To appreciate stream-of-consciousness writing, imagine how you might write if you were tracking your own thoughts and feelings. The instructions are simple—simply write continuously about your thoughts and feelings as they occur to you. Don’t stop, just write. Here are two fairly standard examples from college students:
The refrigerator is making this funny noise. People are walking down the hall talking loudly. Someone is playing their music very loudly. My stomach is growling. I think I want a snack. My head is itching. My mouth is dry. I want something to drink. I need some more bottled water in my room. I need to repaint my finger nails. The color is chipping off. My ring on my finger needs to be sized, it is too big for me.
Or another:
I am not feeling well. I wonder if Nick got home safely. Maybe I will call him and see if he’s okay. I’m nervous about the psychology test. I should have read the chapters tonight but I am sick. I miss home. I miss my family and my dogs. Buzz is so cute and Red always barks but I still love her. I hope I’m not sick when I have to take this test on Thursday.
In both of these examples, people are writing in the here and now. That is, they report their experiences in the immediate present without much structure or analysis. We often refer to this type of thinking as an example of immediacy. We all think like this occasionally. And there are times we even talk like this—perhaps when tired or simply chatting mindlessly with a close friend—using small words, the present tense, and high rates of personal pronouns, especially I-words.
Across hundreds of essays, we separated out the various classes of function words, including personal pronouns, articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and auxiliary verbs. We then used a statistical method called factor analysis to see what clumps of function words emerged. With the stream-of-consciousness essays, three factors appeared that pointed to very different writing styles: formal, analytic, and narrative. In fact, no matter which texts we analyze, we generally find the same dimensions within almost any genre of writing, including similar types of literature, song lyrics, college admissions essays, or suicide notes.
FORMAL THINKING
The most consistent function word factor that always emerges, formality, often appears stiff, sometimes humorless, with a touch of arrogance. Formal thinking can be thought of as the opposite of immediacy. Highly formal (or low-immediacy) thinking and writing typically include big words and high rates of articles, nouns, numbers, and prepositions. At the same time, formal writing has very few I-words, verbs (especially present-tense verbs), discrepancy words (e.g., would, should, could), and common adverbs (really, very, so). Here is an example of someone who the computer identified as very high in formal thinking:
I hear the sound of sandals scuffing the ground. Vague sounds of the television and radio blend into an almost incoherent hum and beat. A monolog comes onto the television in the living room. Hum -the sound of the TruAir air purifier catches my attention amidst the bath of sounds in the apartment room.… Cosmic riddles come to my mind, why does the universe have entropy?
Compared to the examples of immediacy, the high-formality writer is much more intellectual and a bit distant. There is a sense that he is putting on a serious performance. Interestingly, Biber’s first factor in his genre analysis was also formality. Academic writing and general nonfiction tend to be highly formal compared with romance novels, which are high in immediacy.
Formality in writing and speaking is related to a number of important issues. Those highest in formal thinking tend to be more concerned with status and power and are less self-reflective. Compared to the less formal writers, they drink and smoke less, are more mentally healthy, but also tend to be less honest with themselves and others. As people age, their writing and speaking styles shift from more immediate to more formal. In other words, the first dimension of stealth words has tremendous social and psychological implications.
ANALYTIC THINKING
The factor of analytic thinking identifies people who work to understand their world. The hallmark of analyzing is making distinctions. These distinctions could be between what people did and what they didn’t do, which part of the test they passed and which part they failed. Words that contribute to analytic thinking include exclusives (but, without, except), negations (no, not, never), causal words (because, reason, effect), insight words (realize, know, meaning), tentative words (maybe, perhaps), certainty (absolutely, always), and quantifiers (some, many, greater). An example of high analytic thinking:
I always knew everyone’s different but I guess since I was with a few friends I don’t usually hang out with was why this came to my mind. It’s weird how some things are so common and simple for someone but complicated and strange for another. Who knows why I think the way that I do but it usually seems to be different than most people I have met. Some people really need attention and they’ll do whatever it is to get it. I’m not sure if they should be blamed because it’s probably the only way they know how to act.
The woman who wrote this essay is subtly trying to parse the world. Even though she is not a good writer, she attempts to understand what makes one group of people different from others. The analytic thinking factor reflects cognitive complexity. People who make distinctions in speaking and writing make higher grades in college, tend to be more honest, and are more open to new experiences. They also read more and have more complex views of themselves than those who are low in analytic thinking.
NARRATIVE THINKING
Some people are natural storytellers. They can’t control themselves. From a simple language perspective, the function words that generally reveal storytelling involve people (which means the use of personal pronouns of all types—especially third-person pronouns), past-tense verbs, and conjunctions (especially inclusive words such as with, and, together). Here is a lovely example:
Okay, so my friend Chris came to visit town for the football game this weekend. She decided that she wanted to have a GOOOOD time so we went out on Friday night, and she got wasted off her ass.…. She was throwing up at parties and in bathrooms of EVERY place we went! We got kicked out of Waffle House.…. KICKED OUT! I mean seriously, who gets kicked out of Waffle House.… It was crazy.
