her husband Craig welcomed their first child in 1989. Obviously, this was a happy moment in the life of any family. But what came next was a tragedy. Can you tell me the story of what happened, Jamie?
00:21:58 Speaker_06
So their first child, Caleb, was born, and the child was about three weeks old, and one night, Craig woke up in the middle of the night hearing her screaming, and Kathleen was screaming that something was the matter, the baby wasn't moving, and Craig ran into the room and saw her standing over the child, and the child wasn't breathing, and they called an ambulance, and the child, who was only just 20 days old, was dead.
00:22:29 Speaker_06
And the official cause of death was SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
00:22:34 Speaker_05
And of course, that has been known to happen to children, I think, especially if they're placed on their stomachs. We know much more about SIDS today than perhaps they did in the late 80s.
00:22:43 Speaker_05
And I'm imagining that Kathleen and Craig experienced this as a great tragedy. Tell me what happened next. Did they recover? Did they have more children, Jamie?
00:22:53 Speaker_06
They did. And ultimately, they had three more children. And each child died usually within a few months of birth. The last one survived for one year, about a year and a half. So this was over essentially a 10-year period.
00:23:19 Speaker_05
It's difficult to imagine what Craig and Kathleen Fulbig endured during those 10 years as they brought children into the world and lost them again and again. Eventually, the weight of these tragedies tore the couple apart and they divorced.
00:23:34 Speaker_05
Kathleen moved out. Sometime later, as he was cleaning the house, Craig stumbled upon several of Kathleen's diaries. They revealed a conflicted woman.
00:23:46 Speaker_05
She was excited by motherhood and loved her children, but she also felt frustrated, resentful, fearful, and jealous. Reading the entries, Craig became alarmed. Some entries implied that Kathleen was struggling with unresolved mental health issues.
00:24:05 Speaker_05
In one entry, she wrote, I watched a movie today about schizophrenia. Wonder if I have a mild curse of that. I change moods really quickly. In my most dangerous mood, I'm not nice to be around and always want to be anywhere but where I am.
00:24:23 Speaker_05
Another, referring to her daughter Sarah, said simply, with Sarah, all I wanted was her to shut up. And one day she did. Craig took the diaries to the police. Kathleen Fulbig was arrested and tried for the murder of her own children.
00:24:45 Speaker_05
She maintained she was innocent, but she was found guilty based in part on the diary evidence. Years passed. Kathleen appealed her conviction but was turned down. That's when Jamie got involved.
00:25:04 Speaker_06
I was contacted by her lawyer. She'd already been in prison for 20 years. And her lawyer felt she had been railroaded in terms of her conviction. And I should tell you, I knew nothing about this case.
00:25:18 Speaker_06
But the lawyer asked, would I be willing to look at her diaries. As it happened, she had kept diaries. And there was a huge amount of entries. like 250 entries, tens of thousands of words that she had written. So they were quite extensive.
00:25:36 Speaker_06
And the lawyer wanted to know, is it possible to get a sense of her psychological state? And so what happened was they ended up sending me all of her diaries that had been transcribed.
00:25:49 Speaker_06
And I went about analyzing them, trying to get a sense of just psychologically who she was, what was going on in her life. Was there any signs of instability? Were there any signs of hostility? Any signs of kind of premeditation or anything like that?
00:26:08 Speaker_06
So that's the way I approached it.
00:26:11 Speaker_05
Now again, we talked earlier about how sometimes when lay people think about language and words, we're often very focused on, is someone saying that they're happy? Is someone saying they're sad? Is someone saying they're anxious?
00:26:22 Speaker_05
Is someone saying they're depressed? Your approach has always been to sort of analyze more of these function words that are happening in some ways invisibly.
00:26:30 Speaker_05
And I'm imagining there probably were a lot of these function words if you had tens of thousands of words to work with.
00:26:35 Speaker_06
That's right. And I can also... do a reasonably good job at identifying big changes in psychological state. So, for example, we have done some research on presidents who go to war or the Boston bomber in terms of his decision to blow things up.
00:26:56 Speaker_06
When people are planning to do something nefarious, what they often do is they start trying to act innocently, which is a hard thing to do. And what they do is they become more deceptive. They become less self-reflective. They are holding things back.
00:27:15 Speaker_06
Or if somebody is showing signs of deep depression, there are also markers of language. In other words, language can pick up if a person is becoming
00:27:25 Speaker_06
deceptive, if they're becoming depressed, if they're becoming manic, if there are major changes in their social behavior. All of these are available to us through the way they're using words.
