Being Human

Daemon's TV (blog)
COMMUNITY "Social Psychology" Episode 4
Daemon's TV (blog)
Take a first look at the new NBC series COMMUNITY "Social Psychology" Episode 4 Thursday October 8 (9:30-10 pm ET). Episode Synopsis: COMMUNITY "Social ...

While Adolescents May Reason As Well As Adults, Their Emotional Maturity Lags ...
Science Daily (press release)
... of dangerous decisions," said Laurence Steinberg, PhD, a professor of developmental psychology at Temple University and lead author of the study. ...

and more »

PsychCentral.com
Positive Posture
Tonic
(The results of the study are published in this month's European Journal of Social Psychology.) "Sitting up straight is something you can train yourself to ...
The Instant Confidence BoostAllure Magazine
Sit straight to boost your confidence!Times of India
Study: Posture Affects Personal ConfidenceOzarks First
Reuters India -Science Daily (press release)
all 52 news articles »

So that's what they mean by "War of Northern Aggression."
Canada.com
This is actual research, from an actual scientific source, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It was done in 1996, but you can still find it ...

In my recent post "The United States as a subject", I discussed the often-repeated story that the American Civil War turned "the United States are" into "the United States is", and observed that "no one seems ever to have checked, at least not very thoroughly". It's a good thing that I said "seems", since Minor Myers has gently pointed me to his article "Supreme Court Usage and the Making of an 'Is'", 11 Green Bag 2d 457, August 2008, in which he checks this very point, very carefully, in opinions of the United States Supreme Court from 1790 to 1919.

And the answer? In the case of U.S. Supreme Court opinions, we apparently became an 'is' somewhat gradually, between 1840 and 1910. And the effect of the Civil War (or at least its immediate aftermath) was apparently to retard the change, not to accelerate it.

After citing the Shelby Foote "It made us an 'is'" quote that I also gave, Myers adds some evidence of the ubiquity of this view. Thus he quotes James McPherson, Battle cry of freedom: The Civil War era, 1988:

Before 1861 the two words ‘United States’ were rendered as a plural noun: ‘the United States are a republic.’ The war marked a transition of the United States to a singular noun.

And also William Michael Treanor, "Taking Text Too Serously: Modern Textualism, Original meaning, and the Case of Amar's Bill of Rights", Michigan Law Review, vol. 106, 487-544 (Dec. 2007):

‘United States’ was often matched with a plural verb in 1787 and consistently matched with a singular verb after the Civil War.

In order to evaluate these claims in the case of Supreme Court opinions, Myers used the following method:

For each decade in the survey period, I ran word searches for “United States is” and “United States are” through the Westlaw Supreme Court database. To eliminate false positives, I reviewed the search results to identify opinions where (1) “United States” was a subject and (2) the associated verb was “is” (or “are,” depending on the search). To isolate only usage choices made by the author, anything appearing only in a quotation from a statute, a court rule, or another case was ignored, as was anything in West headnotes. Each opinion in a particular case was treated as a separate work, and thus a case could have more than one entry if more than one justice wrote or if a justice used both “is” and “are” in the same opinion. I collected data on usage in the opinions of justices, the arguments of counsel before the court, and supplementary material prepared by the reporter of decisions (e.g., a syllabus). Except where noted, the focus of the presentation here is on usage in opinions of the justices; data on usage in other portions of the case reports appear in the Appendix.

Here are his basic results in graphical form (click for a larger version):

His conclusion:

The Civil War does not appear to have altered the Supreme Court’s usage in a fashion as dramatic as Foote and McPherson have suggested. In the 1860s, the usage pattern shifts away from “are” and toward “is,” and it is during that decade that usage of “is” first predominates. But the change is not wholesale – “are” and “is” were used roughly equally in the 1860s. In the following decade, Court usage reverted back to antebellum patterns. For the remainder of the nineteenth century, plural usage predominated in Supreme Court opinions, though by slowly declining margins.

Usage was quite clearly unsettled in the latter part of the nineteenth century. One of the most striking demonstrations of this is Justice Samuel F. Miller’s majority opinion in United States v. Lee. Justice Miller managed to compose a sentence with both usages:

“[T]he doctrine [of sovereign immunity], if not absolutely limited to cases in which the United States are made defendants by name, is not permitted to interfere with the judicial enforcement of the established rights of plaintiffs when the United States is not a defendant or a necessary party to the suit.”

