The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Dr. James W Pennebaker

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00:00:57.420 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

00:01:04.400 This is episode 11, a conversation with Professor James W. Pennebaker.

00:01:11.100 You can support these podcasts by donating the amount of your choice to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account,

00:01:17.200 which can be found by searching Jordan Peterson Patreon or by finding the link in the description.

00:01:22.820 Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at self-authoring.com.

00:01:32.680 So today I'm talking to Dr. James W. Pennebaker.

00:01:37.440 He is Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and the Executive Director of Project 2021,

00:01:46.100 aimed at rethinking undergraduate education at that university.

00:01:49.840 His cross-disciplinary research is related to linguistics, clinical and cognitive psychology,

00:01:56.420 communications, medicine, and computer science.

00:02:00.660 He and his students have explored natural language use, group dynamics, and personality

00:02:06.100 in educational and other real-world settings.

00:02:09.720 He has demonstrated that physical health and work performance can be improved by simple writing or talking exercises.

00:02:15.800 Dr. Pennebaker has received numerous awards and honors, has written or edited more than 250 scientific articles,

00:02:24.400 as well as nine books, including, more recently, Expressive Writing, Words That Heal, and The Secret Life of Pronouns.

00:02:32.640 He also happens to be one of my favorite psychologists.

00:02:35.740 Welcome, Dr. Pennebaker. I'm very much looking forward to talking to you.

00:02:39.440 Well, it's nice to be here. Thank you.

00:02:40.740 Great. So, as you may know, because I think we've talked about this a little bit before,

00:02:46.640 I developed some online computerized writing programs with my colleagues,

00:02:51.780 one of which we call future authoring, one's past authoring, one's present authoring.

00:02:56.820 They're a suite of writing programs, and they were heavily influenced in their design by your research.

00:03:03.360 My lab's been interested in narrative for a long time, and also in clinical work,

00:03:09.380 and also in the application of psychology in the real-world setting, in the practical setting.

00:03:15.420 And I spent a lot of time developing tests to help employers screen for employees,

00:03:21.660 and we got pretty good at that.

00:03:23.400 But while I was doing that, I was constantly bombarded with questions from managers,

00:03:29.140 middle managers usually, of medium-sized and large corporations,

00:03:33.600 telling me that it was all well and good if they could hire better employees,

00:03:37.980 but they wanted to know what they could do with their poor-performing employees,

00:03:42.540 because that was a continual and intractable problem.

00:03:46.100 And I thought, well, you don't have that much interaction with them,

00:03:49.760 and it's not that easy to solve people's problems,

00:03:51.840 so there's probably not a lot you could do.

00:03:53.860 But I kind of got sick of telling people that over and over,

00:03:57.040 and so I scoured the literature, and it was at that point probably about 15 years ago,

00:04:02.560 10, 15 years ago, that I came across your research on expressive writing.

00:04:06.040 So maybe you can start by telling us what you learned and how you went about it.

00:04:12.460 Okay.

00:04:14.900 A little bit of background.

00:04:16.280 I'm a social psychologist by training,

00:04:17.900 so I don't have any clinical training.

00:04:20.120 I mean, most of my career has just been stumbling upon one idea after another

00:04:25.120 as opposed to approaching anything with a clear set of where I was going.

00:04:31.840 I have been looking at mind-body issues.

00:04:34.220 I've always been interested in how psychological factors influence physical health and mental health.

00:04:38.300 And I came across a finding years ago that just bugged me,

00:04:42.020 and that was people who have had a major traumatic experience in their lives

00:04:46.760 that were much more likely to get sick than people who had not.

00:04:50.280 Now, that was an old finding.

00:04:52.600 But as I dug in more deeply, what I discovered was people who had a trauma and kept it secret

00:04:57.440 were far more likely to have health problems than people who had the same trauma

00:05:01.460 but who talked with others about it.

00:05:03.520 And it made me wonder, what if we brought people in the lab

00:05:07.380 and had them actually write about some kind of trauma,

00:05:10.420 ideally one they hadn't talked to other people about,

00:05:13.680 would that influence their health?

00:05:16.280 And that was really the underlying idea.

00:05:18.420 So the very first study was done in 1983, and we brought in about 50 people.

00:05:27.080 Some of them were asked to write about the most traumatic experience of their lives.

00:05:30.260 The other half were asked to write about superficial topics.

00:05:33.640 I'm simplifying the study some.

00:05:36.180 And they wrote for four days, 15 minutes a day.

00:05:40.680 And they also gave us permission to track their student health center records.

00:05:44.480 These were college students.

00:05:46.200 And this was at a private college where the student health center was right next to the dorms.

00:05:51.880 Well, what we discovered was that those people who were asked about traumatic experiences

00:05:56.580 ended up going to the student health center at about half the rate as people in our controlled condition,

00:06:02.720 the ones who had written about superficial topics, over the next three to six months.

00:06:08.280 And this was a really stunning finding.

00:06:10.260 It was what I kind of hoped would occur, but I was so thrilled that it actually worked.

00:06:19.500 And then we did another study that was very similar, and here again we had half the people write about traumas,

00:06:27.060 half write about superficial topics, and they just – they wrote about trauma or superficial topics.

00:06:33.720 By a flip of the coin, we decided which of the two topics they'd write about.

00:06:37.060 And this time we drew blood before we assigned them to condition, again after the last day of writing,

00:06:46.120 and then six weeks later.

00:06:47.580 And the blood was assayed by a group of people at Ohio State looking at immune function.

00:06:52.940 And again, we found that writing about traumatic experience was associated with enhanced immune function

00:06:57.720 and also reductions in doctor visits.

00:07:00.300 And this now was – takes us to about 1988, and by then other labs started to see what we were doing,

00:07:08.100 and it's – the whole technique started to take off.

00:07:13.440 And then over the years, more and more labs, including my own, found generally positive effects, not always,

00:07:20.520 but generally that writing about upsetting experiences had this salutary effect

00:07:25.460 that influenced both health, physical health, and markers of mental health.

00:07:30.140 And then later, various labs found it to be related to all sorts of things associated with increased memory,

00:07:39.360 cognitive functioning, and so forth.

00:07:42.380 So if I remember correctly as well, when you were doing the earliest studies,

00:07:47.160 you were also influenced by Freud's idea of catharsis,

00:07:51.440 and that was the idea that if people had a traumatic or unpleasant experience,

00:07:57.140 if they were encouraged to express the emotions that were associated with that experience,

00:08:02.980 that that would be curative.

00:08:04.060 That was partly Freud's hypothesis.

00:08:06.600 But you tested it.

00:08:06.940 Well, it was a little bit – it's important to –

00:08:10.920 it is absolutely consistent with Freud's initial idea.

00:08:16.840 And what was interesting is because most people listening to this podcast will hear catharsis,

00:08:24.660 and they will think that catharsis means blowing off steam or venting.

00:08:28.700 And that's not actually what Freud actually meant.

00:08:31.740 And it's interesting.

00:08:32.560 In Europe, catharsis has a completely different meaning than it does in North America.

00:08:37.320 So in North America, we view it as venting.

00:08:40.020 Freud and Europeans view catharsis as connecting emotions and thoughts.

00:08:45.420 And that is actually what I was doing.

00:08:48.080 I really – I had assumed that Freud meant venting.

00:08:51.720 And we had found actually that people who just blew off steam,

00:08:54.920 who just expressed emotions actually didn't show any health improvements.

00:08:59.260 Right.

00:08:59.560 You need a linguistic analysis, right?

00:09:01.620 And that was one of the things that was really fascinating about the research.

00:09:04.580 So maybe you could tell us a bit about that too.

00:09:06.500 Well, I wasn't initially – again, I have never – I had never been interested in psychotherapy.

00:09:20.380 And here all of a sudden I was doing a study that was essentially glorified psychotherapy,

00:09:24.880 which got me speaking to clinicians.

00:09:26.660 And then the question was, why does writing about an upsetting experience bring about these changes?

00:09:33.680 And that's not a – it's a straightforward question, but there's not a straightforward answer.

00:09:39.180 And my lab and others started looking at all sorts of possibilities

00:09:42.740 and looking at markers of inhibition, you know, that people holding back were more prone to illness.

00:09:50.600 And what this did was to loosen them up.

00:09:52.800 We didn't find good evidence for that.

00:09:54.360 Other people had other hypotheses.

00:09:57.080 And at some point I started looking at what people were actually saying.

00:10:01.100 And I got groups of people, students who were in clinical psychology,

00:10:05.800 to write the essays that people wrote on all these different dimensions.

00:10:10.880 And what I found was that relying on people to read these essays

00:10:15.000 and come up with some kind of deep understanding

00:10:17.980 or even predicting if a person would benefit or not just didn't work.

00:10:22.200 It was too hard.

00:10:23.340 The stories were really traumatic.

00:10:24.860 They actually depressed a lot of the people who were in our – who were reading the essays.

00:10:30.180 So it occurred to me it would make much more sense to come up with some objective marker of reading these essays,

00:10:36.500 and a computer program would be what I needed.

00:10:39.440 Well, it turns out back then – this was now the early 90s.

00:10:42.980 There was no such program.

00:10:44.120 And fortunately, I had taken a little computer science in college.

00:10:47.840 And one of my graduate students, Martha Francis, had actually done some – done her undergraduate degree in computer science.

00:10:55.400 And so I asked Martha to essentially help me do a computer program that could go through and analyze the language of an essay.

