Welcome, everyone.
The point of this lesson is going to be
for reading practice.
I have found an article on the Internet
which I quite like –
it’s about both psychology and English pronouns.
The title is: “Pronouns and their Antecedents”
and it’s on the website Psychology Today
So I wanted to share this with you and read through it.
It’s not too long.
The point is we might learn one or two things about pronouns
and also basic reading practice for you, too.
The main tool with this lesson are the English captions,
which will be available,
please enable them now if you haven’t already
on Youtube or Facebook,
so you can read along with the words on your screen.
Are you ready?
Let’s get started.
Pronouns and Their Antecedents
Why are high-status, powerful people LESS likely to say "I", "me," "mine"?
When you are at work at the office, who is more likely to pepper their speech with first-person
singular pronouns like “I”, “me,” and “my”? The top managers or those who
report to top management?
Most of us would guess top management. We know that people with lots of power tend to
be expansive in their posture and gestures, taking up lots of space with their arms akimbo,
and it’s easy to picture those at the top of the company hierarchy confidently asserting
that “I believe that…”, “I say we go ahead and…,” “I think that the only
plan that makes sense is….” or “by my reckoning, sales for next year should….”
But in fact, those in high-rank positions use fewer first-person singular pronouns than
those working under them. In a remarkable series of studies, Ewa Kacewicz, Jamie Pennebaker,
and their colleagues used computerized text analysis to tabulate the pronoun use of people
occupying different spots in various hierarchies. They examined the email correspondence of
faculty and graduate student volunteers, the letters written by soldiers of different rank
in Saddam Hussein’s military, and, for experimental control, the recorded speech of students assigned
to high or low-ranked positions in a simulated consulting team. In each case, those near
the top of the hierarchy used I, me, my significantly less often than those they outranked.
The experimenters attributed their findings to the demands of hierarchy. Lower status
individuals tend to be self-focused—to be conscious of where they stand in the organisation
and how their every word and deed might affect how others (especially those with higher status)
react to them. Higher status individuals, by contrast, feel less need to monitor what
they say and do.
These differences no doubt contribute to the discrepant use of first-person singular pronouns
that Kacewicz, Pennebaker, and colleagues observed. But something else is likely to
be at play as well. As we discuss at some length in our recent book, The Wisest One
in the Room, most people are subject to “naïve realism,” or the conviction that what they
experience as they go through life and react to what’s around them is the world as it
is, not as they have interpreted, filtered, or constructed it. It is this illusion of
personal objectivity that lies at the heart of the great comedian George Carlin’s wry
quip, “have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone
going faster than you is a maniac? Because we all drive at the speed we think the road
conditions dictate, those driving slower do seem idiotic and those driving faster maniacal.
What we fail to appreciate is that our sense of what the road conditions permit is just
that—our sense of the prevailing conditions; and that other drivers may have (and are responding
to) a very different sense of what is reasonable.
Status, power, and privilege permit those at the top of the hierarchy to indulge naïve
realism without constraint. They can simply assert “What’s needed is…,” “The
best strategy would be to…,” or “The competition will react by …” Lower status
individuals, in contrast, use first person pronouns to qualify their assertions. Mindful
that their superiors may have different views, and that a price might be paid for baldly
contradicting them, they’re more likely to say “In my opinion…,” “I suspect
that…,” or “What I worry may be most likely to happen is …”
Beyond the content of what we say, how we speak not only reflects where we stand in
a status hierarchy, it also sheds light on what the experience of being high or low on
the totem pole is like.
And it might be a good idea to examine the pronouncements of high-ranking individuals
with an especially discerning eye.
That concludes the article.
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