Those who are aware of my work life will recall that I’m deep into AI, and natural language processing in particular; not the kind Siri and Alexa do, but a more potent kind, whipped up over the past decade with my bestest thinking buddy (he knows who he is). This variety of AI takes in a person’s speech or writing, returning details about their personality.
With this technology, it becomes possible to spot a person’s descent into Alzheimer’s, before it begins; to know which candidate will be the best fit for a job, not by the content of their answers, but their use of language; to know who is telling the truth and who isn’t; to identify whose mind can be changed and whose can’t - and many, many other things.
We are by no means the only ones doing this, of course; I just think we’re doing it better. And while the AI piece is powerful, challenging, and wicked-cool, the personality piece is equally amazing.
All of us generate speech and text spontaneously. We don’t plan our sentences before we speak them, except when preparing to give a speech or confronting someone; they just emerge, and we are unaware of the processes in our brains that make this happen. And when we spontaneously speak or write, we unconsciously reveal ourselves; the patterns that can be found in our words provide maps of our minds, and those maps can very accurately define us as individuals.
One fellow in particular has been the pacesetter in this area – Dr. James Pennebaker of the University of Texas. He has studied the connections between human speech/text and personality traits for many years, and he has produced some ideas that I think you’ll find of interest.
In The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us, Pennebaker describes his study of the words used in text exchanges between lovers, and found an interesting thing: the more they texted, the more their usage became the same.
He also studied public confrontations between antagonists – a heated argument on a talk show, in particular. The usage there – exactly the same! The more harsh words were exchanged, the more alike they became.
This convergence of words occurs when the emotions of two people become aligned, and a feedback loop is created: the emotions move closer together, and the words follow, and the words push the emotions together, and so on. We’ve all experienced this, many times: the longer two lovers talk, the more enamored they become; the longer they fight, the worse the fight gets.
We see this in operation at a more superficial level in groups, when a large crowd is emotionally stirred: everyone is feeling the same emotions, and won’t hesitate to participate in group utterances - “We got spirit, yes we do, we got spirit, how ‘bout you?” “Lock! Her! Up!” - and more locally when a small group of people reminisce together. It happens in church services, prayer meetings, revivals. It happens in group therapy sessions, when someone really opens up and emotions run high.
My BTB will agree that this is a survival mechanism dating back to the evolution of language. This intensification of group emotion would have existed, on the one hand, around the tribal fire at night, and would have been equally strong when surrounding a leopard with spears. Spontaneous emotional convergence would have been life-saving (and baby-making).
And, of course, it still is.
Talk show hosts and guests are on their own, but what are we to do for word-converging lovers? On the one hand, Pennebaker’s escalation of intimacy is a happy thing, and should be preserved; on the other, arguments that grow too emotional too quickly are not a good thing, and should be discouraged.
An answer presents itself. In both cases, the word convergence that accompanies emotional convergence leads in the direction of mimicry; a loving thought inspires one in turn; an angry accusation triggers an in-kind response. In the latter case, the strategy would be to reject the mirrored comeback out-of-hand, forcing a cortical effort to come up with something different. This disengages the escalation, and brings about an emotional pause.
Lastly, I’m inclined to point out that the Pennebaker convergence presents kind of fiercely on social media. As Right taunts Left, and of course has for years, Left is now taunting right, and beginning to mirror the Right’s ugly emotions – and we see it in the convergence of our words. I’ll be hitting my BTB up to formally study this, but we can see it pretty clearly even now.
Let’s see if we can master the Pennebaker convergence, rather than have it master us, whether we’re at a pep rally, on social media, or alone with the one we love...
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