00:11:08.000 And the idea behind it is really quite simple.

00:11:11.760 You have the computer go in and look at each word, and you would compare each word in the essay with some master list of words.

00:11:20.180 So we would – let's say we're looking for anger words.

00:11:22.460 We want the computer to count up all the words associated with anger.

00:11:26.080 So we'd have this dictionary of anger words.

00:11:29.340 And to get that dictionary, we had to make that ourselves.

00:11:32.360 We had to look in dictionaries, the sources.

00:11:35.120 We had to have students generate anger words.

00:11:38.240 And then we had all these rules of what account – what makes for an anger word versus not.

00:11:43.180 But once you have that list, you go through and you have the computer look at each word, compare it with the master list.

00:11:48.580 And any time it finds an anger word, it just adds it up.

00:11:52.140 And at the end, it adds up all the anger words, divides by the total number of words, and it produces the percentage of total anger words in the essay.

00:12:00.720 And we did this now for not just anger words or sad words, guilt words, negative emotion words in general, but we did positive emotion words and then cognitive words, words that suggested cause and effect like cause, because, effect, rationale, words such as that.

00:12:18.580 And then as long as we were doing it, we added more and more dimensions.

00:12:22.180 We had pronouns and prepositions and articles, et cetera, et cetera.

00:12:26.260 We ended up with about – now there's probably 80 different dimensions.

00:12:31.940 But when we went back and started looking at essays, we found that certain dimensions of writing really predicted health improvements.

00:12:40.280 Now, we found that use of positive emotions was associated with health improvements.

00:12:45.860 So if you can write an essay about the worst thing in your life and still use positive emotions, it's a marker that you're going to show health improvements.

00:12:56.360 The effects are pretty small.

00:12:58.800 Negative emotion words, using a moderate number of negative emotions is weakly related to doing better as well.

00:13:04.660 But what turned out to be far stronger was use of cognitive words, words like because, cause, effect, words like understand, realize, know.

00:13:15.500 These are words that we now know are markers of people working through a problem.

00:13:21.260 So let me ask you a question about that because I thought a lot about that.

00:13:25.000 I thought that was really an interesting idea.

00:13:27.500 So this question has to do with the function of memory.

00:13:31.600 So it's pretty obvious that we don't and can't store what's the equivalent of a videotape of the entire domain of sensory experience when we're interacting with people.

00:13:47.380 And it is obvious as well that that isn't how memory works and that memory is modifiable across time.

00:13:53.160 And so here's a hypothesis for you.

00:13:55.460 And tell me what you think about this.

00:13:57.140 It seems to me that the purpose of memory is so that you can remember the good things that happened to you in the past and how they occurred and duplicate them in the future and remember the bad things that happened and figure out why and change your course of life and your pathway in the future so that they occur less frequently.

00:14:17.860 And so the cause and effect analysis would be something like the adjustment of a pathway map.

00:14:25.100 And it sort of reminds me of the work that was done with rat memory because the hippocampus seems to store something like cognitive maps.

00:14:32.460 And maps almost by definition are representations of ways to get from one place to another.

00:14:39.360 And so you could think maybe that you go from one place to another and you fall into a hole and that's very traumatic.

00:14:46.700 And so you you remember the pathway and how you got there, analyze it and reconstruct a different potential future causal pathway so that you don't have to fall in the same hole twice.

00:14:59.560 Now, I don't know what you think about that.

00:15:01.380 Well, I think that actually I think that works is true, both the way you describe it, but also on a much broader metaphorical level.

00:15:13.140 So, for example, a person who falls into an emotional hole that their life is going well and then their girlfriend dumps them and they go and get drunk in a bar and wreck their car.

00:15:28.700 That experience is incredibly, incredibly, incredibly complex.

00:15:34.400 And unlike the rat, what the human mind has to figure out what in the world went on with my girlfriend?

00:15:42.460 Why did she leave me?

00:15:43.840 What did I do?

00:15:45.140 Why did I go get drunk?

00:15:46.420 Have I been drinking too much?

00:15:48.060 And if to process that requires tremendous cognitive capacity.

00:15:53.820 And what happens is if it's something we're humiliated about, we're really reticent to talk to other people about it.

00:16:01.740 And we so we and language is a really efficient way to to process complex issues.

00:16:07.780 Yes.

00:16:08.020 So what shared language, you know, that's right.

00:16:10.420 Well, so what I found in my clinical practice very frequently is that I think with people who are traumatized,

00:16:16.820 traumatized, they often encounter this is something else I wanted to ask you about.

00:16:21.840 They often have an encounter with malevolence as well as as a as an encounter with just catastrophe.

00:16:27.560 So it's not only that something bad happens to them.

00:16:30.100 It's often something bad that's being consciously directed at them by another person.

00:16:34.820 And they have a really hard time mapping that, especially if they're somewhat naive people.

00:16:39.220 But then the other people who are detrimentally affected by such things and can't recover are those who have no one to listen to them.

00:16:47.240 Because people it seems to me that most people think by talking.

00:16:52.160 And unless you have someone to talk to, you actually don't get to think through it and draw the appropriate, let's call them causal lessons.

00:16:59.020 So, and then you also made this comment about, you know, let's say that the classic example I like to use is that, you know,

00:17:07.440 maybe you're a pre-med student and you write the medical, the gene, what is it?

00:17:13.640 What's the one for medical entrances?

00:17:16.360 The MCAT.

00:17:17.180 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:17:17.880 So, you know, you construe yourself as a pretty solid student.

00:17:21.760 And that's a core element of your, like it's a predicate of the multiple maps of your life that you use.

00:17:27.500 And then you write the MCAT and you end up with 20th percentile scores.

00:17:32.480 And so then what happens is that not only is your map of the future now rendered null and void,

00:17:38.960 but so is your map of you as a predicate for present actions.

00:17:43.460 And also everything about yourself that you thought held true in the past has to be re-examined.

00:17:48.740 And so it's something like the degree of trauma is proportionate to the amount of the area of map that's disturbed by the unfortunate,

00:18:01.020 unexpected, and sometimes malevolent event.

00:18:04.440 And so then the other thing I was thinking about with regards to this,

00:18:07.600 and I think this is more germane to the immunological element,

00:18:11.340 is so it's obviously very, very difficult for the mind to compute how dangerous the environment is,

00:18:19.140 because the environment in some sense is infinitely dangerous.

00:18:22.420 And you never know when something small happens to you if it's the harbinger of something that's terrible.

00:18:28.720 So because an ache in your side can be the cancer that kills you.

00:18:31.620 So you might ask yourself, given the complexity of framing in an unexpected event, how do you ever manage it?

00:18:40.460 So part of it's temperamental.

00:18:42.920 So if you're higher in neuroticism, things hit you harder.

00:18:46.180 And part of it is based on your observed competence.

00:18:49.520 But the other part, I think, is something like the brain computes the proportion of times that you failed in the past

00:18:58.320 compared to the times that you've succeeded, and calculates like a mean danger index.

00:19:05.640 And then it raises up your average cortisol levels in correspondence to how dangerous the general environment has been,

00:19:14.580 because that puts you on alert more.

00:19:17.320 And the problem with the advantage to being on alert is that, well, if anything else negative happens,

00:19:22.740 you're more ready to act.

00:19:24.920 But the negative consequences is that cortisol is toxic in high doses across time.

00:19:32.140 And it also suppresses immunological function.

00:19:35.380 And it also tends to suppress prefrontal functioning as well,

00:19:38.240 because the prefrontal cortex is more involved in medium to long-term planning

00:19:43.520 and less in short-term emergency preparation activities.

00:19:47.200 So I'd also like to know, you know, do those ideas ring a bell?

00:19:53.340 So they do.

00:19:56.680 There's an interesting – so there's another dimension that ties into this, and that is sleep.

00:20:04.340 So we know that sleep is intimately related to cortisol.

00:20:07.460 It's related to depression.

00:20:08.380 It's related to immune function.

00:20:09.980 It's related to – you know, all of these systems are intercorrelated.

00:20:13.800 And the person who is dealing with an upheaval that they're trying to understand,

00:20:20.400 but they don't have somebody to talk to, end up not sleeping as well.

00:20:24.540 And part of it is they're trying to process all this additional information,

00:20:27.940 and this ties into the idea of working memory, that they have less working memory.

00:20:34.020 They're not sleeping as well.

00:20:36.260 Cortisol is higher.

00:20:37.800 They're – and they are also worse friends.

00:20:43.180 So when you talk to them, they're distracted.

00:20:47.240 They're not paying attention.

00:20:49.500 And so all of these things are working together to undermine the person.

00:20:55.980 Now, the cortisol hypothesis is a wonderful hypothesis.

00:21:01.500 The killer problem is that the studies that have been done with cortisol

00:21:04.740 and it's linked to writing and trauma have been – you'd have to stand back

00:21:09.980 and look at the overall studies and kind of squint,

00:21:13.700 and there's a weak evidence to support it.

00:21:15.940 But it's not as clean as I wish it were.

00:21:20.900 Of course, this has been the problem with the writing research,

00:21:24.400 but it's also the problem of all clinical research.

00:21:27.660 That there is – you know, once you start getting real data,

00:21:31.180 and this is not just self-reports of clients saying, oh, yeah, that was really great.

00:21:36.320 When you start to get objective, hard data, everything is kind of off the table,

00:21:41.360 that the effect sizes are very, very modest.

00:21:43.720 By the way, that's true of medical outcomes as well for medical disease.