00:27:39 Speaker_05
In one of your earlier studies, Jamie, you asked volunteers to come into the lab and make both true and false statements about their views on a hot-button topic, in this case, abortion.
00:27:49 Speaker_05
And your computer program was able to detect people's true opinions 67% of the time, whereas human judges got it right only 52% of the time. What were the language clues you were examining in this study?
00:28:02 Speaker_06
There were several, but the one that had the most potency were I words, I, me, and mine. When somebody is telling the truth, they use I words. When a person is holding back or lying, they are hiding themselves and they suppress their use of I's.
00:28:28 Speaker_06
So they're trying to get people to pay attention to something else or pay attention to some other event or object. He, she, she, they, they.
00:28:40 Speaker_06
In other words, we change the way we're paying attention and hopefully the way other people are paying attention when we're being deceptive.
00:28:49 Speaker_05
So again, if language and words are reflecting what's happening inside our minds, and I am trying to hide something, I'm actually trying to pay less attention to myself to change the focus, and in some ways that comes out in the words and language we're using.
00:29:04 Speaker_05
I'm imagining that being able to tell whether people are being honest or they're lying is kind of useful when it comes to a murder investigation.
00:29:12 Speaker_06
It does. The big problem is there is no good method that's wildly reliable that can identify deception versus telling the truth. We can do better than chance, but there's no such thing as a great lie detector.
00:29:28 Speaker_06
And if anybody says they have one, be very, very careful.
00:29:35 Speaker_05
Right. I mean, in the study that we just talked about, the computer program was better than humans, but it was not perfect. It was not detecting dishonesty 100% of the time.
00:29:44 Speaker_06
That's correct.
00:29:51 Speaker_05
So when you apply these different insights to the Kathleen Fulby case and these tens of thousands of words that she had written that you analyzed, what was the impression you came away with, Jamie?
00:30:03 Speaker_06
So one of the first things I was curious about was, did she change in her language as it got closer to the child's death? Because if she was actually planning to kill the child, you would pick up a signal. There's no question about that.
00:30:26 Speaker_06
Her language was exactly the same as it had been for several weeks and months before. And you would expect afterward changes there that might be associated with sadness or grief or maybe relief.
00:30:42 Speaker_06
But, you know, there wasn't much of a signal there either. Hmm.
00:30:55 Speaker_05
One of the things that you noticed is that after the death of her first son, Caleb, Kathleen's diary seemed to repeat words at an extremely high rate. What was the conclusion you drew from this, Jamie?
00:31:09 Speaker_06
When people repeat, what they are doing is they are not paying attention to what they're saying. They're tripping over their words. consumed by other thoughts. And that can tell us all sorts of things.
00:31:25 Speaker_06
We'd have to ask ourselves, why are they not focusing on the topic? My guess was that she was, you know, really upset by the death of her child and then later her children.
00:31:40 Speaker_06
You could imagine having a child and then a second child and then a third die this way and no clear explanation for it. The wording was really sparse. And there was this sense that she was just emotionally disengaged.
00:31:58 Speaker_06
And my sense was this was clearly a mark of postpartum depression, that she just wasn't psychologically connecting.
00:32:10 Speaker_05
In one of your studies that used tens of thousands of words as inputs, you found that about 10% of the words were what you called cognitive words. And in Kathleen's writings, the average was much higher, about 15%.
00:32:26 Speaker_05
What did this tell you about her mental state, Jamie?
00:32:30 Speaker_06
So these words, cognitive process words, these are words like think, believe, wonder. And if you are nervous or concerned, you hedge a lot more. You don't say, it's cold outside. You might say, I think it perhaps maybe it's cold outside.
00:32:49 Speaker_06
These words are common when people are ruminating or trying to work through issues. They're in a situation that they don't understand very well. they tend to be insecure. And all of us increase in those words during periods like that.
00:33:05 Speaker_05
Now, isn't it possible that rumination could have been a sign of guilt?
00:33:10 Speaker_06
It could be, but I would say more likely it's just a sign of uncertainty and confusion about life. And it's interesting, during her pregnancies, and actually in her diaries, throughout her diaries, her use of these cognitive words were high.
00:33:32 Speaker_06
And I think this was a marker of who she is.
00:33:37 Speaker_05
We talked earlier about the use of I-words, words like I, me, and my. What did Kathleen's writings reveal about those words, if any?
00:33:47 Speaker_06
Not much. Her I-words were a little bit above average, but not much higher. And there weren't periods where they dropped a lot, which I would have expected had there been deception going on.
