The secret life of pronouns
by James W. Pennebaker · first published 2011
12mentions
4recommended by
12HN commenters
2011–2022first – last mentioned
33% recommend67% neutral
The Secret Life of Pronouns is based on a large-scale research project that links natural language use to real world social and psychological processes. 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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James Pennebaker wrote about this in "The Secret Life of Pronouns". It was a good book released late last year. He also does twitter stream analysis using his research and you can find that here --> http://analyzewords.com People might dismiss it as tripe, but…
on “The way people copy each other's linguistic style reveals their pecking order” ↗Give the book The Secret Life of Pronouns by Pennebaker a read.
on “Ask HN: Any resources on how to extract insights out of social conversations?” ↗…The real breakthrough is that they provide a lot of clues into our very being. We can predict lying, age, gender, and power using them. For those interested in this it would be worth checking out The Secret Life of Pronouns[1] Your second paragraph talks about being able to notice these things in meetings. Penbrooke's research[1] shows that our brains ignore structural words. So it's pretty impossible to take advantage…
on “The way people copy each other's linguistic style reveals their pecking order” ↗Those interested in the implications of this kind of analysis might enjoy the book The Secret Life of Pronouns http://secretlifeofpronouns.com/
on “Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts” ↗…leaking (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-...). Even your use of pronouns provide clues. It's like your fingerprint, or your gate (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~chiraz/icpr02.pdf). "The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us" (http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Life-Pronouns-Words-About/dp/16...), by Dr. James Pennabaker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_W._Pennebaker).
on “Reddit has the killer social network feature: anonymity” ↗…;) I'm currently reading this one, so far so good: Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything http://amzn.to/nGEnkv This is a small list of books I want to read: The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us http://amzn.to/oiEIDs Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength http://amzn.to/qTNpgB Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup http://amzn.to/njSDPh…
on “Ask HN: Got a Kindle. What now? What books should I read?” ↗…plagiarism software is that it looks for similarities in content, not form. source: I'm supposed to be a digital humanist! :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry#Current_research related: “The Secret Life of Pronouns: James Pennebaker at TEDxAustin” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGsQwAu3PzU
on “Plagiarism software unveils one of Shakespeare’s sources” ↗It was discussed in The Secret Life of Pronouns by James Pennebaker (Although I only read about his finding in an interview in HBR). A few of his most salient points are explained in this article: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201108/the-is-have-i....
on “I’m young, inexperienced and a perfectionist” ↗This exact issue is addressed in _The Secret Life of Pronouns_ (Pennebaker). http://secretlifeofpronouns.com/
on “Is Writing Style Sufficient to Deanonymize Material Posted Online?” ↗When I was reading James W. Pennebaker's "The Secret Life of Pronouns," I started consciously collecting as much personal data as I could for this exact reason. I'm 23 and I've got most of everything I've ever done on a computer since I was around 14 logged. I started thinking…
on “Learning from 20 years of personal analytics” ↗…Pronouns are statistically significant! Oh and possessive nouns too!' -- I cringed." This wasn't, by any chance, James W. Pennebaker from UT Austin? (Or somebody related to him?) I was just reading The Secret Life of Pronouns and his chapter on lying does point to pronouns as a key factor for distinguishing lying. On the other hand, he does take some pains to note that getting to 65% correctness is reasonably easy but getting…
on “The Statistical Crisis in Science” ↗> Is this actually useful? IKR. Pennebaker thinks so. He's a big proponent of "computational linguistics". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_linguistics I recently read his book Secret Life of Pronouns. http://secretlifeofpronouns.com I thought it'd be fun to replicate the book's claims. Like maybe analyze political speeches. But Pennebaker's current rulesets apparently aren't available. And I didn't…
on “Investors use AI to analyse CEOs’ language patterns and tone” ↗