00:21:47.620 Of course, of course.

00:21:47.640 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:21:49.480 So, okay, so the downward spiral that you sort of described there too

00:21:55.220 could also account for the negative health consequences post-trauma.

00:22:01.240 I mean, so you can imagine a couple of things.

00:22:03.220 First of all is that the traumatized person is going to be more reactive to additional trauma,

00:22:08.400 but also that as the effects of their failure cascade, say, across their friendship,

00:22:15.940 interfere with their educational function, interfere with their sleep,

00:22:20.460 the quality of their life overall is going to decline,

00:22:23.480 and that should also produce multiple small stressors that are going to compromise them,

00:22:28.600 including, say, the decreased sleep and maybe also alterations in appetite,

00:22:33.660 and those might accumulate across time and produce the negative health consequences as well.

00:22:39.340 Yeah, and don't forget that they'll smoke more, drink more, take more drugs, stop exercising.

00:22:45.000 Yes, kids out there, when you have a trauma, take care of yourself.

00:22:49.800 Right, right, right, yes, yes.

00:22:52.160 Well, yeah, well, I mean, the first thing I do with my clinical clients, generally speaking,

00:22:55.740 is make sure that they're getting enough sleep and try to re-regulate their sleeping

00:23:01.000 and also to make sure they eat breakfast at least because without those two things,

00:23:06.800 it's very difficult for someone to get themselves back on the straight and narrow.

00:23:10.980 So now when we designed the self-authoring program, I think I had read,

00:23:17.100 I think it was researched by Laura King, but I don't remember.

00:23:20.900 Somebody had taken your writing exercises and applied them to the future,

00:23:25.480 had people write about the future instead of the past and found similar effects.

00:23:29.400 Was that Laura King? Do you remember?

00:23:30.780 Yeah, that's Laura.

00:23:31.920 And what was interesting was that study, you would think having people write what she thought

00:23:40.840 was she'd have people write about the past versus write about the future versus both.

00:23:45.440 And her idea was that having them write about both would be best.

00:23:49.320 Because in a way, therapy sometimes works in that way.

00:23:52.780 So let's work through your issues and what are the implications for the future.

00:23:56.980 She found that writing about both actually wasn't very effective.

00:24:01.640 That having them write about the future was beneficial or just the past was beneficial.

00:24:07.280 And since then, there have been a lot of other studies looking at having people write about

00:24:11.180 just positive effects and or just negative.

00:24:15.060 And what is generally found is that writing about positive effects is also beneficial for health.

00:24:21.080 Well, what it kind of indicates is that thinking is beneficial for health.

00:24:27.080 I think that's true.

00:24:28.940 And it's also, you know, the best studies, as I stand back and look at the kind of the broad

00:24:36.680 panorama of research is giving people instructions to write really loosely in the sense of,

00:24:46.880 here, you write about the most traumatic experience of your life.

00:24:50.440 But, you know, a lot of people haven't had traumas or maybe you've come to terms with traumas.

00:24:54.480 But write about those topics that are weighing upon you the most right now.

00:24:58.520 They may be positive.

00:24:59.900 They may be negative.

00:25:01.260 They may be most or a little bit of both.

00:25:04.740 And essentially, that's what I encourage people to do is to, if you're having trouble sleeping,

00:25:10.960 I mean, you know, set aside 15 minutes and just explore your thoughts and feelings about

00:25:15.480 issues that are weighing on you.

00:25:17.680 Maybe something that you don't want to talk about or something you don't really want to

00:25:21.900 address.

00:25:22.880 Yeah.

00:25:23.260 Yeah.

00:25:23.600 Well, when we set up the future, I'll run you by the latest research on the future authoring

00:25:29.240 program because you won't know about all of it.

00:25:31.680 But so basically what we've done with the future authoring program, which is the one

00:25:36.780 with which now we've administered to thousands of university students in different locales

00:25:42.980 with very, very stable results.

00:25:45.460 And the results are quite remarkable, I think.

00:25:48.760 So the way the thing is structured is we first get people to consider six important dimensions

00:25:55.200 of their life.

00:25:55.960 So we're kind of construing the individual as something that's distributed across dimensions,

00:26:00.600 practical dimensions.

00:26:01.800 So those are intimate relationship, friendships, family, career, education, time spent outside

00:26:14.360 of work, and use of drugs and alcohol, because that's a rabbit hole people can really go down.

00:26:20.660 And having at least an idea of how you should handle intoxicating substances is better than just

00:26:28.640 going into it blindly.

00:26:29.640 So the first thing we get people to write about, and loosely following that idea, it's

00:26:35.680 like a free association idea in psychoanalysis, right?

00:26:38.960 It's like, but it also, I think, frees people up to make mistakes, because they get up tight

00:26:43.780 if they have to do it right.

00:26:44.940 You have to say, look, you don't have to do it right.

00:26:46.700 You can do it badly.

00:26:47.840 It's better than not doing it at all.

00:26:50.360 So we have them write about to envision what they would like if they could have what they

00:26:57.560 wanted on each of those domains.

00:26:59.420 It's like, okay, it's three to five years down the road.

00:27:02.180 Imagine you're taking care of yourself, and as if you were someone you cared about, and

00:27:09.740 that things were set up optimally for you.

00:27:13.360 Hypothetically, what would that look like?

00:27:15.240 And what I found in my clinical practice very frequently is that people are afraid of specifying

00:27:20.180 their future, because they're afraid of hope, but also there's an avoidance element, which

00:27:26.300 is that once you specify your criteria for success, you've also specified your criteria

00:27:32.520 for failure.

00:27:34.300 And if you keep things vague and ill-defined, then you can stumble along without ever really

00:27:39.380 noticing that you're lost.

00:27:40.680 And it's a really bad strategy in the medium to long term, but I think it's effective as

00:27:46.720 a means of, well, it's effective self-deception in the short term.

00:27:52.440 Anyways, they do that first, and then we get them to write for 15 minutes with no concern

00:27:58.380 for spelling or grammar, which I think we took directly from your research, and just to sketch

00:28:03.820 out what life could be like three years down the road if they had what would be good for

00:28:08.780 them.

00:28:08.960 All right, and so now that also gives them something to aim for, right?

00:28:13.740 And so one of the things that we've been thinking through with regards to having something to

00:28:21.060 aim for is the fact that the systems that utilize dopamine, the incentive reward systems, which

00:28:27.600 basically produce most of the positive emotion of the kind that people really like, only respond

00:28:34.200 in relationship to a specified goal.

00:28:37.140 So you feel an incentive reward kick when you're moving towards a valued target.

00:28:43.640 So if there's no valued target, there's no positive emotion in life, except in consequence

00:28:50.060 of direct pleasures, say.

00:28:51.540 But there's no ongoing excitement or enthusiasm about tackling hard problems, for example, because

00:28:58.260 there's no evidence that those are related to a valued destination.

00:29:02.020 And it's the entire dopaminergic system that responds to that.

00:29:07.300 And that's, of course, the system that cocaine and drugs like that affect.

00:29:10.940 And so then we do something else, which we've introduced more recently, which is we say,

00:29:14.660 okay, now, look, you specified the positive goal.

00:29:17.720 And that gives you something to run towards.

00:29:22.340 Now, we want you to think through the ways, the faults that you have, and the resentment and anger that you hold for whatever it is that you're angry about, and resentful about, and unhappy about.

00:29:35.820 And to consider your bad habits, and imagine where those could drag you three to five years from now if you let them take the upper hand.

00:29:44.780 And so people write about that for 15 minutes, and we think, well, that gives them a negative pole to run away from, like a hell to run away from, and a heaven to run towards.

00:29:54.180 And there's some good evidence from the animal literature that animals that are running away and running towards at the same time are run faster.

00:30:03.100 They're more motivated.

00:30:04.880 And then in the second half, they lay out a well-articulated, long-term, implementable plan.

00:30:12.040 And we try to get them to deeply articulate it and say, well, you know, break it into eight goals, rank order the goals.

00:30:19.480 If you attain goal number one, why would that be good for you?

00:30:24.480 Why would it be good for your family?

00:30:26.400 Why would it be good for broader society?

00:30:29.060 What would you do if obstacles arose?

00:30:30.900 Okay, so that's the pattern.

00:30:32.860 And now, at the University of, at Rotterdam, at the business school there, so it's the Rotterdam School of Management.

00:30:41.400 I've been working with Michaela Shippers there and her colleagues.

00:30:46.380 We've run about 7,000 people through that now.

00:30:49.480 And the research indicates there's a bunch of interesting things.

00:30:55.680 Overall, it's raised grade point average about 20%, the dropout rate about 25%, which is absolutely phenomenal.

00:31:03.220 It was far larger effects than we would have imagined.

00:31:06.100 But the effects are quite interesting because, you know, with most interventions, if there's a distribution of performance,

00:31:13.600 you intervene and you raise the higher-performing people even higher, you know, absent a ceiling effect.

00:31:21.160 Right, right.

00:31:22.340 But this has the opposite effect.

00:31:24.260 It raises the lower end up.

00:31:26.360 And so, at Rotterdam, the students that were most positively effective were the ones who were performing the worst.

00:31:34.400 And there, we divided them up by gender and ethnicity.

00:31:40.400 So, male, female, obviously.

00:31:41.940 But then we divided them into ethnic Hollanders, so mostly Caucasian natives.

00:31:48.720 And then non-Western ethnic minorities.