00:34:01 Speaker_06
And, you know, at some points they were a little bit higher, but that, I think, probably goes along with, I'm gonna guess, kind of a residual anxiety and depression. But again, it wasn't so striking that I found that to be out of a normal range.
00:34:17 Speaker_05
So taking all of this together, what were your conclusions about what actually happened in the Kathleen Fulbright case, Jamie?
00:34:25 Speaker_06
So I felt the only thing that I could say was I didn't see high rates of anything that would suggest levels of anger or hostility. That was not true in anything that I saw. Her anxiety levels and
00:34:41 Speaker_06
and negative emotion words were a little above average, but they weren't off the charts. I saw no signs of deception. She was remarkably stable across her writing. I think what you saw is what you get with her.
00:35:01 Speaker_06
From my perspective, there was nothing there that would raise any red flags.
00:35:10 Speaker_05
To be clear, Jamie did not conclude that Kathleen was innocent. He only concluded that if she had killed her children, her writing style would probably have reflected her inner storms. His analysis did not find evidence for such storms.
00:35:30 Speaker_05
Jamie's report was one of two new pieces of scientific evidence in the case. Besides getting a language analysis from Jamie, Kathleen Fulbig's lawyers enlisted scientists to sequence her DNA and the DNA of her children.
00:35:44 Speaker_05
They discovered an extremely rare genetic mutation that is linked to a heightened risk of sudden death in infancy. The appeals court judges considered that evidence, along with Jamie's findings in Kathleen's diaries.
00:35:57 Speaker_05
Two decades after Kathleen's original conviction, they reached a new conclusion about the case. Kathleen's lawyers gave Jamie a link to watch the court proceedings.
00:36:10 Speaker_06
And so I watch this very formal proceeding, everybody in these very fanciful robes. The Chief Justice gets up and he reads this brief discussion of the case.
00:36:21 Speaker_01
In relation to the diary entries, it may readily be understood how certain entries viewed in isolation had a powerful influence on the original jury in a manner adverse to Miss Folbig.
00:36:32 Speaker_01
Viewed in their full context, however, as they must be, and informed by the expert psychological and psychiatric expert evidence referred to extensively in the report, the dire entries were not reliable admissions of guilt.
00:36:45 Speaker_01
Thus, while the verdicts at trial were reasonably open on the evidence then available, there is now reasonable doubt as to Ms Falvig's guilt.
00:36:53 Speaker_06
And then he says the court unanimously agrees that she should be exonerated.
00:37:00 Speaker_01
It is appropriate that Ms. Folby's conviction be quashed. The court so orders and directs the entry of verdicts of acquittal. The court will now adjourn.
00:37:17 Speaker_06
And I remember watching that and tears coming down my eyes. And even as I'm telling you this, I get really choked up.
00:37:29 Speaker_05
I mean, in some ways it really points to the power of this research.
00:37:33 Speaker_05
I mean, it's obviously fascinating in its own right at an intellectual level, but really this is an example of where the real-world effects of this research are potentially transformative.
00:37:43 Speaker_06
It really is, and it just makes me proud to be able to make some kind of contribution to something like this.
00:38:01 Speaker_05
Most of us are not asked to investigate a string of strange and potentially sinister deaths, but all of us constantly evaluate the mind states of others.
00:38:14 Speaker_05
When we come back, what language can reveal about students' performance in college, and what it can tell us about whether our romantic relationships are going to last? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedant.
00:38:38 Speaker_02
This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.
00:38:41 Speaker_05
Every day, the words we use reflect who we are. Language is the medium through which we communicate our innermost thoughts and feelings. Psychologist James Pennebaker has studied how the words we use can reveal things about our love lives.
00:38:56 Speaker_05
Jamie, you once studied people who were on speed dates. You recorded their conversations with potential mates and then transcribed them. What were you looking for and what did you find?
00:39:06 Speaker_06
What had happened was I had never been interested in studying speed dates, but there had been a wonderful study done out of Northwestern.
00:39:14 Speaker_06
Eli Finkel and his colleagues, Paul Eastwick and others, had done some speed dates where they brought, these were heterosexual speed dates, they brought men and women in and each person would talk to multiple other people
00:39:30 Speaker_06
and then afterwards they would write each person and they were trying to find out which people were likely to go on a date subsequently.
00:39:39 Speaker_06
So the study was published and one of my graduate students, Molly Ireland, told me about the study and she and I were studying something that we called language style matching, a degree which two people's language connect with each other, that they use pronouns at similar levels, articles, prepositions, et cetera.