He observes that some of the obvious theories about sources of variation don't pan out, at least in this data set:

Geography does not help explain this pattern. Looking at the geographic latitudes of the justices’ residences prior to appointment, there is no meaningful difference between the mean latitude for the exclusive “are” users and the mean for those who dabbled in “is.”

Politics doesn't seem to help either, at least in the obvious way:

To see whether the Civil War might have influenced usage in a different way, I isolated the usage by justices who were appointed by President Abraham Lincoln. In fact, during the period when at least one justice appointed by Lincoln was on the Court, the five Lincoln-appointed justices used “are” slightly more frequently than did the other justices.

Here's his appendix, giving the counts in different sorts of SCOTUS material:

It would be interesting to look at some other features as well — number agreement with verbs other than is/are; (which would help to increase the rather small counts from this source); the distribution of pronouns co-referential with the United States (19th-century newspapers give us examples of they, it, she, and we); what fraction of "United States" instances are subjects as opposed to modifiers or PP complements or whatever; how usage is affected by the topic, e.g. relations of the federal government to foreign governments, to the states separately, to individual citizens or companies, etc.

West's materials are definitely not accessible for automatic processing of such questions; but most if not all of the same documents are available on the web, I think, so this might be a good testing ground for the idea of automatic or semi-automatic analysis of this type.

There's a curious case published in the medical journal Epilepsy and Behavior of a young man who had his epilepsy triggered by the sight of stairs. This would cause seizures that would trigger "repetitive hugging and affectionate kissing of one of the people around him".

Our patient is currently 24 years old. He is a right-handed male with a history of right temporal lobe epilepsy. He had his first seizure when he was 10 years old. His seizures usually started with an aura of a “feeling” inside his body or abdomen. This feeling, described at times as pain or nausea, lasted a few seconds or a few minutes. His eyes would then widen, he would become confused, and he would look around right and left as if wondering. The seizure would last 1 to 2 minutes with altered consciousness, spitting, and often repetitive hugging and affectionate kissing of one of the people around him.

At times this was followed by head and eye deviation to the left and, sometimes, rotation of the whole body to the left side. Occasionally, he would walk around for a few seconds. These seizures were often precipitated by looking at stairs, whether or not he was walking up the stairs. He learned to avoid looking at stairs to avoid having seizures. He also noted that looking down a flight of stairs did not precipitate his seizures.

I am constantly amazed by both how seizures can be triggered by very specific experiences (such as seeing a certain thing, or hearing a specific sound) and how they can lead to very selective actions.

This is by no means a typical effect of epilepsy but it does raise the interesting question of how these very narrow experiences lead to destabilising brain states which trigger a seizure.

I have heard anecdotal reports from several clinicians that they've met patients who can 'think their way out' of a seizure by deliberately focusing their thoughts on a specific topic, presumably which reduces the destabilising effect of their original 'trigger experience'.

I've not seen this discussed in the medical literature though, so if you know of any articles that do tackle it, I'd love to hear about them.

Link to PubMed entry for stair triggered epilepsy case.

From a NYT story (Shaila Dewan, "Pollster's Censure Jolts News Organizations", October 3) on the polling company Strategic Vision, which has been reprimanded by a professional society of pollsters for failing to disclose "essential facts" about its methods:

As for the accusation that the company's claim to be based in Atlanta was misleading, Mr. Johnson [David E. Johnson, the founder and chief executive of Strategic Vision] acknowledged that the main Strategic Vision office was in Blairsville, Ga., 115 miles away, but said the difference was "semantic".

Yeah, yeah, blame it on the words. "Semantic" here means 'only semantic, not substantive' and locates the problem not in differences of matters of fact but in differences in the meanings of linguistic expressions. The claim is that some people use certain expressions (like based in Atlanta) one way, while other people use these expressions somewhat differently, so that any dispute about the state of things is "just / merely / only" a dispute about word meanings.