00:31:51.760 So, the males were underperforming the females.

00:31:56.360 And then it was female Dutch natives, male Dutch natives, female non-Western ethnic minorities, male non-Western ethnic minorities.

00:32:07.180 There was a big gap between the Dutch females and the non-Western ethnic minority men.

00:32:11.420 And within two years of completing the program, the non-ethnic Western minority men passed the Dutch women.

00:32:19.160 Very cool.

00:32:20.000 Even though the Dutch women also increased a little bit.

00:32:21.340 Yeah.

00:32:21.680 So, and then we replicated that more recently in Canada at a little college called Mohawk College.

00:32:27.940 And we found there that men were underperforming women again.

00:32:31.740 And then we divided them into how well they were doing in high school before they came into college.

00:32:37.700 And the worst performing males were the ones who were doing poorly in university before they hit college.

00:32:46.020 Or, sorry, the males who were in high school and who had the worst grades were those who improved most with the use of the future authoring program.

00:32:55.200 And they did the whole thing in an hour, badly, in one session before they went to college.

00:33:03.760 That's very impressive.

00:33:04.900 Could you send me a copy of that?

00:33:06.060 I'd love to see that.

00:33:07.760 No problem.

00:33:09.360 I can't send you a copy of the Mohawk paper yet because it hasn't been released.

00:33:13.120 But I can send you – I'll send you the rest of them.

00:33:15.580 But, yeah.

00:33:16.220 That's fabulous.

00:33:17.100 Because these are the issues, of course, I'm dealing with right now here at the University of Texas trying to find out.

00:33:23.440 You know, most of the interventions that we are looking at is essentially aiming at lower social class kids who are coming to college for the first time, who face so many obstacles that the upper middle class students aren't even aware exist.

00:33:39.300 Well, see, we're trying to think through why this works, you know.

00:33:43.600 And so part of it is, I think – and I've thought this through a lot – part of it is, I think, that the schools before college never require – really require kids to make a decision.

00:33:56.900 And they don't teach them how to make decisions.

00:33:59.200 They never teach them that their life is theirs to master, let's say, and that they have to make a plan, but that the plan has to serve them.

00:34:07.120 And we also have a suspicion that maybe men won't work unless they have their own plan.

00:34:13.680 Maybe that's associated with trade agreeableness, although we're still investigating that.

00:34:18.120 But there is no doubt that these – at least as far as our research has shown – that these interventions, the future planning interventions, seem to have a more salutary effect on men.

00:34:28.720 But the men are underperforming, you know.

00:34:30.860 So for some reason, the women don't have the same problem.

00:34:33.800 But it's something like males won't work unless they have their own reasons to, which wouldn't surprise me, given that males are more disagreeable than females.

00:34:44.500 So it's certainly possible.

00:34:46.060 But, you know, the effects on dropout at Mohawk College were walloping, about 50% decrease in the first semester.

00:34:54.420 And, of course, that's when kids always drop out.

00:34:56.900 So there's something about having a plan.

00:34:58.780 And so we are thinking, too, that what's happening is – and this kind of goes back to your comments about both positive and negative emotion.

00:35:05.780 It seems to be something like uncertainty reduction.

00:35:09.540 And so that reduces the effect of doubt, let's say.

00:35:14.080 And also tagging – you know, having the person design a future they also want tags success with positive emotion.

00:35:21.120 And that carries them forward, potentially, through obstacles.

00:35:25.220 So, yes.

00:35:25.920 It would be very interesting to analyze the essays that these people wrote using our computer program.

00:35:32.680 Yeah.

00:35:33.080 Well, you know, I think we may have done that, if I remember correctly.

00:35:35.920 We may have done that with the Rotterdam study.

00:35:39.600 But I have to look because we've used your LIWC a couple of times to look for the same sort of phenomena.

00:35:45.940 But we've also done that to look at whether or not we could extract out Big Five traits from writing samples.

00:35:53.480 And that's also possible.

00:35:55.500 So that's –

00:35:56.220 Yeah, I'm less sanguine about the Big Five approach because language and self-reports are really, really different animals.

00:36:09.260 Yeah, well –

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00:38:55.260 Well, I'd like to talk to you now, if you would, about you.

00:39:02.000 Now, you did the computer analysis of words, and that got you interested in different categories of words, correct?

00:39:08.240 That's correct.

00:39:08.840 And you wrote a whole book on pronouns.

00:39:10.540 That's right.

00:39:11.680 Part of the reason I want to talk to you about pronouns, apart from the fact that I'm interested in it,

00:39:15.600 is I've been embroiled in a political controversy in Canada for the last five months.

00:39:20.360 There's been legislation here formulated at the federal level.

00:39:25.300 It's already in place at the provincial level, mandating the use of what have been called preferred pronouns.

00:39:31.160 And I don't know if that's come to the University of Texas at Austin or not yet,

00:39:34.640 but the idea is that people of nonspecific gender, let's say,

00:39:41.180 have the right to choose the pronouns by which other people will address them.

00:39:44.980 And that's actually being mandated in Canadian law, which is something I've been objecting to vociferously

00:39:50.220 because I don't believe the government should mandate language content.

00:39:54.680 I think it's a massive error.

00:39:56.400 But anyway, so I have a specific interest in pronouns,

00:40:00.240 and I know also that pronouns are in a closed linguistic category.

00:40:03.620 So they don't change that frequently.

00:40:05.980 But you wrote a whole book describing why pronouns were so significant from a psychological perspective.

00:40:11.720 Right.

00:40:11.860 And it's more – it's not just pronouns.

00:40:14.860 It's a whole class of words called function words.

00:40:18.260 And if you look at any text or you listen very carefully,

00:40:22.880 most of what we convey are what we call content words.

00:40:26.300 These are nouns and regular verbs and adjectives, most adverbs.

00:40:32.900 And they're the guts of what we're talking about.

00:40:35.680 But we have all these little words, articles, a, n, and the prepositions, two of four pronouns,

00:40:43.060 he, she, they, it, et cetera.

00:40:45.760 And in English, there's only about 180 common pronouns.

00:40:49.980 Now, the average person has a vocabulary of 100,000 words,

00:40:53.840 but only, you know, less than one-half or one percent of those words are these function words,

00:41:01.620 yet they account for 60 percent of all the words we use.

00:41:04.860 They control how we talk.

00:41:08.360 And what they are specifying is how we connect with one another

00:41:12.340 and how we connect with our topic and how we think about ourselves and our group.

00:41:17.700 And by analyzing these function words, you get a really good sense of who a person is.

00:41:23.980 And that's the underlying theory of the work I've been doing for the last several years

00:41:28.860 using this computer program, which is Linguistic Inquiry Word Count, L-I-W-C,

00:41:34.680 which I pronounce Luke.

00:41:36.240 And the Luke program is really just a dumb program that mostly is looking at these function words.

00:41:42.240 So tell us some things that you've found with specific words.

00:41:46.720 So let's start off with the most commonly used spoken word, which is the word I.

00:41:56.840 I tells us so much about people.

00:42:00.160 And if you go into your email, you're going to see that you use I sometimes.

00:42:04.080 Sometimes in an email, you won't.

00:42:06.660 So, for example, people who are depressed use the word I more than when they're not depressed.

00:42:12.540 People who are suicidal use it even more.

00:42:15.240 So one of our first studies was looking at poets who either committed suicide or didn't,

00:42:19.880 and we analyzed their poetry.

00:42:22.180 The suicidal poets did not use more negative emotion words.

00:42:25.520 They didn't make more references to death.

00:42:27.360 They used the word I more.

00:42:28.960 And why?

00:42:29.820 Because pronouns, including I, tell us where we're paying attention.

00:42:34.340 If you use the word I, you're self-focused.

00:42:36.620 And you know as a clinician that one of the theories of depression is that it's a disease of self-focus,

00:42:43.720 that people are so ruminative and looking inward so much.

00:42:46.980 So let me ask you a question about that.

00:42:50.220 So that seems related to the psychometric finding that self-consciousness is a facet of neuroticism.

00:42:59.680 So let me ask you one other question, along with that.

00:43:07.340 Because self-consciousness seems to load with the negative emotions.

00:43:10.720 But also, one of the things that I often recommend to my clinical clients who are socially anxious,

00:43:17.100 because I've watched how they interact.

00:43:19.060 And because they get self-focused, they don't look at other people.

00:43:22.760 They don't look at their face, for example.

00:43:25.200 And they're busily thinking about how other people are looking at them.

00:43:28.720 And they're busily thinking about what they're going to say next.

00:43:32.080 And so what happens is they stop looking at the face of the people that they're talking to or listening to them.

00:43:39.160 And so then they're extraordinarily awkward.

00:43:41.520 And so what I've done is, instead of telling people to stop thinking about themselves,

00:43:47.300 I've said, when you enter a conversation, really, really focus on the other people.

00:43:52.760 Push your attention outward.

00:43:54.620 Because that seems to activate their unconscious and automatized professional, let's say, socialization skills.

00:44:03.880 And then they can flow with the conversation.

00:44:06.500 That's exactly right.

00:44:07.380 And to build on this, the idea of people who are leaders and status.

00:44:13.920 If you look at the two people, you can tell with remarkable accuracy who's the higher status by the person who uses fewer eyes.

00:44:22.760 The high status person doesn't use the word I much.

00:44:25.520 The lower status person doesn't.

00:44:27.080 Because the high status person is looking out at the world.