00:40:00 Speaker_06
And we wondered, would this be related to the speed dating?
00:40:04 Speaker_06
So Molly contacted the Northwestern group asking, would it be possible for us to analyze their data to see if the language of these people in the speed dates could predict whether or not they'd go out on a subsequent date.
00:40:24 Speaker_06
And what we discovered was that if you looked at how much the two people matched in their language style, we did a pretty decent job at predicting who would subsequently go out on a date.
00:40:38 Speaker_06
Specifically, we did better than the people themselves in predicting if they'd go out on a date. And of course, one reason is, is very often you get one person who said, wow, that date went great. And the other person said, eh, not so much.
00:40:54 Speaker_06
And what happens is this style matching is a marker of the degree to which the two of them really are on the same page, that they're clicking.
00:41:11 Speaker_05
In some ways, you told me earlier, Jamie, that there were differences between men and women in terms of the language they used, the words they used, especially the function words they used.
00:41:22 Speaker_05
In some ways, especially, I think, with heterosexual speed dating, it does raise questions, doesn't it? Because in some ways, this research is suggesting that the closer people are, the more likely they are to go out on dates.
00:41:32 Speaker_05
And the earlier research had found that, in general, men and women often use different kinds of words. It doesn't portend well, I suppose, for most speed daters.
00:41:43 Speaker_06
You know, I think we have to think about how conversations work. You know, sometimes I'll speak like a professor. Sometimes I speak like a lover. Sometimes I speak like a father. And my language changes in all those situations.
00:41:57 Speaker_06
And if I'm going on a speed date and I'm really interested in the other person, I will start to talk like them. And if they're really interested in me, they'll start talking like me.
00:42:07 Speaker_06
And the two of us will come together in a way that we might not do under different circumstances.
00:42:14 Speaker_05
Interesting. You've also done a follow-up study featuring college freshman couples, and you looked to see the text exchanges they had with one another as a potential predictor of whether the couples would still be together three months down the road.
00:42:31 Speaker_05
So this would be using language in some ways as a predictor for how long relationships might last. Tell me about the study and what you found.
00:42:39 Speaker_06
So this was a study that one of my former students, Rich Slatcher, did, and it was a wonderful study where he was able to find young couples that were dating.
00:42:49 Speaker_06
They had to have been together a certain amount of time, and they had to agree to give 10 days of their instant messages or their text messages to us to analyze.
00:43:00 Speaker_06
We went through and we analyzed the degree to which the two people in their text messages were matching in terms of this language style matching. And then we used that to find out, would this predict how long the relationship lasted?
00:43:18 Speaker_06
What we found was that we could split the the couples in terms of their language style matching scores were above average or below average. And those that were above average, almost 80% were still together three months later.
00:43:35 Speaker_06
And those that were in the bottom half of style matching, only about half of them were still together three months later. In other words, here was an interesting marker of the quality of their relationship. But the thing that was most interesting was,
00:43:51 Speaker_06
it was completely unrelated to their self-reports. We had asked them beforehand, how strong is your relationship? How likely is it you think you'll be together in the next six months, et cetera?
00:44:01 Speaker_06
And it turns out their judgments of their relationship was completely unrelated to whether or not they were still together three months later. This language style matching, however, was a really good predictor of it.
00:44:21 Speaker_05
You've also studied couples who have broken up, and this was a study that involved the social media site Reddit. What did you do and what did you find, Jamie?
00:44:32 Speaker_06
This was the first study that really introduced me to the power of social media. Reddit is a particularly interesting source because tens of thousands of people go there and they will often write about how they have recently broken up.
00:44:47 Speaker_06
The majority have been dumped by somebody else. And sometimes they get, you know, emotional support from others. Sometimes they just want to reveal it.
00:44:56 Speaker_06
The average person actually had posted between one and a few times in the breakup subreddit, and they'd posted over a hundred times in all these other subreddits in the months before and the months after.
00:45:08 Speaker_06
And we got all of their posts in all of their subreddits from the year before the breakup to the year afterwards. And what we found was that in the months before, starting about three months before the breakup, their language starts to change.
00:45:24 Speaker_06
they become more anxious, they start using more I-words, their cognitive process words go up, they become less logical and formal in their language, less structured, almost as though they're under increasing amounts of stress.
00:45:40 Speaker_06
And then they have their breakup and they post about it, and at this point they are low in logical thinking, their anxiety and negative emotions are high, their I-words are high, And then the after effects, we can track lasting six months.