Now, there's plenty of variation in the meanings people assign to words (and other expressions), and lexicographers, dialectologists, sociolinguists, and theoretical linguists examine this variation all the time. The question is whether SV's use of based in Atlanta is an instance of this sort of variation. As a rule of thumb, you should be suspicious whenever someone who's not professionally involved in the study of semantic variation dismisses some difference as "(just) semantic(s)" or the like; it's likely to be a dodge, or at least a stretching of the truth.

In the case at hand, what's at issue is what counts as being in some location. There's a certain amount of allowable leeway in such things, according to which you can get by saying that your company is located in X when in fact it's in a suburb of X or in a separate jurisdiction within the boundaries of X. So if your company is located in West Hollywood, Santa Monica, or Burbank, it wouldn't be entirely misleading to say (in some contexts) that it's in Los Angeles (though "in the Los Angeles area", or something similar, would be a more scrupulous phrasing).

But even when places are in the same metropolitan area and are close to one another, sometimes few people would accept as "located/based in [principal city of the whole area]" as an identification for a company. A company based in Oakland, Berkeley, Palo Alto, or Mountain View (not to mention San Jose or Santa Cruz) can't get away with saying it's "based in San Francisco". "Based in the Bay Area", yes, but not "based in San Francisco". Sometimes, close doesn't count.

Washington DC and Baltimore MD are different locations, even though they're only 34 miles apart; similarly, Boston MA and Providence RI, only 41 miles apart. And then on to New York NY and New Haven CT, 67 miles apart; Chicago IL and Milwaukee WI, 83 miles apart; New York NY and Philadelphia PA, 86 miles apart; Cleveland OH and Erie PA, 92 miles apart. (All under the 115-mile mark.)

You don't have to cross state lines: Philadelphia and Harrisburg PA are 90 miles apart; Columbus and Cincinnati OH, 100 miles apart; Los Angeles and San Diego CA, 111 miles apart. Just a tad over the 115-mile mark are Columbus and Cleveland OH, 124 miles apart. (These lists are not intended to be exhaustive, merely representative; the distances are from the Geobytes City Distance Tool.)

The point is that it can be seriously misleading to say that your company is based at location X when in fact it's based at location Y, even if Y is not far from X or is in Y's cultural orbit.

Note: "in its cultural orbit". I imagine that David Johnson would like to claim that he can say that his company is based in Atlanta because Atlanta is the largest city near the tiny town of Blairsville (though Knoxville TN is 122 miles from Blairsville). But thinking this way would allow all sorts of mischievous misrepresentation. For instance, a company with its headquarters in Auburn AL could represent itself as "based in Atlanta" (a mere 106 miles away from Auburn).

It might have been useful for Johnson to refer to Atlanta in some way in locating his company. (Who knows about Blairsville, after all?) Or he could have said that the company is located in Union County, at the very northern edge of Georgia. But saying that the company is located in Atlanta just won't do, and trying to deflect criticism of this claim by saying it's all a matter of semantics won't do either.

[Addendum 10/8: Peter Taylor writes: "One of the criticisms levelled at Strategic Vision, LLC is that there is a well-known (and, it is alleged, better-known) polling company called Strategic Vision, Inc. based in San Diego. At the moment your LL post refers simply to "Strategic Vision". You may wish to clarify."]

Local MC student looks for answers with autism study
Marietta Times
Haught had little background on autism when she learned a bit about it in a developmental psychology course at the college. She took that interest to ...

I was trying to keep up with the news on Iran's "secret new nuclear enrichment facility" a couple of weeks ago, as I'm sure many of our readers were also doing. In reading one update in the NYT, I came upon this quotation:

[Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran's nuclear program, said in an interview with ISNA news agency on Sunday, said] that Iran had taken defensive measures against possible military threats against the facility into consideration. "We are always faced with threats," he said. "We don't think that those threats would necessarily take place but we have prepared ourselves for the worse."