Kicked out of Waffle House? Crazy indeed. Even though the writing assignment is for people to track their thoughts and feelings as they occur, at least 20 percent of the writers can’t help but tell a story of some kind. In fact, people who score high on the narrative thinking factor tend to have better social skills, more friends, and rate themselves as more outgoing.
Briefly consider what these findings mean. By statistically clumping people’s function words into meaningful categories, we are seeing how they think, how they organize their worlds, and how they relate to other people. Their almost-invisible function words are revealing the very essence of who they are.
As Laura King and I delved into the study of thinking styles, we found that people are surprisingly consistent in their thinking and writing styles. For example, the ways students wrote in the stream-of-consciousness exercise was related to the ways they wrote when writing a paper on the ways the nervous system worked. Other studies suggest that your thinking styles when you are young will remain with you most of your life. In fact, if you have ever happened across a school paper or diary entry you wrote when you were a young teenager, you will likely see that your writing and thinking styles have not changed that dramatically. In other words, people’s language styles are part of who they are.
People also fluctuate in their thinking styles depending on who they are with, what they are doing, and how they feel about themselves. As will be discussed in later chapters, someone who is in the middle of a depression may slide from high to very low levels of formal thinking. And a person attempting to make an important life decision may evidence signs of increased analytic thinking in her or his e-mail, blogs, or natural conversations.
Finally, we can study anyone’s writing or speaking style and begin to get a better sense of who they ar
e. As an example, look back at the various personal ads at the beginning of the chapter. Armed with your knowledge of ways of thinking, you can spot who is the highest in formal thinking (Marcus and Mirah), analytic thinking (Juan and Mirah), and narrative thinking (Margaret and Gigi). These analyses are based on very few words and should be interpreted with caution; the more words that can be collected, the more trustworthy the conclusions. When we return to the study of love and relationships (chapter 8), you will be able to see how we can match thinking styles and predict which relationships are more likely to last based on a pair’s writing or speaking style.
THE MAGIC OF FACTOR ANALYSIS
Some people who read this book won’t particularly like graphs or tables, and certainly not statistics. Even if you have a deep-seated aversion to statistics, you might find this box interesting. Fascinating, really.
Factor analysis is based on the idea of correlation. A simple correlation is a statistic that can tell us how any two variables are related to each other, or covary. The more nervous people report being, the more guilty they usually feel. Ratings of nervousness and guilt naturally covary. We know this by measuring ratings of nervousness and guilt on questionnaires and then correlating people’s responses to these two items. The resulting statistic, the correlation coefficient, tells us how closely the two concepts are mathematically linked.
Factor analysis is a more elaborate correlation method. Instead of just correlating two variables, it relies on correlations of large groups of variables. So, imagine that we give people a questionnaire that asks them to rate the degree to which they feel nervous, guilty, afraid, sad, enthusiastic, energetic, and joyful. We would probably find two clumps of correlations here. Ratings of nervous, guilty, afraid, and sad would all be closely linked to each other. A person feeling nervous would likely feel guilty, afraid, and sad. A second clump would include the items enthusiastic, energetic, and joyful. A factor analysis would determine how the original seven questionnaire items naturally broke into broader factors. In this case, the factor analysis would reveal that there were two distinct clumps of variables—negative emotion states and positive emotion states.
Factor analysis is wonderful because it helps researchers boil down a large group of variables into more manageable overarching factors. Biber, for example, relied on dozens of language dimensions that linguists care about—proper nouns, noun phrases, gerunds, possessive pronouns. By running factor analyses on the use of these language dimensions across over four hundred books and articles, he was able to reduce the dozens of language dimensions to only about seven dimensions. His relatively simple factors were able to discriminate the literary genres he studied. As described below, factor analysis is a grand method for the analysis of personality as well.
FINDING PERSONALITY IN PICTURES
One of my colleagues, Sam Gosling, is a groundbreaking personality researcher who studies what he calls “behavioral residue.” He tries to guess people’s personalities by looking at their offices, bedrooms, web pages, book collections, and music collections. He finds that people leave bits of their personalities wherever they go. The rigid, conscientious person typically has a neat office and bedroom and elegantly organized music collection. The same person may even have a detailed system to save e-mails.
The words we write and speak can also be thought of as a form of behavioral residue. Function words are good indicators of the broad ways that people connect to others, think about their worlds, and even think about themselves. By the same token, content words can yield valuable clues to people as well. Why does one of your friends always talk about his cats and another feels compelled to mention her new diet? The content of a conversation reveals what issues are important to people, including their values, their goals, and, at the broadest level, their personality.
