> We use "I" more when we talk to someone with power because we're more self-conscious.
Isn't it simply because you need to introduce yourself and provide a bit of context when you write an unsolicited email? That seems to be a reasonable explanation for the two examples from the post...
"The idea of..." line suggests that whatever is being said is a known fact, that the reader should take it on authority, where as adding "I think" immediately makes it sound like the writer is less sure of themself and only has an opinion that they don't want to push on anyone.
Ok so to summarize: when they are talking to higher-ups, people don't want to make strong claims so they use wordings that make it explicit that this is "only" their personal opinion rather than an absolute truth. And they typically do so by using the word 'I'. Which is therefore a good indicator to detect who's the higher-up.
I would agree with this, but this all very implicit in the post.
So how about "We're putting together a conference..." or "Org name is putting together a..."? Even if you're the driver behind the conference, it just seems more charitable to use "we".
As kids we were taught by our parents to avoid I, me and my in letters we wrote to our grandparents. It was (is?) seen as rude. The justification wasn't about status at all, but rather about ego. The worst offense was beginning a letter with I. At least it was in German in the '70's. Anyway, the habit stuck but lately I find myself slipping.
I was never taught anything like that, but in one of my high school English classes all of our essays had to be written in the third person, so I get gain some experience doing it.
I actually put it to good use writing some email newsletters for a local conference where I tried to eliminate usage of I/we/etc because I felt that it was more professional.
It's standard negotiating practice to attribute all decisions to a larger group one is a part of. People who do this by using passive tense and "we" instead of "I" will tend to have more status over time.
What about the initial email, just dropping the I? I get email like this a lot in the professional world, and for whatever reason I've found myself sensitive to it:
Dear Dr. Pennebaker:
Was part of your Introductory Psychology class last semester.
Enjoyed your lectures and learned so much. Received an
email from you about doing some research with you.
Would there be a time to come by and talk about this?
Pam
It has the minor problem of dropping a significant, not-to-be-assumed part of every sentence.
I see that commonly in three scenarios: 1) irc 2) from people who learn to write English as a second language 3) from people with whom I have a familiar relationship - generally rendering the pronoun unnecessary.
I get it a lot in unsolicited requests and workplace emails. Perhaps as a misguided effort to be more professional. Or a subconscious realization of the topic of the article.
An example of an email I got just today:
Hi <mr-ron>,
Saw your company's ad on a taxi yesterday, checked out your product,
and was wondering who you are using for colocation.
Regards,
<person i will not be responding to>
Really odd. It's always seemed to me that "like", "um", and "uh" were often used as filler words to 'distance' yourself from the thing being discussed.
This seems even further in that direction - instead of distancing the author, it removes him entirely from the discussion.
The article implied to me you'd see the effect between people already well-acquinted, so long as a power gap exists.
I do agree the "self-conscious" explanation seemed like an interpretation without evidence, and struck me as incomplete. I'd guess it has more to do with intentional signalling, and that it's often conscious, even if that consiousness is not of "I"-frequency per se. That is, when writing or speaking as a supplicant, you're aware of using language that sounds "respectful" or "polite," and "I"-frequency is a feature of such language which we internalize.
Which is to say that we often write in this style because we intellectually know it's appropriate, even when we are not affectively feeling any emotion like self-consciousness or nervousness.
Probably the emails are not supposed to be proof, but just an interesting example, to say that after doing lots of research and discovering this trend, the professor was surprised to find their own emails following that trend.
There are severe misconceptions in this hypothesis, or at least in the examples that are being presented.
When you are introducing yourself, you have to refer to yourself explicitly. You are trying to convey information about who you are and what your background is. That's not a sign of low status, it's a necessity to transport essential context. If you try to leave that information out, or if you just omit the pronoun, your introduction will inevitably sound broken or unfriendly.
I'm guessing the reason why this is being conflated with low status by the professor is simple: if you're high-status, other people initiate contact a lot more often than you do. And when they initiate contact, they need an introduction, whereas you are already known to them.
At a fundamental level, this hypothesis as it's being described muddles correlations and causes.
Secondly, I'd like to point out that clearly marking certain points as opinion does not come from a perspective of inferiority or uncertainty. Especially in a setting where discussion is warranted, such as here on HN, it's an appropriate signal.
When I refer to myself and my perspective, I'm not asking you to disregard my point of view, I'm inviting you to see things from where I'm standing, and I'm also inviting you to present other perspectives without either of us being pressured to lead with assertions like "WRONG! Here's how it really is: [text]". Instead, you are afforded the option to respond with "My experience has been different. Here's why: [text]".
There are several papers on Pennebaker's home page[1] that may provide more information than the NPR article. "Pronoun Use Reflects Standings in Social Hierarchies"[2] specifically surveys 5 studies, only a couple of which would obviously have the problem you describe. But there are a lot of caveats involved.
