Using computerized text analysis, scientists are able to help police identify psychopathic murderers by analyzing the word choices they use when talking about their crimes. Researcher Jeff Hancock found that "the words of these criminals match their personalities, which reflect selfishness, detachment from their crimes and emotional "flatness."
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The words people use are like fingerprints that can reveal their relationships, honesty, or their status in a group. Scientists are using linguistic software to analyze pronouns, articles, prepositions and a handful of other small function words. Social psychologist James W. Pennebaker says, "Using computerized text analyses on hundreds of thousands of letters, poems, books, blogs, Tweets, conversations and other texts, it is possible to begin to read people’s hearts and minds in ways they can’t do themselves.
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We’ve talked about the kind of language your computer uses, but what about the words that humans use? Google has created a huge database, consisting of 500 billion words, using over five million digitized books that are available to the public for free downloads, enabling scholars to see how words are used in relation to other words. It gives us a year-by-year count of how often various words appear, opening a window into how we think and act.
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After Obama’s State of the Union speech, in which he emphasized jobs, it’s interesting to reflect on how the choice of words affects politics. It turns out that the various terms used to describe the very same proposals and policies can influence whether or not voters support them in the future. But some wordless emotional expressions are the same in EVERY culture!
We all saw this in the last election, when candidate Obama’s suggestion that elderly people make out a “living will” in order to qualify for national health insurance (something many of them have already done voluntarily) was described by candidate Sarah Palin as the creation of “Death Panels.”
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