00:44:31.900 And the lower status person, as you're pointing out, is looking inward.

00:44:35.480 And you can take this to the bank.

00:44:37.600 Go look at your emails.

00:44:38.520 And you'll see, when you're writing to someone of higher status, you tend to use I more.

00:44:43.040 And when you're writing to someone of lower status, you use I less.

00:44:47.180 So it's, so...

00:44:48.080 Okay, so let me, okay, let me tell you another observation that I've had.

00:44:52.960 You tell me what you think about this.

00:44:54.300 I'm going to tell you about an observation from animation first.

00:44:59.760 So I've done some very in-depth analysis of various Disney movies, including The Lion King.

00:45:05.180 And The Lion King involves a child and then an adolescent lion who matures.

00:45:14.380 And so, and the animators also represented his father.

00:45:19.000 Now, his father has a very interesting face because it looks like this.

00:45:23.240 Like, it's focused forward and kind of staring.

00:45:27.700 Almost, you might think of almost predatory because a predatory gaze is locked on someone else.

00:45:32.460 And then the adolescent lion who's kind of naive and imbecilic in some sense is like this all the time.

00:45:40.120 And so, it seems to me that there's a relationship between immaturity and self-focus and maturity and outward focus.

00:45:49.800 And in The Lion King, when the adolescent lion undergoes this initiation rite, his face changes into one like this, into one of determination.

00:46:00.180 And the other thing that seems related to this is that, you know, when people are speaking in front of a group, they often get self-conscious.

00:46:09.560 And they feel all the eyes on them.

00:46:12.280 And that makes them self-conscious.

00:46:13.940 And one of the things that I've recommended to people who want to speak to groups is never to speak to the group.

00:46:18.240 Just to look at one individual and then another individual and then another individual because that, well, that seems to foster communication.

00:46:27.880 But it also blows out the probability of becoming self-conscious.

00:46:32.280 That's exactly right.

00:46:33.900 In fact, I have recommended to teacher trainers.

00:46:37.760 So, here's what you do at my university for teacher training.

00:46:40.760 You give a practice lecture and you have the camera is in the audience looking at you.

00:46:49.720 That's the wrong way to do it.

00:46:51.360 The way that you should train teachers is put a camera behind the teacher at the audience and point out afterwards, look, they're not – that guy's not paying attention to you.

00:47:01.600 That person is.

00:47:02.540 In other words, not making you self-focused, making you – that if you're training a teacher, training a public speaker, doing exactly what you're saying, you should give them the view of what the audience looks like and not what you look like.

00:47:17.480 Right.

00:47:17.960 That's the exact wrong training.

00:47:19.380 Absolutely.

00:47:19.880 Absolutely.

00:47:20.780 You know, okay, so tell me what you think about this.

00:47:23.800 When I'm lecturing, I pay attention to the people who are paying attention.

00:47:28.020 Now, I mean, most of the time, most people in my lectures are paying attention, at least a reasonable proportion of them.

00:47:36.020 But the ones that aren't, well, I don't know why they're not.

00:47:39.600 But there's lots of reasons.

00:47:40.880 They might have had a bad night.

00:47:42.000 They might be overtired.

00:47:43.140 They may have taken the course by mistake.

00:47:44.920 I mean, God only knows.

00:47:47.640 But if I'm paying attention to the students that are paying attention, then I can read off their faces how the audience is thinking, especially if I glance around.

00:47:56.380 But it's that intense communication from individual to individual that seems to make a lecture or an interview or a conversation really compelling.

00:48:05.100 That's exactly right.

00:48:06.580 And I think that's the secret to one of the secrets to being a good teacher and a good speaker is really being able to watch and also to judge when all of a sudden you're starting to lose them.

00:48:20.860 Yeah, right.

00:48:21.080 You know, you're also doing little experiments the whole time.

00:48:25.400 You know, one of the things that people who are relatively new is they start to lose people and then they start speaking more quickly, which, of course, is precisely the wrong thing to do.

00:48:35.880 And they start paying less attention because they get self-conscious and want to hide from the audience.

00:48:40.560 And then they get into a loop.

00:48:41.760 And things just go, you know, the worst speakers I've ever seen stand at the front of the audience with their head down and mumble at their feet.

00:48:52.800 It's just painful.

00:48:54.060 I mean, OK, OK.

00:48:57.020 So that's very interesting.

00:48:58.720 So, OK, so you talked about I.

00:49:00.460 You talked about dominance.

00:49:02.260 What else have you learned about specific words?

00:49:04.340 Well, a couple more things about I mixed with some others.

00:49:09.840 One is is honesty.

00:49:11.600 So the ability to detect deception versus honesty as a function of how people talk.

00:49:17.820 And what we find is that we've done many studies where we induce people to lie and tell the truth.

00:49:24.640 And then we look at the transcripts of the two.

00:49:27.400 But what we find is when people tell the truth, they tend to use I more.

00:49:30.880 They're owning what they're saying.

00:49:32.800 And the person who is lying is psychologically distancing, distancing themselves from what they're saying.

00:49:38.740 And then there's another feature is when you're telling the truth, you tend to use more words that are we used to call them exclusive words or differentiation words where you use words like accept, but without exclude words where you're making a distinction between what's in a category and not in a category that these exclusive kind of words are you're being more honest because you're saying what you did, but also what you didn't do.

00:50:07.420 And that's a really complex cognitive task.

00:50:10.260 Whereas if you're lying and you didn't do any of it, to say what you didn't not do is just beyond the capabilities of most people.

00:50:20.500 So both I word usage and these exclusive words together do a pretty good job.

00:50:27.120 And another one is also focusing on details.

00:50:30.200 So can you do that with political speeches?

00:50:33.440 Oh, yeah.

00:50:33.820 And there's been some nice research on that as well.

00:50:37.420 Jeff Hancock, for example, who's now at Stanford, has played with this idea quite a bit when he was looking at all of the rhetoric about weapons of mass destruction during the Bush administration, that what he found was administrators were using deceptive language prior to the U.S. prior to our going to war.

00:51:02.860 So that opens up the whole completely appalling and interesting scenario.

00:51:12.020 It's like, I mean, increasingly people are using computer programs to analyze personality and that sort of thing by analyzing people's behavior on the web.

00:51:22.140 That's exactly right.

00:51:23.140 That's exactly right.

00:51:24.040 And we've been doing this a lot with political figures.

00:51:29.080 And in fact, one of my graduate students and I, Kayla Jordan, we have a website that's called Word Watchers.

00:51:37.860 It's wordwatchers.wordpress.com.

00:51:40.140 And by going there, you can see our analysis of Trump and actually this whole election from my perspective as a scientist.

00:51:50.400 This has been a phenomenal electoral season.

00:51:54.220 As a human being, not so much.

00:51:56.540 So I'm going to get you when we're done here.

00:52:00.920 I'll email you and you can give me some links, okay, that I can put in the description here where people can go look this sort of thing up.

00:52:08.020 You bet.

00:52:08.260 So that's interesting.

00:52:09.460 So can you actually rank order politicians in terms of the probability that they're telling the truth?

00:52:14.960 Yes, I could, but I'm not sure I'd trust it very much because one of the interesting issues about deception is you've got some people who are deceptive, but they honestly believe they're telling the truth.

00:52:40.160 And I think Trump actually falls into that category.

00:52:43.440 I think he actually believes what he says, and he might say just the opposite 10 minutes later, and he'll believe that as well.

00:52:51.780 Yeah, so do you suppose that, okay, so that's interesting because I've seen in poorly written undergraduate essays, you commonly see, I think about it as fracturing at different levels of the linguistic hierarchy.

00:53:04.600 So, you know, if you listen to a schizophrenic speak, they're actually fractured at the level of the phrase.

00:53:09.580 And then if you listen to a manic speak, they're more like fractured at the level of the sentence or the paragraph.

00:53:16.160 They can say a whole paragraph, and then in the next paragraph, they'll say something completely different that contradicts the first paragraph, but there's no awareness of the contradiction.

00:53:24.060 And in poorly written undergraduate essays, there'll be a claim made on page one, and then a claim made on page two that are completely antithetical.

00:53:33.760 And, you know, it isn't self-evident that you become conscious of paradoxes in your thinking unless you act out both propositions simultaneously, and it produces a conflict.

00:53:46.560 Because you can hold paradoxical explanation without ever knowing it.

00:53:50.340 And so maybe what happens with someone who does that sort of contradictory speech is that temperamentally, they're very confident.

00:54:01.140 So they might be assertive, for example.

00:54:03.060 That's right.

00:54:03.500 And they're agreeable to something like that.

00:54:05.520 And maybe also low or high in stress tolerance.

00:54:08.900 So they're not anxious people.

00:54:10.740 They're assertive, and they don't really care so much what other people think.

00:54:14.200 So they come across continually as confident.

00:54:16.600 And so that would be more like temperamental confidence, which is a form.

00:54:22.140 It's a funny thing because it's not exactly the same as telling the truth, but it is something more like believing what you say or believing in what you say.

00:54:29.720 That's right.

00:54:30.160 And what I think that the text analytic approach is better at is when a person knows damn well they're telling a lie.

00:54:39.300 And that's when our tells do better.

00:54:43.200 There's another phenomenon that's called a performative that's one of my favorites that you hear.

00:54:50.020 And that is performatives are used in linguistics, and they're usually a phrase.

00:54:56.860 And they might be something like, let me assure you, or as I've said before, or believe me when I say.

