Language style matching in relationships

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New research suggests that people, particularly those who are happy in relationships, tend to match their language to those of those around them or to authors they have just read. Here are some of the findings:

Pennebaker and his colleagues tracked language use by 2,000 college students responding to class assignments written in different language styles. The results confirmed that language style matching extends to the written word. When an essay question was written in a dry, confusing tone, students responded with dry, confusing answers. If the question took a flighty, casual tone, students responded with “Valley girl”-like answers peppered with “like” and “sorta.”

Next, the researchers used historical figures to find out if language style matching could reveal schisms or closeness in a relationship.

They began with Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, psychologists who corresponded almost weekly for seven years. Using style-matching statistics, the researchers were able to chart the two men’s tempestuous relationship from their early days of joint admiration to their final days of mutual contempt by counting the ways they used pronouns, prepositions and other words, such as “the,” “you,” “a” and “as,” that have little meaning outside the context of the sentence. Such words can be indicators of a person’s style of writing (and speaking)…

Married Victorian Poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, along with 20th century poet couple Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, also revealed more in their poetry than they perhaps realized.

I’ll have to watch for this. How much do others typically pick up on this when being around people who are matching each other’s language? Is this how we know people “are good together”?

Sociologists less susceptible to offshoring

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According to ResumeBear, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has compiled a list of the occupations that are likely to be sent offshore. Sociologists are not very likely to be offshored, with a score of 7 on a susceptibility score (which ranges from 16 on the high end to 4 on the low end).

How the honeybee problem was identified: through the social networks of scientists

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Learning about how exactly scientific advances are made can be very interesting. While people might have images of people squirreled away in offices feverishly conducting experiments and reading articles, social networks play a large role in solving problems. Buried in this story about the discovery of the fungus and virus combination that is killing honeybees is how the two teams that solved the problem came together:

But it took a family connection — through David Wick, Charles’s brother — to really connect the dots. When colony collapse became news a few years ago, Mr. Wick, a tech entrepreneur who moved to Montana in the 1990s for the outdoor lifestyle, saw a television interview with Dr. Bromenshenk about bees.

Mr. Wick knew of his brother’s work in Maryland, and remembered meeting Dr. Bromenshenk at a business conference. A retained business card and a telephone call put the Army and the Bee Alert team buzzing around the same blossom.

The first steps were awkward…The process eventually was refined.

By working through this family connection, two teams that each had their own expertise were able to pool their knowledge and resources and come to a solution.

Schools don’t just teach academic skills; they also teach social and emotional skills

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The Chicago Tribune reports on widespread programs in schools to teach social and emotional skills to students. The state of Illinois is leading the way:

In 2004, Illinois became the first state in the nation to require all school districts to teach social and emotional skills as part of their curriculum and daily school life. That means students are expected to meet certain benchmarks, such as recognizing and managing feelings, building empathy and making responsible decisions.

The touchy-feely stuff doesn’t have to come at the expense of intellect. New evidence shows a strong link between interpersonal skills and academics, said Roger Weissberg, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, Chicago, who has studied social and emotional learning for more than 25 years.

Weissberg and his colleagues recently completed an analysis of 300 scientific studies and reached two important conclusions: Students enrolled in such programs scored at least 10 percentage points higher on achievement tests than peers who weren’t. At the same time, discipline problems were cut in half.

The article also suggests teaching social and emotional skills is tied to seeing students more as whole persons. This is all part of the broad program of socialization in schools. While academic skills are an important emphasis, so are emotional/social skills as well as other topics such as learning how to be a good citizen or acquiring skills needed for jobs.

Complaints about wind turbines: noisy and more

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A number of wind farms built in more populated areas have drawn complaints from nearby residents, including the noise generated by the spinning turbines:

The wind industry has long been dogged by a vocal minority bearing all manner of complaints about turbines, from routine claims that they ruin the look of pastoral landscapes to more elaborate allegations that they have direct physiological impacts like rapid heart beat, nausea and blurred vision caused by the ultra-low-frequency sound and vibrations from the machines.

For the most extreme claims, there is little independent backing…

Numerous studies also suggest that not everyone will be bothered by turbine noise, and that much depends on the context into which the noise is introduced. A previously quiet setting like Vinalhaven is more likely to produce irritated neighbors than, say, a mixed-use suburban setting where ambient noise is already the norm.

A number of lawsuits against the turbines are now working through the courts.

An acoustic expert in the article suggests a solution: simply build the turbines further away from residences. However, there is a well-documented issue of a lack of high-capacity transmission lines that affects a lot of energy plant building.

How much of this is simply American NIMBYism in action: while people might generally support greener energy, how many want such plants built nearby?

h/t The Infrastructurist

Judges: a dying breed?

