#85 The Secret Life of Words - What Our Words Say About Us with Jamie Pennebaker

What this episode is about

In this discussion, social psychologist and language expert Jamie Pennebaker explores how our choice of words, particularly pronouns and prepositions, reflects our emotions, state of mind, and interpersonal connections. He highlights the significance of these seemingly insignificant words in revealing personal insights and predicting behaviors in various contexts, from academic performance to leadership decisions.

Key takeaways

• Language reveals more than we think: three-letter words hold the key to our emotional state.
• Overusing 'I' in poetry may signal deep struggles; even the arts have their silent alarms.
• Big leaders, small pronouns: the dropdown in 'I's can signal a coming battle—Putin's case is telling.
• Tweets are the new Rorschach; even a celebrity's casual post speaks volumes about their psyche.
• 'Forgettable' words are the most revealing—when did we learn to ignore the subtle power of pronouns?

Who speaks in this episode?

• Lynn Thomas (Host) · 12 min speaking
• Jamie Pennebaker (Guest) · 18 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 5:00: Amy Pennebaker, Donald Trump

Notable quotes from "#85 The Secret Life of Words - What Our Words Say About Us with Jamie Pennebaker"

• And Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone it's Lyn toen welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be with Amy pennebaker he's a social psychologist and a language expert he's…

  about Amy Pennebaker · at 0:21

• Extraordinarily revealing I'm excited to learn what our forgettable words tell us about ourselves well known people and leaders such as Donald Trump Vladimir Putin and xiin…

  about Donald Trump · at 1:23

• I'll call those the three takeaways Jamie this has been wonderful thank you so much I really enjoyed your book The Secret Life of pronouns well thank you so much I'm honored to…

  about The Secret Life of Pronouns · at 28:34

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Amy Pennebaker — Person · Main guest · 1 mention · first at 0:26
  Interview subject explaining how function words (pronouns, prepositions) reveal psychology, deception, leadership style, and mental health signals.
• Donald Trump — Person · Referenced leader (comparative example) · 1 mention · first at 1:28
  Referenced as an example of leadership language; discussed in the context of US presidents’ analytic thinking and clout metrics (very high clout; low analytic thinking).

Books & papers

• The Secret Life of Pronouns — Book · Referenced work · 2 mentions
  Mentioned by the host as a notable work by the guest, highlighting its significance in understanding language psychology.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:01 welcome to the three takeaways podcast which features short memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers Business Leaders writers politicians scientists and other newsmakers each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone it's Lyn toen welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be with Amy pennebaker he's a social psychologist and a language expert he's found that our language reveals secrets about our feelings our state of mind and our connection with family and friends the most revealing words turn out to be the little three-letter words pronouns and prepositions the forgettable words who would have predicted that as Jamie says the high school student who uses too many verbs in our College admissions essay is likely to get lower grades in

1:01 college or that the poet who overuses I in his poetry is at higher risk of suicide or that leaders use of pronouns such as I you we and they can predict whether they'll lead their countries into war or even that a tweet by a famous person would be so extraordinarily revealing I'm excited to learn what our forgettable words tell us about ourselves well known people and leaders such as Donald Trump Vladimir Putin and xiin ping I'm also excited to learn what our language about covid and black lives matter reveals now and how we can use words to improve people's mental health Jamie welcome and thanks so much for our conversation today thank you it's nice to be here it's a pleasure to be with you let's start with some examples of tweets by some famous people could you give some examples I would have thought that a tweet was so short that one could read very little into it you can get some information it would be

2:11 best of course as a good scientist to get dozens hundreds thousands of tweets from the same person I have three or four right here we'll start off with Paris Hilton good morning everyone exclamation point have a fabulous day exclamation point XOXO Paris with a Emoji after that from that we can tell this is a person who is not conveying anything deep or meaningful that these are all very positive words there's nothing personal she's not revealing anything about herself and it's also intriguing that she really loves punctuation which that kind of punctuation is a little bit like Furious hand waving let's go one end to the other end of the spectrum from John McCain went to the mountains above Bay rout yesterday to meet with walled jum lot the leader of the Drews fascinating experience that was it and his first word was went to the mountains and went was in small letters this is very formal