The content of speech reveals what people are paying attention to. A few years ago before studying language, I became interested in how people naturally looked at their worlds. Do people differ in the ways they pay attention to their environment as they walk around? To what degree do we all see the same objects and events in different ways? As part of a little experiment, I fitted a small video camera inside a baseball cap. Several of my students agreed to be guinea pigs in my project. All were given the same instructions:
After you have put on your camera-hat, walk down the stairs at the end of the hall and leave the building. Walk the two blocks to the main shopping district close to campus. Go into the drugstore on the corner and buy a pack of gum. Leave the store and walk back to the lab taking a particular backstreet to the Psychology Building. Be your usual self and ignore your hat.
The entire excursion took about ten minutes for each of the five students and me. Everyone followed instructions and the scenery along the route was virtually identical. But as we watched the videos, all of us were amazed at how each of us looked around as we walked. One student with rather low self-esteem looked at the ground most of the time, rarely looking at anyone’s face as they came along. Two younger students carefully checked out anyone of the opposite sex. Another person froze in front of the gum display comparing the relative prices of the different brands. I was particularly struck by the video of one of the very tall males who was a foot taller than I am. He scanned over the top of everyone’s heads and saw the world in ways I never imagined.
Most of my students could guess which video segment was filmed by which person simply because they knew each other’s interests, values, personalities, and, in one case, height. Each person tended to look at objects, people, and the world in different ways. Their brains processed their walks differently because each person took in different information. Had I interviewed each student in detail about their walk to the drugstore, they would have used different content words to describe it. I suspect that had we analyzed their content words, we would have discovered something about who they were—just as we would have with their use of function words.
SEEING YOURSELF THROUGH A BOTTLE
A couple of years after the camera-hat exercise, I was in a conversation with one of my beginning graduate students, Cindy Chung. Cindy, a native Canadian, had spent her entire life in Toronto. She had just moved to Texas and was finding the state a bit different from any place she had ever seen or imagined. Perhaps because of the brutally hot weather at the time, she felt the need to carry around a bottle of water everywhere. I think she believed that a blinding sandstorm could blow in at any time and it was important to be prepared. As we spoke about the nature of language and perception, we each made reference to the different ways people might see her water bottle. Somehow the water bottle became the focus of the discussion. In fact, we took a picture of the bottle and had other people tell us about it.
Cindy’s actual water bottle:
Since that discussion in 2002, thousands of people have seen this bottle and have taken part in a brief five-minute bottle exercise. If you would like to try out the bottle experiment, go to www.SecretLifeOfPronouns.com and click on the link “Perceptual Style: You are what you see.” In fact, I would urge you to try it out before reading any farther. We’ll wait here. If you didn’t go to the website, the instructions are straightforward: For the next 5 minutes, write what you see in the picture as if you were describing it to someone who hadn’t seen it. Write continuously. Below the picture is a writing area along with a small timer that tells you when the five minutes have elapsed. Go ahead and look at the picture and imagine what you would write over the next five minutes.
The ways people write about the bottle vary a great deal. Some excerpts:
This is a clear plastic bottle looking similar to a water bottle it has a white cap on the bottle there is a red label and I can see the first two letters are I believe OZ the last 2 letters are KA. The label is red with a picture above the lettering. There is also a blue box with small text that is hard to read. Ingredients and company information is in small yellow type …
—61-year-old woman
It is a li
ttle plastic bottle of water with a red emblem on it. Its top is white. There is some water in the bottle. Maybe in one third of the bottle there is water. The light comes from the right so the shadow of the bottle lies to the left of the bottle. Some parts of the bottle are shining because of the light …
—25-year-old woman
This is a clear, colorless water bottle. It is about 8 inches tall, and small enough that you could put your hand around it, and still have a finger left over. It has a white screw on cap that keeps the water fresh until you open it, and it also keeps the water from spilling out, so you can close it between sips.… It’s also empty. It has no water in it, so I hope you’re not thirsty. But that also makes it light weight, so it’s easy to carry. It’s also easy to knock it over when it’s empty.
—60-year-old man
Each of the people emphasizes different aspects of the bottle. The first person focuses almost exclusively on the words and lettering. The second person describes the shadow that the bottle casts. The third person conveys the sensations of holding the bottle and drinking from it, feelings of thirst, its lightness.
The bottle project influenced the way I think about personality. As more and more people described the bottle, Cindy and I started to analyze their descriptions in new ways. Initially, of course, we linked people’s function words with what we knew of their personality. For example, the more people used pronouns (as in “I hope you’re not thirsty”), the more sociable they reported being. I-words were used slightly more by people who were insecure, anxious, or depressed. People displaying markers of formal thinking used high rates of articles and prepositions in their descriptions and tended to be older, more organized, and conscientious.
The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us Page 9