00:45:57 Speaker_06
People going through a breakup are profoundly affected. They are not good at work. They even talk about how they're making errors, they're coming in late, they're drinking too much, et cetera. It really gave me a different perspective.
00:46:12 Speaker_05
But in some ways, Jamie, what you're finding is that language is both a predictor of when a relationship might come apart, and then it also, in some ways, is an X-ray into what's happening in people's minds after a relationship comes apart.
00:46:29 Speaker_06
That's exactly right. And one thing that was interesting was how many people, when they were writing about their breakup, they would say, this came out of nowhere. I had no expectation.
00:46:41 Speaker_04
Yeah.
00:46:42 Speaker_06
But I think they kind of did. Their numbers showed that they were thinking differently. They were orienting their lives in a different way in those months beforehand.
00:46:56 Speaker_05
You've also done some really unusual work predicting how successful students are going to be in college based on their college admission essays. Tell me about that work, Jamie.
00:47:07 Speaker_06
When people apply to universities, they write an admissions essay. And I was curious, would it be possible to analyze their admissions essays and see if it would predict how well they would do at the university?
00:47:20 Speaker_06
So working with our admissions office, I was able to analyze about 50,000 admissions essays from 25,000 students who enrolled at the university. And we were curious.
00:47:36 Speaker_06
Were there features of language in their admissions essays that could tell us something? We discovered that there was this group of words, these are all function words, that naturally hang together in an interesting way.
00:47:52 Speaker_06
We now call it analytic thinking. If you are thinking in an analytic way, you're thinking in a logical, formal, hierarchical way. You're using lots of articles and nouns and prepositions, but you're not using many pronouns or auxiliary verbs.
00:48:10 Speaker_06
And what we found was that The more analytic a person's essay was, the better they did at the university.
00:48:20 Speaker_06
So four years later, people who were high in their analytic essays, they made better grades, whether they were in the business school, philosophy, nursing, fine arts, it didn't matter.
00:48:41 Speaker_05
I'm wondering, Jamie, after doing all this work, do you find yourself, you know, perusing people's language as they talk to you or write to you?
00:48:48 Speaker_05
Do you find that as you're reviewing emails from friends that you can't help but say, you know, huh, that's an unusual number of pronouns and prepositions?
00:48:59 Speaker_06
Usually not, and it's always funny when I give a talk on this, I can tell people are so self-conscious. Here's the good news. People can't tell unless you talk in a weird way. And you can't believe how many emails that I've gotten over the years.
00:49:18 Speaker_06
Dear Dr. Pennebaker, just wanted to say the work you do is good. thinking about such and such, and they'll have no first person singular pronouns. And I'm thinking, why?
00:49:33 Speaker_06
And then sometimes someone at the end will say, it took me an hour to write this email, so I didn't use any I words. And what it does is it makes them sound deranged.
00:49:49 Speaker_05
Psychologist James Pennebaker is the author of The Secret Life of Pronouns, What Our Words Say About Us. Jamie, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
00:49:59 Speaker_06
It's been a joy, thank you.
00:51:42 Speaker_05
One of the unusual things about Jamie Pennebaker is that he is responsible for two major discoveries in the course of his psychology research career. We've talked about the first in today's show.
00:51:53 Speaker_05
In our companion story, we explore the other dimension of Jamie's work on the power of what he calls expressive writing to help us think through difficult challenges in our lives.
00:52:04 Speaker_05
If you have ever experienced a breakup or lost a job or suffered a serious illness, that episode is for you.
00:52:11 Speaker_05
Jamie has found surprising and unusual effects that come from expressive writing, but he has also found that some kinds of writing have psychological benefits while other forms have no effects or can even be harmful.
00:52:24 Speaker_05
I learned a lot from that conversation. I think you will too. To listen to it now, please go to the episode titled Dear Diary in our subscription feed, Hidden Brain Plus.
00:52:35 Speaker_05
If you are not yet a subscriber, please go to apple.co slash hiddenbrain on your iOS device. If you're using another kind of phone or tablet, you can sign up via our Patreon page at support.hiddenbrain.org.
00:52:51 Speaker_05
In either case, you can get a free seven-day trial. Your support helps us build more episodes like this. If you're already a supporter, thank you. You have immediate access to the Dear Diary episode right now.
00:53:04 Speaker_05
Again, if you'd like to give the subscription a try, please visit apple.co.hiddenbrain or support.hiddenbrain.org. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media.
00:53:22 Speaker_05
Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.
00:53:36 Speaker_05
Special thanks to Liza Goodstein-Katz for voice acting and singing in this week's episode. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.