3:11 writing and it's interesting because I think he's trying to come across as by dropping the word I but what he is doing is he's psychologically distancing himself from both the experience and also from the audience that he's writing to when he wrote this in probably the year 2010 my guess is he was just being introduced to Twitter and was probably not particularly comfortable with that method of communication or Lady Gaga time to drink a bottle of wine and sketch for the new Tour St Louis was brilliant there's eyeliner on my knee and blood on my elbow shady I love that one that's very much Lady Gaga a mixture of a really rich vocabulary not completely personal but but somewhat personal but also very rich and personal in the sense of she's bragging a little bit about her recent show and she's talking about the act of creativity and at the same time signaling about her condition by her bloody elbow Etc so each one of these

4:19 quotes you get a really different picture of these people and the pictures are pretty accurate in terms of Paris Hilton versus John McCain versus lady go I will have to be much more careful and thoughtful about my tweets somehow I don't believe your tweets would match any of these people very well they might not match any of them but I'm scared to think what they show about me what they'll do is they will show about you which people who know you already know about you hope so Jamie you've analyzed Vladimir Putin's language what does it reveal about him and can you tell anything about his intentions for example in Ukraine hents intentions are always difficult to pick out specifically one thing that language is good at is telling us if a person is Letting Go and being relatively Frank and honest versus they are holding back and a leader who has plans to do something very significant and let's say

5:29 in Putin's case he doesn't want other people to know about it his language and other people's language when they do that becomes more deceptive and one aspect of deceptive language is you are trying to hide yourself from others and one way we can see this is the use of first person singular pronouns I me and my in fact we found this with George Bush prior to going to war in Iraq that several months beforehand just about the time that he officially decided we'd go to war his language George Bush's language dropped in ey words by almost in half I was curious if the same thing was true with Putin prior to going into Ukraine and the Kremlin maintains all of his annual press conferences and other press conferences and they are translated I was able to go back and look at his use of IW for the last 20 years and he's fairly consistent in the rate of using first person singular however starting about a month or two

6:32 before going into Ukraine his first person singular words I wordss dropped probably 30 or 40% unlike any other time I'd seen in other words this was a really powerful tale of his I predicted would go into Ukraine these numbers Were sufficiently Striking that I felt that it might be valuable just to post a blog about it because this information really validated many of the things that the Biden administration had been talking about fascinating one thing that that's also interesting is that the fact that about December 15th was his last big press conference and there was no hint that he had made a final decision it wasn't until his smaller press conferences or interviews with the press in late January early February that we saw these big changes so that is fascinating had anyone analyzed his language months before he invaded Ukraine there was a tell in its use of ey wordss well months before no and and

7:44 in fact I would say that the data suggests that he had not made a final decision to go into Ukraine until January probably early January maybe late December in other words about two months before he went in before that time I think he was still weighing his options his IE word shift didn't occur until about a month before he went into Ukraine maybe two months so interesting yeah no I this I must admit that I am fascinated by this myself what does xiin ping China's leader what does his language tell you about him she I found to be much more interesting and complicated you're the one who has educated me that his speeches are all straight pretty much without notes and his press conferences his language is exactly the same I just assumed that he was reading something word for word but he clearly isn't he is the most analytic person I've ever seen he is incredibly logical formal Etc and ironically over

8:52 the years he has been the Prime Minister he's gotten even more analytic he doesn't use IW at all in other words he is distant and quite cold in terms of his kind of having to work through questions so we saw with Putin Putin is always trying to understand he's using words like think Wonder believe that's not the way that she is he is he knows the answer to any question that is asked so he's very different in that way he's not warm his emotion words in terms of true emotion are lower than anything I've seen I think the one thing that really comes out is he's very risk averse he is always talking about the dangers of One Thing versus another so his mindset is very different than either Putin or any of the American Presidents so interesting and yet from his words you believe that his confidence is very high I would say exceptionally High there's a number of words that can can know kind of a