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According to the reporters over at CNBC, judges are “disappearing” from the workforce:

It seems counterintuitive that we’re increasingly becoming a lawsuit-happy nation and yet, the need for judges is shrinking. The reason is simple: Budget. From the federal government on down to states, cities and towns, cash-strapped governments are slashing their budgets.

This trend is having and will have profound effects on the U.S. legal environmental.  It is true that today most cases settle (civil) or plea bargain (criminal) long before they reach trial, but they do so under the so-called “shadow of the law.”  In other words, litigants choose not to waste time and money fully arguing their cases when the payoff (winning or losing) is not worth the transaction costs of trial (years of litigation, lawyer fees, etc.).

These settlements and plea bargainings are attractive alternatives to full trials, however, only if trials (1) are an actual possibility and (2) it is reasonably certain who will win.  If there are fewer judges, (1) is undermined.  Moreover, if there are fewer trials–resulting in fewer judicial opinions–(2) is undermined insofar as there are precedents to indicate how current controversies will resolve.  In a world with few judges, potential litigants are thus left with a less-attractive reason to settle/bargain:  uncertainty.

A potentially huge penalty for losing, combined with the cost of not knowing, results in a rational decision to resolve the problem quickly.  This is fine to the extent that it lessens legal combativeness.  It is problematic to the degree that it encourages wasteful payments of “go away money” (civil) or guilty pleas to lesser crimes by the innocent (criminal).

Disagreement about unemployment figures between government and Gallup

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Gallup suggests that the unemployment figures to be released by the federal government at the end of this week are underestimates. While the government figures are expected to be around 9.6-9.8%, Gallup says the unemployment is really closer to 10.1%.

The main issue seems to be that Gallup is measuring through the end of September while the government figures are based on data that ended in mid-September. And Gallup found that unemployment increased quite a bit in the last few weeks of September.

More poor people now in suburbia

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American suburbs are often imagined as homes to primarily the middle and upper classes. However, new figures from the US Census suggests the number of poor people living in suburbs continues to grow:

The analyses of census data released Thursday show that since 2000, the number of poor people in the suburbs jumped by 37.4 percent to 13.7 million. That’s faster than the national growth rate of 26.5 percent and more than double the city rate of 16.7 percent…

Cities still have higher poverty rates — about 19.5 percent, compared to 10.4 percent in the suburbs. But the gap has been steadily narrowing. In a reversal from 2000, the number of poor people living in the suburbs now exceeds those in cities by roughly 1.6 million.

Analysts attribute the shift largely to years of middle-class flight and substantial shares of minorities and immigrants leaving cities in the early part of the decade for affordable housing and job opportunities in the suburbs. After the housing bust, their fortunes changed, throwing millions of people out of work.

To recap: in terms of absolute numbers, there are more poor people living in suburbs than in large cities. As a proportion of the population, cities have higher percentages of poor people compared to suburbs. And the number of poor people in suburbs has grown more since 2000 than the number of poor people in cities.

On one hand, these figures should challenge the typical images of suburbia as a wealthy paradise. On the other hand, there have always been some poor and working-class people in suburbs – this is nothing new, suggesting the typical image has always been somewhat wrong.

What will be interesting to watch is how suburban municipalities respond to the growing number of poor people.

Wanting to fit in leads to interesting behavior

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A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research finds that people are willing to alter their behavior in a quest to try to fit in:

“Social exclusion is a very painful experience, which makes it a strong motivator,” explains Tyler Stillman, a visiting sociology professor at Southern Utah University, who is one of the study’s co-authors.

In one experiment, researchers paired study participants with a partner who left midway through the study. Some of the participants believed their partners left because they didn’t like them — and those people were more easily talked into buying a silly school spirit trinket. In another study, people who felt excluded were more likely to say they were willing to try cocaine. Researchers say their findings could have real-life implications.

Interesting results. If these results are all based on lab experiments, how much more willing would people be to change their behavior to fit in when confronted with real people?

I would be curious to find if the study looked at different age groups. If lab experiments were only conducted with undergraduate students, might the results change if the same experiments were done with older adults?

How technology might contribute to being late

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A writer at the Wall Street Journal argues that technology has contributed to more people being willing to be late to appointments:

Now, thanks to cellphones, BlackBerrys and other gadgets, too many of us have become blasé about being late. We have so many ways to relay a message that we’re going to be tardy that we no longer feel guilty about it.

And lateness is contagious. Once one person is tardy, others feel they can be late as well. It becomes beneficial to be the last one in a group to show up, because your wait will be the shortest.

The writer admits that lateness is not caused by technology since lateness has existed for a long time. Yet at the same time, I can see how this might work: because the late person is still able to maintain contact with the person who is waiting for them, the late person could feel that it is less of a problem that they are late. After all, at least they let the other person they were going to be late.