Speaking of correlation and causation, inferiority can definitely result in points marked as opinions or as uncertain. Depending on the setting, of course. In my experience, anyway.
I agree that it's possible that the correlations and causes have been muddled (but note I'm not willing to conclude they are). But I do think that an introductory email is low status. High status people don't introduce themselves. They are known, or others introduce them.
What may be better is to look at emails from people who already know each other, but have some power imbalance.
>>> What you find is completely different from what most people would think. The person with the higher status uses the word "I" less.
Here's a hypothesis. The higher status person has learned to express their thoughts in a way that makes them seem more objective and authoritarian -- and less susceptible to negotiation or debate. The implicit assumption is that your words convey opinions, but their words convey facts.
I'm not sure how that holds up against the example shown, where the same professor fell at different levels on the scale depending on whether he was talking to someone lower or higher on the status hierarchy.
If the language shift was a learned skill that developed as part of performing the roles of the higher status, wouldn't two people of high status converse using similar rates, even if one of them is relatively higher than the other?
According to Pennebaker status is negotiated at the beginning of a new interaction when the perceived status of the participants is unclear. The frequency of the filler words mark the status/role that has been adopted by the participants. Which is clearly marked in the email examples given.
The article does not imply that this is a learned skill, since the whole theory is based on function words which are accessible at even the most basic proficiency of a language. It is merely describing what happens to our language when we enter a social interaction.
Note the words used aren't necessarily important but rather the function of the words are, i.e are they referencing social objects ( the role of pronouns) or referencing concrete or abstract non-social objects.
Implicit in your second paragraph are the notions of absolute status and of mutual recognition of absolute status.
I'd suggest social status is always relative and is likely assumed by participants prior to their initiating an interaction: The student used lower status language when writing to the professor, who used lower status language when writing to the famous professor.
I'm saying the same thing you said. The hypothesis in the comment I was replying to is that speaking with fewer of the noted words is a skilled learned as part of reaching higher status, presumably because speaking that way allows you to better wield your station.
That isn't shown in the evidence, because the evidence in the article shows that the speech used is indeed relative.
Not necessarily. It has little to do with learning to speak in a higher status manner. The comment box doesn't allow for a clear concise explanation but the language shift is something that the brain does on a subconscious level. A person's emotional state is related to how they see themselves in relation to their world at that moment. The 'language shift' is a manifestation of that. It is a tell in a way, the same way different clusters of body movements are, unlike body language, though, it is something that goes undetected by either party and hence can't be actively expressed or detected. That's why the LWC software was built. Check out the book that Pennebaker wrote. It does a better job explaining this than the article does and it will clear any confusion. Pennebaker doesn't provide an explanation for why their's a need to be more personal when assuming a lower status or when experiencing emotional trauma but he does provide plenty of evidence for the relationship.
I wonder if the email examples are simply a byproduct of the specific conversations / order of the discussion. Maybe 'cold-call' emails demand a lot of 'I's in them as part of the initial explanation while responses to these emails do not.
I think it is simpler than that. A person who uses -I- is asking for attention. A person in power feels that they already have the other person's attention or is unconcerned with it.
Interesting to note that you started this reply with "I think." Would it have carried more weight if you started with "perhaps" instead, or stripped it altogether? Maybe. Either way it's fun to think about.
Another thought -- perhaps an "I" form of statement would invite more discussion in a forum than something that appears to be a factual statement and not a opinion.
But the professor used language without using 'I' when he held the power with the undergraduate, but he used it a lot when talking to a famous professor.
In fact, says Pennebaker, even in our native language, these function words are basically invisible to us. "You can't hear them," Pennebaker says. "Humans just aren't able to do it."
There's an entire class of people who make a profession out of being able to do that reliably. They're called actors, and they're not the only people who are good at this. This sort of hyperbole in discussions of science may engage some readers but probably alienates at least as many more.
An earlier version of this story ran on NPR in 2012.
Wow - just 3 or 4 new sentences tacked onto the end. I wish they had put this warning at the beginning of the article rather than the end.
Writers, too, and folks with social anxiety. Two classes of people who think very carefully to every little word they use and the subtle tonal effects and interactions of the tiniest details.
I suppose this article is more about listening/reading than speaking/writing, but I reckon most people would easily be able to notice a difference between the example professor and student messages, and put it down on first thoughts to formality. And we certainly notice when people communicate with a level of formality that greatly differs from what we expect from them.
The article says that this might be used for contentious stuff like being able to tell if people are lying, detecting their gender, or economic status. I have my doubts to be honest, and fear the consequences of applying this stuff naively. I suppose if their results check out... but the article doesn't go into that, instead saying the "most interesting work" is about power dynamics. Well that to me is the bleedin' obvious part.
Anyway yes, when I reached that categorical 'puny humans' put down I rolled my eyes and started to scan the rest.
