Many previous studies have looked at the links between personality and language, but usually this has been about the content of what different personalities choose to talk about. It's been shown, for example, that extraverts are more likely to talk about family and friends, and to use words like "drinks" and "dancing", which makes intuitive sense given that people matching that personality type are expected to spend more time socialising.
Camiel Beukeboom and his co-workers took a different tack, asking 40 employees (19 women; average age 34 years) at a large company in Amsterdam to describe out loud the same five photos depicting ambiguous social situations. Participants were told that "there are no right or wrong answers" and given as long as they wanted to describe each photo. Their answers were recorded and transcribed for later coding. Three days later, the participants also completed a personality questionnaire.
Participants who scored higher in extraversion tended to describe the photos in terms that were rated by an independent coder as more abstract. For example, they used more "state verbs" (e.g. Jack loves Sue) and adjectives, and they admitted to engaging in more interpretation - describing things that were not directly visible in the pictures. On the other hand, the higher a person scored in introversion, the more concrete and precise their speech tended to be, including more use of articles (i.e. "a", "the"), more mentions of numbers and specific people, and making more distinctions (i.e. use of words like "but" and "except").
The differences make sense in terms of what we know about social behaviour and the introvert-extravert personality dimension, with the introverted linguistic style being more cautious, and the extravert style being more casual and vague.
The researchers said their results have far-reaching implications because we know based on past research that the contrasting speech styles are interpreted differently. For instance, they said behaviour described in abstract terms, in the style of an extravert (e.g. Camiel is unfriendly), is usually attributed to personality, as opposed to the situation, and therefore interpreted as enduring, more likely to occur again, yet harder to verify. By contrast, behaviour described in more concrete terms, in the characteristic style of an introvert (e.g. Camiel yells at Martin), tends to be interpreted as situation-specific, and as more believable.
"Thus an introvert's linguistic style would induce more situational attributions and a higher perception of trustworthiness than an extravert's style," the researchers said.
The findings also complement past research showing how conversations between two introverts usually involve discussing one topic in more depth whereas two extraverts dance around more topics in less detail.
"By talking at different levels of abstraction, extraverts and introverts report information differently," the researchers concluded, "and induce different recipient inferences, memories, and subsequent representations of the information exchanged."
_________________________________
Beukeboom, C., Tanis, M., and Vermeulen, I. (2012). The Language of Extraversion: Extraverted People Talk More Abstractly, Introverts Are More Concrete. Journal of Language and Social Psychology DOI: 10.1177/0261927X12460844
--Further reading--
The links between bloggers' personalities and their use of words.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
Thanks for writing about this interesting study. I was reminded of reading that histrionic personality disorder is associated with high extraversion and also with an impressionistic style of talking about things that tends to be vague and flighty. This study sheds some light on this. I wonder if personality disorders associated with introversion are associated with overly concrete speech styles? I'm not sure if this has been reported or not.
ReplyDeleteI have just read the paper that this post describes, and the conclusions do not appear to be warranted. The authors only measured extraversion and not other personality factors that might affect someone's use of concrete or abstract language. Most notably, the personality factor openness to experience--the extent to which people are imaginative, artistic, curious, etc.--was not measured in this study. One would certainly expect that people who score low in openness would use more concrete language than those who score high. Most personality research shows a moderately high correlation between extraversion and openness. Thus, the authors may have captured a spurious effect of extraversion on use of language; if they partialled out the effect of openness to experience on use of language, I bet the effect of extraversion would be severely attenuated.
ReplyDeleteIndeed - and they have not included, most importantly, the dimension of S/N - sensing - taking in and relating to information concretely and iNtution - taking in information filtered through imagination - from the MBTI 4 dimensions.
Delete"Thus an introvert's linguistic style would induce more situational attributions and a higher perception of trustworthiness than an extravert's style," the researchers said.
ReplyDeleteDoes that mean they are actually more trustworthy, or in some cases at least more psychopathically able to mimic trustworthiness?
apparently the only real conclusion is tendency toward specificity; whether you regard that as synonymous with trustworthiness is a matter of interpretation
DeleteIn the first place the measure is biased towards extroverts; ambiguous "social" situations are more easily read abstractly by extroverts than introverts.
ReplyDeleteNow if one had tried a test that is more biased towards introverts, the results might reverse.
And a sample of 40 employees of a single company is representative how(?). Laughable study!
ReplyDelete