00:55:03.800 And if you have a performative, it makes the entire sentence, you're not able to detect if it's true or not.

00:55:14.520 So you can't establish the truth value.

00:55:17.300 Let me assure you that this is a glass of water.

00:55:21.060 Now, is that true or not?

00:55:22.880 Well, yes, actually it is because I want to assure you it's a glass of water.

00:55:28.080 It's true because I want to assure you that it is, even though it's not.

00:55:34.520 And what happens is, consciously we don't know we do this, but it's almost so our brain is kind of trying to protect us.

00:55:44.520 And we throw these up.

00:55:45.980 I have another webpage that has a number of performatives that you see in president after president, where the president says something that at the beginning sets it up so it's a performative.

00:56:00.760 And then the second half, sure enough, it is a lie.

00:56:05.060 Yeah, well, so do you suppose that, okay, that's interesting.

00:56:09.120 So do you suppose that, so is the performative a marker for deceit?

00:56:18.480 I think it is.

00:56:19.680 Is something deceptive is coming?

00:56:21.380 Yes, I think it is.

00:56:22.700 And in fact, Trump's great, his best one is, believe me.

00:56:28.540 So I know more about the army than the generals, believe me.

00:56:35.880 Right, right.

00:56:36.660 Do you suppose he's going to convince himself?

00:56:39.160 He is, and it's a form of performative, which is he's really saying, please believe me that I know more, da, da, da, da, da.

00:56:50.220 Right.

00:56:50.560 He doesn't place it that way, but that's what it essentially is.

00:56:53.320 Well, it kind of makes you wonder if he thinks that if people believe him, that makes it true.

00:56:57.720 Yeah, exactly.

00:56:58.880 You know, because it's a funny thing, because there is some truth to the idea that true things are what other people believe.

00:57:08.060 Now, obviously, you don't want to go too far down that road.

00:57:12.020 That's right.

00:57:12.580 But there is something, I mean, because, for example, a contract holds no truth unless there's consensus around it.

00:57:19.520 So whenever the reality is dependent on everyone agreeing to do the same thing, then consensus is actually a very good marker for truth.

00:57:30.860 You know, because there's lots of situations where you say, well, if we agree on all this, then it's going to be true.

00:57:35.580 That's what a contract is.

00:57:36.900 So it's almost as if using words like that is an attempt to establish a contract where no contract can genuinely be established.

00:57:47.920 I mean, we can't have a contract about whether or not Iran has weapons of mass destruction, but we can certainly have a contract about whether or not we'll go to war over it.

00:57:55.880 Mm-hmm.

00:57:57.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:57:57.880 So what else have you got with regards to interesting words?

00:58:02.100 Because that was fascinating.

00:58:03.100 Well, there's a whole – we could go for hours on this, actually.

00:58:08.040 So another one that I've been quite interested in is using these groups of words and looking at how two people connect in terms of these function words.

00:58:20.080 So what we could do is we could actually calculate the percentage agreement we have in our use of pronouns, prepositions, articles, conjunctions, and so forth.

00:58:30.580 And we call this language style matching.

00:58:32.560 And the closer two people are in their use of these words in a given conversation, the more they are in tune with one another.

00:58:42.640 Wow.

00:58:43.160 So that's being on the same wavelength.

00:58:45.620 That's exactly right.

00:58:46.620 And it's not necessarily liking one another.

00:58:50.700 It's being – absolutely paying attention to one another.

00:58:54.320 So two people in the midst of an argument tend to entrain really closely, just like two people madly in love.

00:59:00.820 Now, we've done analyses of transcripts of speed dates.

00:59:05.600 And what we find is we actually can predict who will go on a subsequent date at rates somewhat higher than the people themselves.

00:59:12.740 So what's happening is the rapid establishment of mutual imitations.

00:59:16.620 That's exactly right.

00:59:17.740 And that's exactly what happens from the Piagetian perspective when two children start to play.

00:59:22.760 That's exactly right.

00:59:24.240 Cool.

00:59:24.800 That's cool.

00:59:26.180 And we've looked at – one that I particularly like was we studied – we looked at 86 dating couples.

00:59:32.800 These are freshmen in college.

00:59:34.640 And freshmen in college are in notoriously unstable relationships, which from my perspective is perfect for research.

00:59:42.680 And to be in our studies, they had to do instant messaging at least daily with each other and to give us 10 days of their IMs, which they did.

00:59:52.840 And what we did – and we also asked them, how good is your relationship?

00:59:57.060 How likely will you be together in several months?

00:59:59.980 And what we found was that we did a shockingly good job at predicting who would still be together.

01:00:05.360 Those people who were – if we just averaged – got their style-matching score, their average entrainment score, and we just got the top half, 80 percent were still together three months later.

01:00:17.860 If they were in the bottom half, only 50 percent were still together.

01:00:21.360 Wow.

01:00:21.800 Wow.

01:00:22.200 That's so cool.

01:00:24.280 And self-reports – people's self-reports about their relationship was absolutely unrelated to whether or not they were still together.

01:00:31.620 So that's like dancing.

01:00:33.840 It is.

01:00:34.620 I've always thought of this as a dance.

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01:01:44.020 That's exactly right.

01:01:45.100 Yeah, yeah.

01:01:45.640 Because, so what that really means in some sense is that, think about it this way, is that the two people come together.

01:01:55.740 And the two of them, it's as if they're making something, they make something jointly that they're both acting out.

01:02:02.380 So that they're uniting into something central.

01:02:05.120 That's right.

01:02:05.540 And then you might think too that in order for that to happen, they have to be paying close attention to each other.

01:02:10.500 That's right.

01:02:10.960 And so you can't entrain with someone unless you pay close attention to them.

01:02:15.860 And certainly one of the best markers for the utility of a relationship is going to be whether or not the people pay attention to each other, right?

01:02:23.600 Yes, that's exactly right.

01:02:25.300 That's why children are so absolutely desperate for adult attention.

01:02:29.020 That's their currency.

01:02:30.460 Yes, that's exactly right.

01:02:32.560 Yeah.

01:02:32.900 Wow, that's really cool.

01:02:34.380 Well, have you got another one?

01:02:36.240 Okay, I've got another one.

01:02:38.300 A few, three or four years ago, I started working with much bigger data sets.

01:02:46.840 So this was with about 25,000 college students who have been admitted to my university over four years.

01:02:56.160 And I got their admissions essays.

01:02:58.200 And these essays are people explaining why they want to come to the university, you know, how they have overcome a difficult time or something like that.

01:03:06.400 So each person wrote two essays.

01:03:09.320 And we went through and started to do some kind of general analysis of word use, focusing on these function words.

01:03:18.020 And found that there was a central dimension to language.

01:03:21.360 This is a fundamental dimension.

01:03:23.640 And it's what I'm calling it is analytic versus narrative thinking.

01:03:28.320 People high on analytic thinking are using high rates of articles and prepositions.

01:03:34.260 At the other end of this dimension are people who are using high rates of pronouns, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, negations, and so forth.

01:03:41.820 It is a coherent dimension.

01:03:45.000 And that any text can be put along this continuum.

01:03:49.640 And in fact, it's like a fingerprint.

01:03:51.000 People who, you know, use words at this level tend to do so in other emails, other emails, or natural conversation, etc.

01:04:03.700 So are the narrative people using more metaphors?

01:04:07.560 Yeah, they probably would.

01:04:09.620 So tell me how you would tell the difference if you were reading it.

01:04:13.540 Well, listen, before we get into metaphors, metaphors are going to take us down a rabbit hole.

01:04:17.880 So before we fall down the hole, let me just point out this analytic thinking.

01:04:23.640 What's so cool about it is we were able to track these students' grades over the next four years of college.

01:04:29.360 And the higher they were on analytic thinking, the better they did in college.

01:04:33.660 And in terms of grades, it was correlated about 0.2.

01:04:37.120 And it did matter if they were physics majors or fine art majors, if they were in engineering, psychology, music, social work.

01:04:47.380 That this, you could take this to the bank.

01:04:50.060 The more analytic a person is in their essay, the better they do in college.

01:04:54.520 And part of it is that college is based on analytic thinking.

01:04:58.700 But it's also correlated with intelligence.

01:05:00.940 It's correlated with SAT.

01:05:02.740 At what level?

01:05:05.140 Probably about 0.3, 0.35.

01:05:07.660 Oh, yeah.

01:05:08.000 That's pretty good.

01:05:08.760 That's pretty high.

01:05:09.560 Yeah.

01:05:09.860 It's really quite striking.

01:05:11.280 And what's interesting is that we can now use this as kind of a remote sensor to get a sense of how smart somebody is.

01:05:19.480 So if we're analyzing.

01:05:20.660 Man, you're a dangerous man.

01:05:22.500 I'm a dangerous man.

01:05:23.800 That's for sure.

01:05:25.040 Yeah, yeah.

01:05:26.000 So that's another one.

01:05:28.060 And we've been playing with many other things.

01:05:30.020 We've been doing a lot of work on author identification.

01:05:32.200 So we published a cool article.

01:05:35.480 One of my graduate students, Ryan Boyd, and I have been focusing on a lost play or a play that was attributed to Shakespeare, but people didn't know if it was or not.

01:05:45.860 And we were able to do some really smart analysis showing pretty clearly that it was written by Shakespeare, probably co-authored with another guy, John Fletcher.

01:05:55.280 Wow.

