Who Is Really the Leader: The Use of Pronouns

How can you tell who is really in charge in a group? An article in The Wall Street Journal got me thinking about this.  The article talked about the research of James Pennebaker, chair of Department of Psychology, at the University of Texas at Austin. Pennebaker has devoted decades to studying our language patterns, an area called computational linguistics. One of his conclusions: the power of pronouns.

Intrigued by the WSJ article, I ordered Pennebaker’s book, The Secret Life of Pronouns. It won the 2012 Media Book Prize from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, a division of the American Psychological Association. When the book arrived, my wife jokingly commented, “Aha, I see you’re studying secret lives now.” Pennebaker’s work is insightful and important (and he is a good writer).

So how can you tell who has higher status in a social group? People of higher social status usually have more influence. Decades of research show pronouns are good predictors of status:

• People of higher social status use “I”, "me", "my" less frequently.
• People lower in status are more likely to use “I”, “me”, or “my”.
• People higher in status use “we”, “us”, or “our” more than those of lower status. 
• People higher in status use “you” or “your” more frequently than those of lower status.

My take-away: Pennebaker’s research seems very sound and revealing.  As he discusses, we use pronouns very frequently in our speech and pronouns reveal our focus. Good leaders focus on others, the group, the organization. “We are doing well.” “We could use more resources.”  “Our success will continue.” But our use of pronouns is not either-or. We use different pronouns in different situations. The research is about frequency, how often we use different pronouns in different situations. People of more influence, people with more confidence, people who are leaders, are more likely to use “we, us, our” in social interactions. 

Pennebaker, J. W. (2011). The secret life of pronouns: What our words say about us. New York: Bloomsbury Press.

Image from UT-Austin by Utnomi, retrieved from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:UT-Austin-Tower.jpg  Used with permission.

© John Ballard, PhD,  2015. All rights reserved.
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Author of Decoding the Workplace.
 
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