Pompous instructions: Although your professors gave this topic rather minimal attention, cognitive dissonance is a common psychological phenomenon with which the vast majority of uninformed laymen will be familiar … generating an example should be simple enough once one has become reasonably familiar with this concept.
Valley girl instructions: OK, we might not have talked about cognitive dissonance much. Which I think is totally crazy cause it’s like, everybody should be able to see that cognitive dissonance is majorly relevant. Like, it’s seriously happening ALL the time, you know??… So OK, it’s your turn. I mean, like really try to think of an example of cognitive dissonance and tell me everything about it.
At the end of both questions, everyone read the same instructions:
In the space below, give a real-life example of cognitive dissonance, explaining what led to it and how it was resolved. Support your example with evidence from your book.
So, like, you get the idea of the differences between the writing styles of the two questions. Interestingly, the students provided equally knowledgeable answers no matter what the writing style. The only difference was that students who received the pompous question answered in pompous ways and those who read the Valley girl instructions wrote in the same freestyle informal lingo. Because everyone responded to four different essay questions, each written in a different style, many students later reported not even noticing the writing styles at all.
It’s hard to look at those two essay questions and not notice the striking differences in the ways they are worded. Nevertheless, we all naturally adjust to the speaker (or exam writer) we are working with. In fact, Molly ran another experiment where she gave people two pages from previously published novels. She then asked her participants to pick up where the original author left off and to write another page of the novel. For half of her participants, she explicitly told them to try to match the author’s writing style. Molly found that everyone, even those who were not explicitly told to do any language matching, naturally matched the writers’ original styles. In fact, when people were directly told to match styles, they were slightly worse at style matching.
Language style matching is much more pervasive than you might think. You may have had the experience of watching a particularly riveting movie and then, afterward, talking like one of the characters you have just seen. Several people tell me that after reading a book with a distinctive writing style they find themselves writing and talking using that same style over the next few hours or even days. In fact, if I, like, started—you know—writing in a Valley girl style for like gobs of paragraphs, and, you know, if, uhhh, your phone rang and like you totally answered it? You would like majorly start talking like this.
I’ll stop now to preserve our respective senses of dignity.
LANGUAGE STYLE MATCHING AND THE BRAIN
If style matching is so pervasive, why does it occur? One explanation is that it is hardwired in our brains. In the 1980s, a team of Italian neuroscientists measured the activity of a group of brain cells in a macaque monkey that fired whenever the monkey grasped a particular object. Later, they discovered that the same group of cells fired when the monkey watched a person’s hand grasp the same object in the same way. Other studies suggested that there might be an entire group of brain cells that mirrors the actions of others. These groups of cells are collectively called mirror neurons or mirror neuron systems.
More recent studies have asked ballet dancers to watch videos of ballets while their brain activity was being scanned. The researchers found that mirror neuron systems became activated for ballet dancers while watching the ballet videos, whereas nondancers did not show the same activity. Most of us have had subjectively similar experiences. For example, if you have ever played tennis, you may have noticed that if you watch an intense match on television, you sometimes catch yourself subtly moving your arm in an attempt to hit the ball.
Particularly noteworthy is that most researchers report that mirror neurons are most dense in Broca’s area in the brain. You will recall from chapter 2 that Broca’s area is also the area implicated in the processing of function words. It’s not coincidental that the ability to use function words is closely linked to mimicking nonverbal behaviors and, according to recent findings, voice intonation and inflection. Indeed, many scholars now claim that the ability to mimic social behavior and its close links to Broca’s area explain the early development and evolution of language abilities.
The mirror neuron research is now relying on state-of-the-art brain imaging methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), where it is possible to see which parts of the brain are active during highly specific tasks. For example, a research team from Princeton University recently found that people who are particularly empathic show more brain activity in Broca’s area while watching short videos of people making emotional facial expressions than do people low in empathy. It should be emphasized that the mirror neuron research is still in its infancy with researchers often disagreeing about the best way to interpret the brain activity associated with empathy.
A question that emerges from the brain imaging research concerns the possible links between mirror neurons and language style matching. At this point, direct experiments have not been done. However, the studies we have conducted with style matching among students answering open-ended essay questions hint at some important parallels. Those students who evidenced the greatest style matching in response to the different question writing styles tended to be people who made the highest grades on the multiple choice exams. In other words, those students who were most committed to the class naturally paid closer attention to the essay questions. Paying closer attention resulted in greater correspondence between the function words in the questions and their responses.