9:58 moralistic worldview essentially judging others along some kind of moral Dimension and he's very high in that as well much more than any other person I've seen Jamie I know that you have spent a lot of time analyzing the speech and words of US presidents from Washington to Trump and Biden can you talk about the US presidents please the primary project that I've done this with is Kayla Jordan and Ryan boy who had really driven the ship on this and the project has gone back and looked at all US presidents in terms of inaugural addresses the union messages the personal papers as well as press conferences which started Essen with FDR and with them you find two Dimensions that are the most interesting one is this analytic thinking that I was talking about which is really reflecting a complexity of thought and logical formal rigid speaking and it was very high in the days during the first 1015

11:02 US presidents and then getting to the middle of the series moving up to maybe Teddy Roosevelt all of a sudden this level this analytic thinking started to drop every year the presidents became less analytic when it got to trump it hit a new low but ironically and this shocked me when we started this project the person who was the second lowest in analytic thinking formal logical thinking was Barack Obama which to me it didn't make any sense but then if you go and you listen to Obama the way he speaks is very simple he tells very simple stories we know that he's a gifted thinker but in his public presentations he is very simple he tells stories he's not formal logical and he's not much different than Trump and George Bush and the presidents before him were also low in analytic thinking and as it happens Biden is as as well at the same time we look at something called clout cloud is made up of a number of parts of

12:05 speech we know that over time and clout is that sense of when a person walks into a room they feel completely confident completely comfortable they are looking around at others they're trying to figure out who they want to talk to it's not power but it's just this sense of confidence in the room and what you see is in the early days from George Washington essentially almost to Teddy Roosevelt clout was at pretty low levels and then again around Roosevelt they started climbing president after president and the two highest ones very highest one is Trump the second highest one is Obama of all US presidents what this means is and I think it's interesting that these things started to change with Teddy Roosevelt that was kind of the beginning of mass media as we know it and also the change in the electric and was happening is I think presidents realized they had to sound much more likable much more confident

13:07 and that's who we vote for we are suckers for someone who tells a simple story we can go out and get a beer with but they are confident and show leadership skills which is frankly a little bit creepy because there is a lot of research in Psychology that when people are extremely confident they make much poorer decisions and that we should be very frightened you mentioned the early presidents like President Washington could you give an example of how his speech for example compare to a current president well as it so happens I have a file right here that I can go to this is the very first inaugural address and I'm sure you're going to be just blown away by the oratory here we go among the vicissitudes incident to life no event should have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order and received on 14th day of the present month on the one hand I was

14:08 summoned by my country whose voice I could never hear but with veneration and love from a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection and in my flattering hopes with an immutable decision as the Asylum of my declining this sentence by the way goes on for another 10 minutes I'll just stop there you get the idea it is noral distant but he does use the words I and me and my at surprisingly High rate so I think for him it was a very personal message but for us I think we are horrified and somebody talking like that when they're running for president in the United States you think they'd get 2% of the vote they would they'd have to work at it what can you read into President Biden's language Biden it's very early to tell because I only have three press conferences that he's actually done in his first year I would characterize him as somebody who is working through issues he is really surprisingly

15:11 emotionally distant he doesn't use positive or negative emotion words at very high rates he uses social words especially in references to family he uses i words at fairly High rates meaning I think he comes across as fairly authentic I wish I could tell you more but I just don't have enough data on him just yet okay time will tell how do women use words compared to men very differently and it really boils down to what men and women talk about and analyzing hundreds of thousands millions of texts on average women tend to talk about other people more than men do men generally talk more about objects and things compared to women it's not all the time women use i words more than men women use all pronouns more pronouns would be words like I me and my or it could be you or it could be we us and our and he and she words such as that so women use pronouns generally more than men do but especially those I words

16:19 there's a big difference in articles a n and the the only reason that's interesting is a and and D hang around with other nouns nouns being word labels so car table things like that are nouns and we often will refer to the table a table and so forth men use those words at much higher rates than women one other thing that there's a huge difference on what we call cognitive words and I've mentioned these before cognitive words and cognitive process words are words like realize understand know meaning because cause effect would should could all of those are words that are broadcasting I am thinking about something and it is a working through process when you're trying to work through a complex problem male or female you use those words women use these words more than men do and it's partly because of what they're talking about if I'm talking about how to screw in a light bulb that's an object in thing I'll say well you get