01:05:55.560 And we've looked at some other manuscripts that have been called into question that have come out of the 17th century.

01:06:02.660 So we know we've been taking this work in all of these different directions.

01:06:06.720 Cool.

01:06:08.520 Okay, so let's close this off by why don't you tell us something about what you're doing with regards to revamping undergraduate education at the University of Texas and what your aims are and also why it was that you were picked or chose to do this.

01:06:24.740 Exactly.

01:06:27.480 It all gets into my analysis of language.

01:06:29.940 I was doing all of this work trying to understand could I get, say, a group of initially two people but then as many as five people to interact with one another on the computer?

01:06:42.460 And if so, could I track how they are interacting with each other and get a sense of how the group was working?

01:06:51.180 And working with some computer scientists, we were able to come up with a really slick program to do that.

01:06:56.640 And then it occurred to me, wouldn't it be interesting to do that in a large class because I taught a large introductory psychology class with a colleague of mine, Sam Gosling.

01:07:06.180 And we had 500 students in the class.

01:07:08.440 We had them bring a laptop to class one day.

01:07:11.960 And we were able to bring the class into small groups of five each.

01:07:16.240 They could interact with each other.

01:07:18.700 And we were able to track how they were interacting and we could get feedback to the group trying to get the group to work better.

01:07:27.000 So using the style matching, we could tell people whether or not people, the members of the group, were paying attention to each other.

01:07:34.300 Or if someone was talking too much, we could ask them to not talk so much and so forth.

01:07:39.620 And it worked.

01:07:40.480 The next semester, we realized, you know, we could use this idea and revamp the class from top to bottom where we got rid of the textbook so all readings were online.

01:07:53.180 We'd have a quiz at the beginning of every class.

01:07:56.280 We would break the class into interactions more frequently.

01:08:01.320 In other words, started to rethink the class from top to bottom.

01:08:04.320 And then we moved it into an online class so that we were able to broadcast out.

01:08:11.000 And we switched the format of the class.

01:08:13.160 It was like a TV show.

01:08:14.780 So we were behind a desk.

01:08:16.300 We'd have fake news.

01:08:17.620 We'd have – or at least one of us would be in front of a green screen or somewhere in some other place.

01:08:23.260 I want to ask you to use the word fake news.

01:08:24.360 I'm not sure that that's appropriate.

01:08:26.000 No, no.

01:08:26.820 It used to – people used to know what I meant.

01:08:29.060 But now as soon as I said that, I realized I can't use that anymore.

01:08:32.080 But this idea of one of us would be on – in front of a scene somewhere on earth, you know, so one of us, you know, I would say, Sam, where are you?

01:08:44.960 It looks like you are in a balloon today.

01:08:47.760 And, you know, so it looks like he's in a balloon and so forth.

01:08:50.900 In any case, the point was we turned this into a television show.

01:08:55.880 And what we found was that by broadcasting this out to 1,500 students, we set it up because there was testing every day that students were in class every day.

01:09:08.500 They were focusing more on the material.

01:09:12.420 They were more engaged.

01:09:13.960 And it turns out that their average performance went up compared to when we taught it in the past.

01:09:18.720 And more impressively, we – people who took our online class did better in the other classes they were taking that semester.

01:09:28.040 Oh, yeah.

01:09:28.320 That's impressive.

01:09:29.440 And the classes they took the semester afterwards.

01:09:32.120 What kind of improvement did you get?

01:09:35.000 It wasn't huge.

01:09:36.460 It was like a difference between a 3.1 versus a 3.25.

01:09:42.380 And we reduced the disparity between upper, middle, and lower middle class students in terms of their performance so that historically we found a one-letter grade between the upper, middle, and lower middle class students.

01:09:55.920 Yeah.

01:09:56.080 And now we had reduced it to 0.4-letter grade.

01:09:58.940 Okay.

01:09:59.300 That's big.

01:10:00.180 That's big.

01:10:00.940 So that's kind of analogous to what was happening with the future authoring program.

01:10:04.800 That's right.

01:10:06.480 So how do you account for that?

01:10:08.220 Why do you think it had that differential effect on the lower-performing students?

01:10:13.680 Well, it turns out we came across some previous research that had found similar effects, but it deals with frequent testing.

01:10:23.160 The idea is kids who come from lower middle class backgrounds by and large went to crappy high schools.

01:10:29.880 And in these high schools – these were – by the way, our kids are all smart.

01:10:33.500 They're always – most of them are in the top 7 percent of their high school class.

01:10:37.100 But if they were in a crappy high school, they learned to get by by memorizing because their tests were memorization tests.

01:10:45.580 And so these kids were great at memorizing.

01:10:47.180 And then they come to a real university where you're not tested on memorization.

01:10:51.080 You have to think conceptually.

01:10:52.460 Right, right.

01:10:52.920 And historically, when we taught those – the classes, we had this usual three or four tests over the course of the semester.

01:11:01.840 I would always get students in my office walking in after the first test saying, I have never made a B in my life, and I just failed your first test.

01:11:10.220 That's impossible.

01:11:11.060 How is this even possible?

01:11:12.440 And I would say, how did you study?

01:11:14.700 Well, I had flashcards.

01:11:15.880 I did this.

01:11:16.680 I memorized this.

01:11:17.580 And I said, I told you memorization doesn't work.

01:11:21.460 You have to think conceptually.

01:11:23.660 And that doesn't mean anything to these kids.

01:11:26.220 But now you've got a test every day, and you fail that first test, pow.

01:11:31.380 You fail the second test, pow.

01:11:32.900 And all of a sudden, you're realizing, wow, it's true.

01:11:35.660 Memorizing doesn't work.

01:11:37.380 I see.

01:11:37.900 So, okay.

01:11:38.400 So you think what's happening is that they're learning that memorization doesn't work faster.

01:11:43.100 That's exactly right.

01:11:43.880 Oh, that's really funny.

01:11:44.980 That's really funny.

01:11:46.440 And they use these skills in their other classes because they realize memorization is not working in the other classes either.

01:11:53.140 So how do they catch on to the – okay.

01:11:54.980 So now they know that memorization doesn't work.

01:11:57.500 How do they figure out what does work?

01:12:00.200 Well, it's been interesting moving to the online world.

01:12:04.180 We create all of these videos, which basically there's a video on how to take – how to study.

01:12:10.000 And there's another video on how to take a test.

01:12:11.860 And another video on, you know, how do you manage your time.

01:12:16.380 In other words, now we understand the problem a lot better than we did before.

01:12:22.160 And so students are taking advantage of these resources and end up doing better.

01:12:26.940 That's cool.

01:12:27.940 So how long have you been doing that?

01:12:31.200 So after – so we started the class the first year in 2011.

01:12:39.000 And then in the years afterwards, I started talking to people at the University of Texas and elsewhere about kind of the big picture of education, which was, what the hell are we doing in education right now?

01:12:53.600 Well, you know, the world's changed.

01:12:56.160 That's a question that I've been asking myself.

01:12:58.020 I know.

01:12:58.520 But the world's changed.

01:12:59.860 Why do we have three-hour courses?

01:13:01.520 There's no logic for a three-hour course.

01:13:03.600 Why do we have a semester that goes from the first of January to sometime in May?

01:13:07.780 There's no reason for that.

01:13:09.480 Why don't we have a half-hour course?

01:13:11.060 Why don't we have a seven-hour course?

01:13:13.800 In other words, why do we put things together the way we do?

01:13:17.520 And it turns out there's really good reasons because in the early 1900s, we needed a standardized way of talking about credit and so forth.

01:13:28.540 And then we built computers to program this in.

01:13:31.360 And we built buildings that we knew how to use time and space and location so that your computer will tell you this class is going to be in this room at this time, and your final exam will be at this place and this place.

01:13:48.980 We don't need all of that.

01:13:50.120 Yeah, well, that's all – it's analogous to the conservation of physical structure and evolution.

01:13:56.040 That's exactly right.

01:13:57.080 And we don't – and what's interesting is the University of Texas computer that the registrar uses can't make a half-hour course.

01:14:07.340 It can't change the semester.

01:14:09.780 It can't do any of these things.

01:14:11.720 And a modern student information system computer costs an unbelievable amount of money.

01:14:17.880 And so what I'm doing is I am working with the university and the entire infrastructure to start to rethink everything.

01:14:27.080 What should be the curriculum?

01:14:28.820 We don't need all these required courses that we used to have.

01:14:31.420 It makes no sense.

01:14:33.220 You know, a lot of our requirements made a lot of sense 50 years ago, and a lot of our classes were flunk-out classes.

01:14:39.780 We don't need flunk-out classes anymore.

01:14:41.900 And we can come up with really brief classes, half-hour classes to learn a basic skill.

01:14:48.060 For example, we have a requirement you have to have a statistics course to take upper-division psychology classes.

01:14:55.380 Do you really need the statistics course?

01:14:57.100 Well, most of it you don't.

01:14:58.980 And if I ask my – the people teaching statistics, asking them, do the statistics you're teaching, are they relevant to today?

01:15:07.280 And they all say, oh, not at all.

01:15:09.380 I mean, I don't use analysis of variance.

01:15:11.040 I don't use T-test.

01:15:11.920 I use linear regression.

01:15:13.440 I use this.

01:15:14.120 I use that.

01:15:15.100 But we can't teach that.

01:15:17.120 And my view is if you're going to take my upper-division class, you better know correlations.

01:15:22.360 And you better know correlations up and down.