We all have mirror neurons and have the basic ability to mimic and empathize with others. These abilities differ from person to person and also depend on whom we are talking with. We have all been in situations where we talked with someone who wasn’t interested in what we had to say. Admit it, we have also been in conversations where we weren’t interested in what the other person was saying. I might have a head full of mirror neurons but if I sit next to a stranger on a plane who spends the flight describing his joint pains, medication history, and phlegm observations, our respective function words will go in different directions.
HOW TO MEASURE LANGUAGE STYLE MATCHING
There are a number of ways that researchers have developed to tap the degree to which two people are using function words at comparable rates. Some of the techniques are mind-bogglingly complicated. Others are fairly simple. Here is a method that you can actually do with a calculator. The basic idea is that we want to find out the degree to which any two text samples are similar in their use of function words.
Although there are nine categories of function words (including personal pronouns, impersonal pronouns, prepositions, articles, conjunctions, negations, quantifiers, common adverbs, and auxiliary verbs), personal pronouns are the most common in everyday speech. Although our computer programs analyze all types of function words to calculate LSM, you can get a pretty good idea of people’s engagement with each other by just looking at their personal pronoun use.
Look back at the nasty exchange between Rosie O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck at the beginning of the chapter. To get a sense of how in synch the two women are, all we need to do is to calculate the rate of personal pronouns that each woman used, with the following formula:
In their brief exchange, Hasselbeck used 17 personal pronouns out of a total of 81 words and O’Donnell used 26 out of a total of 99 words. In other words, 21 percent of Hasselbeck’s and 26.2 percent of O’Donnell’s words were personal pronouns.
Recall that the vertical line, |, refers to absolute value. That is, when the personal pronouns from person 1 are subtracted from those of person 2, the result will always be positive. So in this case:
or
Voilà! The LS
M score based on personal pronouns alone is a high .89. Interestingly, when all nine dimensions of function words are averaged together, the two women’s LSM score is even higher: an amazing 0.94—almost perfect synchrony. The LSM scale ranges from a perfect 1.00 if the two people are in perfect function word harmony and as low as 0 if they are completely out of synch. In reality, numbers below .60 reflect very low synchrony and those above .85 reflect high synchrony.
RIDING THE LSM ROLLER COASTER OF CONVERSATIONS
Mirror neurons help us to quickly synchronize our conversations with others. From a communication perspective, this makes good sense. Whether talking with an old friend, a business associate, a stranger on a plane, or a salesperson, we adapt our language style to set up a common social framework and to reduce friction. Style matching helps ensure that the people are similar in their emotional tone, formality, and openness, and understand their relative status with each other.
Further, our brains are highly attentive to changes in language style over the course of an interaction, constantly making corrections in the ways we use words. Style matching waxes and wanes over the course of a conversation. In most conversations, style matching usually starts out quite high and then gradually drops as the people continue to talk. The reason for this pattern is that at the beginning of the conversation it’s important to connect with the other person. Both people need to know how the other person is thinking and feeling. As the conversation rolls on, the speakers begin to get more comfortable and their attention starts to wander. There are times, however, that style matching will immediately increase. The best examples can be seen when unexpected shifts in the conversational topic or tone occur.
Imagine you are planning a surprise birthday party for a close friend. The day before the party, your friend mentions that she is thinking of going to a movie the next evening at the time you have scheduled the party. You must quickly come up with a lie that makes sure she will be around for the party. From her perspective, this is an innocuous conversation; from yours, it has become highly charged. If we could track the words between the two of you, what would happen to your style matching? Surprisingly, it will go up but not in the way you might think.
TALKING TO LIARS
The tone and direction of a conversation changes drastically as soon as one of the people starts to lie. Jeff Hancock, the Cornell researcher who studies the language of deception, has conducted some experiments that demonstrate this. In one project, he brought pairs of students into his lab and told them that they would have four online conversations on four different topics. In other words, their chatting would be from computers in different rooms so that they couldn’t actually see each other. So that both partners knew how the system worked, they were first asked to chat in a get-to-know-you kind of way for about five minutes. Once both were comfortable with the online chat systems, the experimenter gave both partners a list of the official conversational topics that they were to discuss for five minutes each. The sneaky part of the study was that one of the two partners received the topic list and, for two of the four topics, was instructed to blatantly lie about their views. Their partners never knew about this and so assumed that all of the conversations were, in fact, honest and straightforward.
We already know that when people lie, their language changes. You might have thought that style matching would drop during the deception topics. In fact, partners’ style matching increased during the deception topics. Yes, the liars’ language changed when they were deceptive but the innocent truth-tellers’ language changed as much or more.