17:23 the base of the lamp and you'll explain it if I'm talking about I is Julia who lives next door dating Rodrigo and everybody knows that she likes Fred a lot more why is that happening and it's a really complex issue I'm going to have to work through that and in a funny way talking about other people is also you're talking about more complex issues human relationships are a lot more complex than a light if men talk more about things like light bulbs and they categorize their things by count ing them or naming them or organizing them in some way and women talk more about social things and use more cognitive Words which you've said are words like think or understand or realize then men just by the choice of what they're talking about and how they talk about it are talking about it with much more certainty where the women are not talking about things with so much certainty so does that mean that men

18:28 across as more certain I would think about it a little bit differently I think you can talk about the light bulb with certainty or not an example I'd like is talking about the weather outside if I ask you what the weather's like outside you could say I think it's kind of cold or you could say it's cold and women are much more likely to say I think it's cold than men and part of that is an awareness of perspective because when you say I think it's cold what you were signaling is there are multiple perspectives here and it's possible you might think that it's actually somewhat warm but I just want to signal that there is no certainty here and so male or female could talk about it's that style of how you say something and even if me speaking as a male and talking about why the woman next door is dating the guy that she is it's very likely I'll just say well she's doing it because of this and as my

19:32 wife like said how can you say that you have no knowledge of this and she's poting out that I'm speaking with certainty over which something I have no knowledge how can you tell by the little forgettable words if someone is anxious or depressed there's been a lot of work on this over the last several years and obviously if I'm saying I'm worried or depressed we can immediately pick that up some of the best predictors are first person singular pronouns I me and my and in fact the very first study I did with this was looking at suicidal versus non-suicidal poets and analyzing their poetry and I was expecting that the suicidal poets would talk a lot about death and sadness and depression and misery and dark colors and so forth that wasn't true at all the biggest marker that separated them was that suicidal poets used the word I at much higher rate and later we did several studies with people who were clinically

20:31 depressed or not depressed or we tracked people when they were in a depressive State versus not and when they were in depressive States they Ed the i words much more and it makes sense because when you're depressed your attention is being drawn to yourself and it's the same as if you're physically sick you use eye wordss more your attention is being drawn Inward and if you are standing in front of a mirror you use eye words more there have been studies where people write an essay in front of a mirror or not in front of a mirror and it's much more self-focused if you just have write it in front of a mirror can words be used as tools to improve People's Health I'll answer that two ways the first is by trying to change your use of these little three-letter words the answer is no I don't think it'll make any difference but the more interesting answer is the reason I got into the whole world of language was

21:27 because in my earlier life I was doing research on how people cope with traumatic experiences and I discovered that people who had traumas but kept them secret were much more likely to become ill than if they had similar traumas and they talk to others and it made me wonder if we brought people in the lab and had them talk or write about traumatic experiences would their health change and the answer was yes so I began a series of projects years ago where people would come into the lab they would be asked to either write about traumatic experiences for four days or superficial topics for four days and then we would track their health by student health center visits and we found in multiple studies that when people were asked to write about traumatic experiences they went to the Student Health Center and about half the rate as people who wrote about superficial topics so there have been over 2,000 studies published using this

22:24 method that's called expressive writing and that's what got me into the language world was trying to figure out what is it about their writing that is bringing about such profound changes in their physical health that's why it's a complex answer when we spoke last week you told me you were in Playland as a social psychologist now what are you seeing in terms of Co the Playland that I'm in is a playland of moving to the world of Big Data I've been doing a lot of work on social media and what that allows the platform I love the most is reddit reddit for a social scientist like me it's like oh my God it's wonderful and I would urge all your viewers and listeners to immediately go to Reddit and start using it because I can always use the data and what I'm able to do what anybody can do is to actually download all the conversations that have ever occurred in that group and everybody has a handle this name is their handle and