The author says that you can't intentionally modify your language to change who you are, but there's not much depth to that section.
I can't help but to wonder if you really can "fake it until you make it". If you force yourself to write in a more "powerful" manner, could that not cause people to perceive you as such and therefore boost your confidence to where you really are that person?
Robert Anton Wilson in one or two of his books gives an exercise similar to this - consciously choosing to remove all absolutes from your conversations. Something like never saying "I am tired" but rather "I feel tired" and not saying "That is bad" but rather "That activity has badness in it" or something like that! Edits - it's called E-Prime and mentioned in another comment in this thread.
The point is that it would be possible to do it, but it would be very difficult and initially very strange.
RAW's 'Quantum psychology' is probably the best distillation of those ideas. At first sight it seems like a bunch of hand-waving hippy nonsense, but underneath are some actionable and practical techniques for improving critical thinking and self-directed neuro-linguistic programming (though I can't remember whether he uses that specific term).
E-prime feels more difficult than the exercise hinted at here, namely, removing all trace of first person identity from one's communications. (Though years of intermittently practicing the latter might have had an impact here...)
Combining the two at length seems ferociously difficult.
Sure you can consciously make an effort to drop the word I, and suggestive/passive words such as as "Think, Perhaps, May, Maybe, Should, Could, etc..." It is easier in writing, but even in real time conversations, one can pause before answering and think of which words to add/remove before speaking.
The added benefit of the Pause is that it makes you look more thoughtful, hence smarter.
Getting into this habit also means you can choose to express personal opinions or make passive statements to reflect genuine uncertainty and distinguish guesses from fact.
I'm not a fan of the examples as both have the "lower status" person initiating the conversation. This further makes me wonder if looking at this in terms of word-level usage is going to miss the true causation sources. Consider "I think this article has problems" versus "This article has problems". The former seems (to me) to be much less confrontational than the latter, but I don't think that's really a function of the appearance of the word "I".
Going back to the examples, maybe the usage of personal pronouns is not directly related to the status of the email participants, but instead, is based upon who initiated the email. If the person with lower status is more likely to initiate the email (seems plausible, particularly in academia), then you might see the same results.
If a "higher status" person and sees problems, they're going to tend to be direct and say "There are problems here."
If a "lower status" person has to tell someone there are problems, using "I think" softens it and sounds less like an order, which would be weird coming from low-to-high status.
Problem is that such "absolute" statements are often frowned upon around here, e.g. people who consider their personal opinions as universal viewpoints.
I have observed in my own writing especially online, that I'm very quick to prefix almost everything with "I think", "in my opinion", and qualifiers like "maybe" and "probably". I've gotten in the habit because I'm aware what I say is just my opinion and not a universal viewpoint, on the other hand when you write like that your writing comes off as extremely deferential, mealy-mouthed, and lacking conviction.
Just about everything people write is an opinion, so why not write in a manner that skips those formalities and gets straight to the point? It might come off as more absolutist, but should make for better writing.
Of course, there are times that you should use a qualifying "I think" or "in my opinion", but when they are absolutely necessary isn't clear to me.
Yeah I had a writing teacher that informed me that you don't need to write "I think" in front of everything -- that is implicit because you are the author.
"I think" is only for the purposes of softening a statement, which is sometimes (but not always) what you want.
Another tip that I got as a high-schooler was to not use "very" or "extremely". That also "dilutes your prose" (his words, which were apt). That came up in a recent NY Times Book Review. If you put "very" in front of every adjective, you sound like a high school student who hasn't been corrected yet :)
Right, most of the time "I think" is a waste of space.
I sometimes say explicitly when I'm on the fence about an idea ("Mild preference for A because __, though B would be ok"), or if I feel like my currently viewpoint isn't well-considered yet, to encourage others to read with a critical eye -- otherwise the polite default is often to go with the flow if there are no obvious or serious problems, and that can be bad.
> Another tip that I got as a high-schooler was to not use "very" or "extremely". That also "dilutes your prose" (his words, which were apt).
A generalized version of this is to never use an adjective/adverb/etc. unless it in some sense contradicts the thing it's applied to. There's no sense just trying to intensify the thing you've already written; the modifier should add new information.
There is some confusion around the article and it may be because of the way it is written. but here's a brief summary. Hope this helps to clarify:
* The theory/hypothesis is not saying avoid pronouns.
* It's about relative frequencies not absolute.
* The pronoun frequency is looked at in different scenarios:
1. between two people who don't know each other
2. between two people who do know each other
3. pronoun frequencies of an individual in a diary, blog over a period of time.
* The frequency of pronouns in spoken or written language is an unconscious activity. It's something that is hard to fake, unlike body language.
* The words being compared/counted are primarily social identifiers vs determiners and articles.
Isn't it simply because you need to introduce yourself and provide a bit of context when you write an unsolicited email? That seems to be a reasonable explanation for the two examples from the post...