Think what is happening in this situation. Once the study starts, the innocent partner has already had at least one honest conversation with the person and then, out of nowhere, the other person starts speaking differently. Our brains are highly attentive to change. In this situation, the innocent person is detecting that something is “off” or not making sense. Consequently, he or she starts paying closer attention, resulting in higher style matching. This is clearly not a conscious process because most innocent partners later report that they thought the deceptive conversations seemed normal.
There is something about this study that has always puzzled me. Think back to the dilemma of the surprise birthday party. If I have to lie to my friend to convince her to stay home the next evening, I have to think fast and come up with a reasonable story. Lying is hard work and during my lie, I won’t be paying much attention to my friend. Instead, she will be paying attention to me. Hancock’s findings indicate that my friend’s language use will accommodate to my deceptive way of speaking.
There is an interesting paradox about LSM. In the case of deceptiveness, one of the speakers—the person who is lying—is actually paying less attention to the other person. Intuitively, you would think that this would result in lower levels of style matching. Apparently when we talk with liars we start paying more attention in an attempt to decode their odd language change. In the case of deception, as one person becomes less attentive, the other becomes more attentive. Surprisingly, this occurs far more frequently than you might think.
TALKING WITH DISTRACTED MULTITASKERS
Recent studies indicate that multitasking is both quite common and surprisingly ineffective. When people multitask, they are attempting to do several things at once with the net effect that the quality of their work across all tasks is diminished. We have all had the experience of talking with someone who, at the same time, was reading a text message, watching something on television, or pondering a deep existential question. The deception research hints that conversations with multitaskers would result in high language style matching; common sense would argue just the opposite.
Common sense fails again. Yla Tausczik, a graduate student in my lab with extensive background in studying online social media, set up a simple experiment to test this idea. She had pairs of strangers initiate get-to-know-you conversations on separate lab computers as part of a psychology experiment. The computer displays were programmed to have random numbers continuously float across the top of the screens. For half of the conversations, the people were told to just ignore the floating numbers. In the other half of the conversations, one of the partners was told to count the number of times that the number 7 appeared. The people they were talking with, however, were told to ignore the numbers and didn’t know that that their partner was multitasking by keeping track of the floating numbers. In other words, in half of the conversations, one of the two people was distracted during the entire conversation.
Much like the deception study, the distracted pairs actually showed slightly higher style matching than the non-distracted pair. Even odder, they tended to report liking each other more. In terms of actual word use, the distracted students were less negative, less complex, and more personal than non-distracted writers.
There have been very few times in my career that I didn’t believe my own results. It just didn’t make sense to me that style matching increases when talking to a multitasker. So I took things into my own hands and called two former students and asked if they would mind participating in a language project. The deal would be that we would have an informal talk on the phone that would be recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. The talk would actually be made up of three five-minute segments, and after each segment, they would complete a brief questionnaire. Both agreed to the rules. What they didn’t know was that on one of the three segments, I would be sitting in my office madly doing arithmetic problems as fast as I could.
The phone calls started and we talked about work, our lives, our mutual friends, and other issues of the day. During the period I was working on the arithmetic problems, I recall thinking, “Wow, I’m really good at this. I’m as socially adept when I’m busy as when I’m not.” Later, when I transcribed the conversations, I was startled to see how differently I spoke while engaged in the arithmetic problems. I stuttered and repeated myself. I deflected any complicated questions and tried to get the other person to talk more. Similar to the participants i
n Yla’s experiment, I tended to laugh more and used more positive language in general.
Both of my students rated the distraction phases of the conversation as enjoyable as the other parts. In fact, the LSM measures indicated that we matched in our language use during the distraction period at rates as high or higher than during the nondistraction periods. What happened, however, is that both students started speaking to me in the ways I was speaking to them. As I psychologically distanced myself from the conversation, my conversational partners did the same. What intrigues me is that none of us were consciously aware of it. In fact, after the phone calls, I discussed the conversations with both students, asking their perceptions. One said that she was vaguely aware that I was slightly more distracted during the arithmetic problems but said, “You often are distracted in phone calls.” Oooh.
Two people who respect and like one another learn how to dance with each other across conversational topics. They are both invested in paying attention to one another, even during periods of distraction or disagreement. What makes the conversational dance dynamic is that as one person’s attention wanders, the other person attempts to adjust to it. An unspoken rule in this dance, however, is that both people are ultimately committed to it. If one or both members of the conversation simply doesn’t care about the other person, the dance is at risk of falling apart.
The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us Page 21