23:28 what we can do is track how any given handle any person talks in this group versus how they talk in that group or some other group so we can actually track people as they are in one gathering with one groups of friends or acquaintances or another one that's a political group or whatever so what we've been able to do with say Co we looked at just City reddits so Austin has one New York has one we got about 20 25 cities and we simply track how these cities change in the way they use words in the city level rdit and every city there are hundreds of thousands posts and tens of thousands sometimes hundreds of thousands of people who are posting in this and we're able to go back more than 10 years for most of these cities so we can track almost on a daily basis how people in that City are say using i words I me and my so you can look at the levels of eye over the last several years and you'll see that you know it

24:32 bounces up and down week by week and then all of a sudden Co hits and all of a sudden you see ey work go up like crazy and stayed elevated for months or the same thing with anxiety words or the analytic thinking that I've talked about it was striking what happened there we tracked analytic thinking for all this time and then covid hit and analytic thinking across the country in all the cities dropped tremendously almost as though the cultural IQ dropped for several months and it's slowly been coming back but what's been so exciting about this is these new methods give us kind of an Insight in terms of how people are thinking how they're connecting with others how their social lives are changing people are expressing all of this and we have so much data that we can now see signals that I don't think we would ever be able to look at in the past so if I ask you to name the major changes that you've seen due to co what

25:34 would they be we published our first article Asen asokumar was the first author a couple of months ago we're now working on a much bigger we're waiting for March to do the last survey but in the first months the biggest effects was that people social worlds turned upside down and even references on Reddit they reduced greatly the references to friends to neighbors to state to country but an increased references to family people weren't going out and we found again huge increases in anxiety levels Ironically in the first several months anger which went against what everybody thought would happen until George Floyd's murder and at that point the culture turned upside down and the level of anger in the society exploded and also discussions of race jump in ways that we hadn't seen in the previous 12 years of Reddit before I ask for the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today is there anything

26:39 else you'd like to mention that you haven't touched upon as you can tell I I could talk about almost anything for quite a while I think I'll stop and TR to walk away safely now okay well you can't walk away until you say your three takeaways what are they Jamie I should tell you I struggled with the takeaways because there's takeaways in life and then there's takeaways that I can contribute based on my work and I thought I'd go with my work because you've had such remarkable people on your show who can provide a much richer perspective but in terms of my work the first takeaway is the beliefs we have often blind us to the realities in the world that beliefs Trump facts that if we believe something fervently we can't see the world in an objective way and this is true for people on the left people on the right it's true for religious beliefs or scientific beliefs that's one of the things that as a

27:43 scientist I kind of love the fact that our Rich beliefs can be good sometimes they account for the power of placebos but they can be terrible sometimes when we see the the dangers of nationalism all of them are the really rich beliefs the second is putting experience into words changes the experience and it simplifies it and it allows us to extract meaning in ways we couldn't and this of course comes from my work on expressive writing putting things into words helps us understand them and this can be traumas or it could be how light bulbs look or more about that neighbor and the last one is essentially summary of today's talk which is the words we use in everyday life reflect who we are I'll call those the three takeaways Jamie this has been wonderful thank you so much I really enjoyed your book The Secret Life of pronouns well thank you so much I'm honored to be on your show and thank you

28:47 for the nice things you said about my book if you enjoyed today's episode and would like to receive the show notes or get new Fresh weekly episodes be sure to sign up for our newsletter at 3 three takeaway.com or follow us on Instagram Twitter and Facebook note that 3 takeaway.com is with the number three three is not spelled out see you soon at three takeaways tocom

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "#85 The Secret Life of Words - What Our Words Say About Us with Jamie Pennebaker"?

Lynn Thomas (Host), Jamie Pennebaker (Guest).

What is "#85 The Secret Life of Words - What Our Words Say About Us with Jamie Pennebaker" about?

In this discussion, social psychologist and language expert Jamie Pennebaker explores how our choice of words, particularly pronouns and prepositions, reflects our emotions, state of mind, and interpersonal connections. He highlights the significance of these seemingly insignificant words in revealing personal insights and predicting behaviors in various contexts, from academic performance to…

What is mentioned in this 3 Takeaways episode?

3 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Amy Pennebaker, Donald Trump, The Secret Life of Pronouns. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "#85 The Secret Life of Words - What Our Words Say About Us with Jamie Pennebaker"?

The episode runs 29 min; the transcript is about 4,672 words in 28 timestamped sections.

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