When you are interviewing someone for a job, either for a “permanent” position or temporary one, do you monitor how – and how many times – the candidate uses the words “I” “we” and “they?” Do you have a metric for it? Place much significance in it? Pay attention or care at all? Professor James W. Pennebaker, chair of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us, says you should care.
Professor Pennebaker’s research isn’t new, but I just came across it recently in a Harvard Business Review post. It made me think, and it made me more aware of how others use personal pronouns.
For example, I was reading the sports page in the local newspaper about NFL quarterback Drew Brees of the New Orleans Saints. He just passed the 40,000-yard passing mark and is on pace to surpass the all-time NFL record for most passing yards in a season. His response when asked about the record by a sportswriter following last week’s game? “I’m aware that we’re close.”
Catch that we reference? Of course when you are depending on some very large men to protect your life and limbs from other large men who want to use your head to drill for oil, it might be a bit self-serving to want to share the credit.
Anyway, in the 1990s, Pennebaker helped develop a computer program that counted and categorized words. He made a distinction between “content” words, words which convey meaning, and “function” words, words that have little real meaning on their own, but merely serve to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence.
Still with me? Pennebaker analyzed 400,000 different pieces of text, from essays by college students to online chat room discussions and press conference transcripts. He concluded that function words are important keys to someone’s psychological state and reveal much more than content words do.
Pennebaker says there are about 500 function words, and about 150 are really common. “Content words—nouns, verbs, adjectives, and most adverbs—convey the guts of communication. They’re how we express ideas. Function words help shape and shortcut language,” Pennebaker told the Harvard Business Review.
But do they really reveal something useful about the speaker? Pennebaker says they can in fact tell us the state of a person’s emotions, as well as their personality, age and social class. Really. Here’s an example Professor Pennebaker used in the Harvard Business Review post he wrote.
“If someone uses the pronoun ‘I,’ it’s a sign of self-focus. Say someone asks ‘What’s the weather outside?’ You could answer ‘It’s hot’ or ‘I think it’s hot.’ The ‘I think’ may seem insignificant, but it’s quite meaningful. It shows you’re more focused on yourself. Depressed people use the word ‘I’ much more often than emotionally stable people. People who are lower in status use ‘I’ much more frequently.”
So how does it pertain to an interview situation? Professor Pennebaker answers, “I might consider how the candidate talks about their coworkers at their last job. Do they refer to them as ‘we’ or ‘they’? That gives you a sense of their relationship to the group. And if you want someone who’s really decisive in a position, a person who says ‘It’s hot’ rather than ‘I think it’s hot’ may be a better fit.”
“I might consider how the candidate talks about their coworkers at their last job. Do they refer to them as ‘we’ or ‘they’? That gives you a sense of their relationship to the group. And if you want someone who’s really decisive in a position, a person who says ‘It’s hot’ rather than ‘I think it’s hot’ may be a better fit.”
It would be interesting to know whether the results of a similar study would be any different if conducted today. One of the trends in writing and speaking, as we become more cryptic and time-crunched, is that many people eliminate the subject entirely. As in, “Hope you’re well.” ”See you figured that out.” ”Feeling better today?”
Are you buying this at all? Does what Professor Pennebaker opines about the use of personal pronouns resonate?
I would like, no make that we would like, to hear from those of you who interview candidates consistently whether this is even on your radar, and if after reading the article, you feel it should be.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
David,
The author makes it to the redzone by focusing on pronouns but fumbles in applying to to job interviews which often reveal more about the egocentricity of the interviewer than the interviewee.
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I interviewed someone today who spoke in 3rd person about themselves the entire interview! I thought he was joking but he wasn’t. Definitely made a lasting impression, though probably not the kind he was aiming for
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Kind of like someone who says “I used to be schitzoprinic but we are ok now”
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Actually meant to Dislike.
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I didn’t realize until I saw your comment Arianna that I did in fact forget to include the 3rd person form. I once interviewed British actor Rowan Atkinson, and he referred to his Mr. Bean character as a separate entity, in the 3rd person, but it never occurred to me that someone would do that in an actual job interview. Thanks for stretching our brains a bit. Who would have thunk it, huh?
And Gregg, your sentiments very closely follow mine. I like the premise of the Professor’s research, I think it’s a very interesting question, but I wasn’t super impressed with what follows. Good football analogy though Gregg.
t
It is clearly understood that psychology is behind everything that is written, it’s a good article about just that. But when in the job search, and getting to the interview phase, it should be noted that a majority (not all) of hiring managers make up their minds in less than 90 seconds. This is regardless of verbal portion if the person is talking in the first person, third person, and or (third person omniscient).
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Peter, you hit on the consensus of this post I believe. Everyone seems to agree this study and post was on fairly firm footing when it was just about the psychology behind the use of “I” vs. “we” and “they” and so on. But as soon as the author strayed from that a bit, and specifically into the areas where Staffing Talk readers live every day, people began to take strong exception to his statements and conclusions. It was worth putting out there and having a discussion around it though I believe.
As for your hypothesis that many hiring managers make up their minds within the first few seconds of meeting someone, I will up that ante.
I have been doing a lot of research into this area, as have many others such as Malcolm Gladwell, Gary Klein et. al. It is fairly commonly accepted that 93% of what we think of a person is determined within the first three seconds of meeting them.
If that is anywhere close to being accurate, then you are so right Peter, what follows after is all kind of moot, no matter the number of “persons,” or personal pronouns.
Agree with the theory here, but as mentioned, in practice it’s more about the interviewer than the interviewee. It’s rare that an interviewer leaves their preconceptions at the door and would have checkboxes for “I” versus “We”.
More often than not, they walk in take a look and listen to the first 2-3 sentences and already have decisions made.
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