Psychologist James Pennebaker reveals the hidden meaning of pronouns

One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status. The effects were quite robust and, naturally, I wanted to test this on myself. I always assumed that I was a warm, egalitarian kind of guy who treated people pretty much the same.

I was the same as everyone else. When undergraduates wrote me, their emails were littered with I, me, and my. My response, although quite friendly, was remarkably detached -- hardly an I-word graced the page. And then I analyzed my emails to the dean of my college. My emails looked like an I-word salad; his emails back to me were practically I-word free.

Running an analysis on the translation into English would rather depend on what translation you were using. For instance the King James Bible is rather heavy on the now-obsolete "thee/thou" forms, whereas a modern translation isn't.

On my home page the tagline says, "Your perspective guides your thoughts, your choices, your trajectory." I believe your ability to change perspective is one of the keys to life so this idea that you can use pronouns as a signal for one's ability to change perspective is fascinating to me. As Alan Kay was fond of saying at Xerox PARC, "A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points."

Undergraduates write to professors with singular first person pronouns because they are often requesting information, or this sort of thing... understandable then that there's less reason for I, me, and my in the professor's response (and easy to imagine similar situation in other relationships).

Still, a cool article. Interesting research.

I'm not a believer but I read the Quran from time to time. Pretty potent stuff. The imagery is rich!

انا صببنا الماء صبا، ثم شققنا اﻻرض شقا. فأنبتنا فيها حبا، وعنبا وغضبا، وزيتونا ونخلا