Fellas, if a woman is hedging her statements on any topic—if she “sorta” likes her drink or “kinda” feels chilly or “probably” will have another hors d’oeuvre—you can bet that she is “sorta” “kinda” “probably” not into you.
A woman is likely to be interested when she talks about herself. It turns out that, for a man looking to connect, the most beautiful word you can hear from a woman’s mouth may be “I”: it’s a sign she is feeling comfortable. A woman also is likely to be interested if she uses self-marking phrases such as “Ya know?” and “I mean.” Why? The scientists noted that these phrases invite the listener’s attention. They are friendly and warm and suggest a person is looking to connect, ya know what I mean?
Now, how can men and women communicate in order to get a date interested in them? The data tells us that there are plenty of ways a man can talk to raise the chances a woman likes him. Women like men who follow their lead. Perhaps not surprisingly, a woman is more likely to report a connection if a man laughs at her jokes and keeps the conversation on topics she introduces rather than constantly changing the subject to those he wants to talk about.* Women also like men who express support and sympathy. If a man says, “That’s awesome!” or “That’s really cool,” a woman is significantly more likely to report a connection. Likewise if he uses phrases such as “That’s tough” or “You must be sad.”
For women, there is some bad news here, as the data seems to confirm a distasteful truth about men. Conversation plays only a small role in how they respond to women. Physical appearance trumps all else in predicting whether a man reports a connection. That said, there is one word that a woman can use to at least slightly improve the odds a man likes her and it’s one we’ve already discussed: “I.” Men are more likely to report clicking with a woman who talks about herself. And as previously noted, a woman is also more likely to report a connection after a date where she talks about herself. Thus it is a great sign, on a first date, if there is substantial discussion about the woman. The woman signals her comfort and probably appreciates that the man is not hogging the conversation. And the man likes that the woman is opening up. A second date is likely.
Finally, there is one clear indicator of trouble in a date transcript: a question mark. If there are lots of questions asked on a date, it is less likely that both the man and the woman will report a connection. This seems counterintuitive; you might think that questions are a sign of interest. But not so on a first date. On a first date, most questions are signs of boredom. “What are your hobbies?” “How many brothers and sisters do you have?” These are the kinds of things people say when the conversation stalls. A great first date may include a single question at the end: “Will you go out with me again?” If this is the only question on the date, the answer is likely to be “Yes.”
And men and women don’t just talk differently when they’re trying to woo each other. They talk differently in general.
A team of psychologists analyzed the words used in hundreds of thousands of Facebook posts. They measured how frequently every word is used by men and women. They could then declare which are the most masculine and most feminine words in the English language.
Many of these word preferences, alas, were obvious. For example, women talk about “shopping” and “my hair” much more frequently than men do. Men talk about “football” and “Xbox” much more frequently than women do. You probably didn’t need a team of psychologists analyzing Big Data to tell you that.
Some of the findings, however, were more interesting. Women use the word “tomorrow” far more often than men do, perhaps because men aren’t so great at thinking ahead. Adding the letter “o” to the word “so” is one of the most feminine linguistic traits. Among the words most disproportionately used by women are “soo,” “sooo,” “soooo,” “sooooo,” and “soooooo.”
Maybe it was my childhood exposure to women who weren’t afraid to throw the occasional f-bomb. But I always thought cursing was an equal-opportunity trait. Not so. Among the words used much more frequently by men than women are “fuck,” “shit,” “fucks,” “bullshit,” “fucking,” and “fuckers.”
Here are word clouds showing words used mostly by men and those used mostly by women. The larger a word appears, the more that word’s use tilts toward that gender.
Males
Females
What I like about this study is the new data informs us of patterns that have long existed but we hadn’t necessarily been aware of. Men and women have always spoken in different ways. But, for tens of thousands of years, this data disappeared as soon as the sound waves faded in space. Now this data is preserved on computers and can be analyzed by computers.
Or perhaps what I should have said, given my gender: “The words used to fucking disappear. Now we can take a break from watching football and playing Xbox and learn this shit. That is, if anyone gives a fuck.”
It isn’t just men and women who speak differently. People use different words as they age. This might even give us some clues as to how the aging process plays out. Here, from the same study, are the words most disproportionately used by people of different ages on Facebook. I call this graphic “Drink. Work. Pray.” In people’s teens, they’re drinking. In their twenties, they are working. In their thirties and onward, they are praying.
DRINK.WORK.PRAY
19-to 22-year-olds
23-to 29-year-olds
30-to 65-year-olds
A powerful new tool for analyzing text is something called sentiment analysis. Scientists can now estimate how happy or sad a particular passage of text is.
How? Teams of scientists have asked large numbers of people to code tens of thousands of words in the English language as positive or negative. The most positive words, according to this methodology, include “happy,” “love,” and “awesome.” The most negative words include “sad,” “death,” and “depression.” They thus have built an index of the mood of a huge set of words.
Using this index, they can measure the average mood of words in a passage of text. If someone writes “I am happy and in love and feeling awesome,” sentiment analysis would code that as extremely happy text. If someone writes “I am sad thinking about all the world’s death and depression,” sentiment analysis would code that as extremely sad text. Other pieces of text would be somewhere in between.