01:15:25.240 I could teach a correlation course that would be a 0.7-hour course.

01:15:29.300 Yeah.

01:15:30.080 And download it and take it any time.

01:15:33.520 I don't care when you take it.

01:15:34.900 Yeah.

01:15:35.160 Well, one of the – I mean, I've been using YouTube a lot for the last three years.

01:15:39.880 That's right.

01:15:40.320 I started putting my lectures online just taped with an iPad, you know.

01:15:48.780 And by the beginning of 2016, I collected about a million views.

01:15:54.500 And I thought, oh, that's a whole different thing than I thought it was.

01:16:00.380 I thought YouTube was for cute cat videos.

01:16:02.540 And then I started thinking it through.

01:16:04.160 And I thought, oh, no, look, here's the situation, man.

01:16:06.800 For the first time in human history, the spoken word has as much staying power and reach as books.

01:16:15.200 No, more reach.

01:16:17.200 You could publish faster.

01:16:19.280 And it can be broken up and communicated in all sorts of chunks.

01:16:22.140 It's like this is absolutely revolutionary.

01:16:24.940 It seems to me that while you're at the universities, you're in a race against time.

01:16:28.900 That's exactly right because this is the new world order.

01:16:32.820 And it's like every other part of our world right now where we're dealing with the future of AI and the future of everything.

01:16:45.340 That this really messes with the world order because so much of what we can teach can be put up there.

01:16:54.300 And it, you know, because correlations haven't changed a hell of a lot in the last hundred years.

01:16:58.940 You don't need to update your lecture on correlations.

01:17:02.000 Right.

01:17:02.200 And you only need one really good lecture on correlations.

01:17:05.740 Not a thousand of them or ten thousand of them.

01:17:08.340 That's also very frightening.

01:17:10.300 That's exactly right.

01:17:11.440 And but then we do need, you know, you know, we're talking now, 15th century.

01:17:19.840 We do need a guild mentality.

01:17:21.760 If you're going to become a therapist, a scientist or this or that, you need to have some serious lab experience.

01:17:29.740 You need to have some serious experience doing things in addition to learning how to think and to get some smart feedback on how to think,

01:17:39.660 how to how to come up to get up to the level to understand what's involved in trying to make new size to make new advances.

01:17:50.480 It's a it's an incredibly exciting time.

01:17:53.360 And I'm working with all parts of the university.

01:17:56.020 I have 200 people working with me.

01:17:59.160 I've got various, you know, we were dealing with a development studio, working on new ways of thinking of online and other technologies.

01:18:07.100 I've got a big research and methods group trying to find out what even works.

01:18:11.380 We don't even know what works and what doesn't.

01:18:13.860 We're having to deal with extended campus in terms of how we can push out our our our classes,

01:18:20.200 our information to the world in a way that has some kind of financial value to the university.

01:18:27.580 So we and this office.

01:18:30.700 You guys have you guys been thinking about accreditation because it seems to me that this is the biggest thing is,

01:18:38.760 is that the ability to disseminate valuable information was once that university in some sense had a hammer lock on that.

01:18:47.280 That's gone.

01:18:48.260 No more.

01:18:48.580 That's right.

01:18:49.460 That's right.

01:18:50.140 The thing that the the the impediment to mass education at the moment, in some sense, is the problem of mass accreditation.

01:18:56.700 And universities still have a hammer lock on that, but there's no reason that they need to.

01:19:02.700 So I'm curious when you're thinking about the mass distribution of educational material, what have you been thinking about in relation to accreditation?

01:19:09.580 You and the problems and the complexity is this are unbelievable.

01:19:15.680 So some of it is the the nationwide bureaucracy.

01:19:21.660 So there are accrediting agencies that that don't know how to use deal with fractional credit, don't know how to deal with a variable calendar.

01:19:29.960 We've got financial aid issues because they're based on these old systems as well.

01:19:35.060 We're dealing with with intellectual property in terms of who owns the IP of a class.

01:19:40.820 Is it the instructors at the university?

01:19:43.520 Can the university resell it?

01:19:45.260 How do we rethink this?

01:19:47.240 You know, the idea of having free open classes is great, but it's not a very good business model.

01:19:52.180 And this is one of the problems with Coursera and edX.

01:19:54.980 And you're putting your videos on online for free because it the reality is it costs it using Patreon, you know, you know about Patreon.

01:20:08.160 No, it's really interesting.

01:20:09.520 It's a platform that was developed because of the difficulties that creative people were having in monetizing their production.

01:20:18.580 And so with Patreon, people can voluntarily buy a monthly subscription.

01:20:24.540 If they find that the content that you're producing is worth supporting, then they can donate monthly to your Patreon account.

01:20:32.760 And they can either do that on a monthly basis or they can pay you a donation per video that you put up.

01:20:39.520 And that's been a very, you know, I thought with my YouTube content because I wanted to professionalize what I was doing to some degree to hire a film crew and to increase, improve the audio and all of that.

01:20:50.140 And I threw up a Patreon account online last April when I found out about the technology, just out of curiosity.

01:21:00.380 And I got about, I don't know, 60 or 70 people subscribing in the first month.

01:21:06.020 So that was kind of interesting.

01:21:07.720 And it's enabled me to hire a film crew and that sort of thing.

01:21:12.220 But it's quite interesting because the Patreon people, although there's some perks they get, like I send the hire donors a signed copy of one of my books, for example.

01:21:21.800 But mostly they don't get access to any content that everyone doesn't get access to.

01:21:26.400 But people have a strong sense of reciprocity.

01:21:31.160 And they're not completely comfortable with the idea of getting something for nothing.

01:21:35.120 And the Patreon account has been extraordinarily useful to me.

01:21:39.420 It's very interesting.

01:21:41.180 Yeah.

01:21:41.620 Well, it's what we're doing now, for example.

01:21:45.780 You know, and these are issues that we're struggling with at the university in terms of how do we do it?

01:21:50.860 Because to do one of our courses is really quite expensive and, you know, taught, you know, $10,000, $20,000, $30,000.

01:22:00.820 And trying to figure out the model for it, the one thing that we can do is we can give university credit.

01:22:08.200 So that's one hold that we have.

01:22:12.260 But, you know, it really does deal with a broader issue in our society, which is, is knowing the material and knowing what and knowing how to think sufficient to get by in the real world?

01:22:27.220 Or do you need the official credential?

01:22:30.000 Right.

01:22:30.840 Yeah.

01:22:31.340 Well, hopefully you need both.

01:22:33.120 Yes.

01:22:35.580 Or, you know, if it was a just world, just knowing the material would be sufficient.

01:22:43.260 Yeah.

01:22:43.540 Well, the problem is it gives you no rapid way of telling the charlatans from the real thing.

01:22:48.120 That's the big issue.

01:22:50.140 Yeah.

01:22:50.260 That's the big issue.

01:22:51.580 It's a big problem.

01:22:51.640 And then another problem is that as the credential becomes more important, the knowledge becomes less important because you can use the credential to play the system.

01:23:02.760 That's right.

01:23:03.120 That's exactly right.

01:23:04.480 So these are the kinds of things that that I've been dealing with.

01:23:07.840 And I, you know, trying to change a giant bureaucracy turns out it's not real easy.

01:23:14.380 Yeah.

01:23:14.760 And you said why it has all these built in assumptions that that are part of the structure, not only not only part of the cognitive apparatus, but actually built right into the infrastructure.

01:23:24.980 That's exactly right.

01:23:26.020 And what I found is the people at the university have been very supportive.

01:23:30.180 I thought for sure I would run into major obstacles.

01:23:34.100 Faculty, students, administrators, even the legislators, because this is a public university, are all really supportive.

01:23:41.380 Yeah.

01:23:41.660 And even though I've got support all around, it's still just like swimming through molasses because there are all of these rules and regulations that have been there sometimes for a hundred years.

01:23:53.260 That's no longer serve a purpose.

01:23:55.260 Well, you know, that's, you know, maybe, you know, maybe you don't know, but the typical fortune 500 company only lasts 30 years and the typical family fortune three generations.

01:24:05.360 Mm-hmm.

01:24:35.360 Yes.

01:24:36.080 And, and built for the late 1800s.

01:24:38.700 Well, it is.

01:24:39.820 And actually, if you think about it, university started in the 1400s and it's amazing that they have survived as well as they have.

01:24:49.000 Yeah, that's for sure.

01:24:50.400 That's for sure.

01:24:51.560 Well, look, it was really good talking to you.

01:24:54.340 I've enjoyed this myself.

01:24:55.380 Well, I, I, I've been a great admirer of your research and, and I, I don't say that lightly because.

01:25:00.860 Well, thank you.

01:25:01.480 There, there's a handful of psychologists that have had a profound effect on me and you're certainly one of them.

01:25:06.120 And I would also say you're a spectacular rarity among social psychologists in my estimation.

01:25:11.180 So, I know that's a nasty thing to say, but being partly a social psychologist, I guess I'm allowed to say it.

01:25:17.740 Yeah, you can.

01:25:17.900 So, and I would also like to talk to you again at some point in the future, maybe, you know, six months down the road or something, because you have all sorts of things that people need to know about.

01:25:26.280 And this is a really good way of telling people about them.

01:25:32.540 To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon page or purchase the self-authoring programs at self-authoring.com.

01:25:40.920 The links are in the description.

01:25:43.120 Thank you for listening.

01:25:56.280 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - March 09, 2017

Dr. James W Pennebaker

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