Shouldn't that be "for the worst"?, I found myself asking as I read this. But then I remembered the fact that [t] and [d] are highly likely to be deleted (= unpronounced) in this kind of position (word- and utterance-finally and after another consonant) in many if not most (most if not all?) spoken varieties of English, even when the distinction between e.g. worse and worst is at stake — a somewhat subtle distinction in most contexts anyway, including this one. This deletion has also been found to be even more likely among (some groups of) second language speakers, which we can reasonably assume the translator (and/or the transcriber) to be. [ I've not been able to find the original quote, but given that the ISNA is primarily a Persian-language news agency (with an available English-language version), I assume that this English quotation was not original to Salehi but rather that it is a translation of the Persian original. ]

Quick Google searches for {"prepare for the worst"} and {"prepare for the worse"} reveal both that the variant with worst is almost 10 times more common than the variant with worse (~25M ghits vs. ~2.6M ghits) and what appears to me to be a subtle but not insignificant class distinction of sorts: the worst variant seems to be found in more formal, "corporate" sites (book publishers, magazines, and the like), while the worse variant seems to be found in more informal sites (message boards, blogs, and the like). Overall, though, not too shabby a showing for the worse variant.

New Scientist has a fantastic issue on 'strange journeys of the mind' that has three great articles on the twilight zone of sleep, simulating psychopathology with hypnosis and laboratory-induced out-of-body experiences.

The piece on the hypnotic simulation of brain disturbances is fantastic, not least because it features two researchers I work with, Peter Halligan and David Oakley, who have done some of the seminal work in the area.

Essentially, the approach views hypnosis as a tool that allows researchers, with the co-operation of the participant, to temporarily alter mental states in a completely safe and reversible way.

Importantly, these alterations, such as blindness or paralysis, seem like they're happening 'on their own' - which helps us understand conditions like conversion disorder, where these sorts of symptoms appear without any neurological damage but without the patient seeming to have any control over them.

The other article which blew me away was on recent studies suggesting that sleep and alertness are not two distinct states of consciousness and in some people with a dementia-like brain disorder the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness completely break down.

That this can happen contradicts the way we usually think about sleep, but it came as no surprise to Mark Mahowald, medical director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis, who has long contested the dogma that sleep and wakefulness are discrete and distinct states. "There is now overwhelming evidence that the primary states of being are not mutually exclusive," he says. The blurring of sleep and wakefulness is very clear in status dissociatus, but he believes it can happen to us all. If he is right, we will have to rethink our understanding of what sleep is and what it is for. Maybe wakefulness is not the all-or-nothing phenomenon we thought it was either.

Finally, the piece on out of body experiences covers the work of Swiss researchers who have been studying these states in people with brain disorder, and managing to induce them in volunteers in a number of inventive ways.

Three awesome articles, all worth your time, all open-access. Three cheers New Scientist.

Link to article on sleep states.
Link to article on hypnotic simulations.
Link to article on out-of-body experiences.

Facebook Tries to Monitor Happiness
WebProNews (blog)
... as happier than usual," says Adam DI Kramer, a Ph.D. student in social psychology at the University of Oregon and an intern on Facebook's data team. ...

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Electrical readings from seven patients who died in hospital suggest that the brain undergoes a surge of activity at the moment of death, according to a study just published in the Journal of Palliative Medicine.

Palliative care is a medical approach that aims to make dying patients as comfortable as possible. As part of this, doctors from George Washington University Medical Centre's intensive care unit were using standard alertness monitors for seven patients that include EEG measurements of the frontal lobes.

The monitors are commercial devices designed to help anaesthetists monitor how 'awake' patients are, and they combine the electrical readings from the brain into a single signal that reflects alertness.

For each of the seven patients, the researchers noticed that at the point where blood pressure dropped to zero there was a surge in brain activity. The graph on the right is from one of the patients and shows a typical activity burst.

This is not the first time these have been noticed, but previous reports were single cases and the electrical surges were explained away as due to electrical interference from other sources. In these new cases, the doctors could be pretty confident that previously suggested sources of interference weren't present.

Instead, they suggest that the surge was due to 'anoxic depolarisation' - a process where the lack of oxygen destabilises the electrical balance of the neurons leading to one last cascade of activity.

Now, this is just a case series and the neuroelectrical measures aren't the best. The researchers encourage more systematic research with appropriate tools, but they do suggest an intriguing hypothesis with regard to 'near death experiences':

We speculate that in those patients who suffer cardiac arrest who are successfully revived, they may recall the images and memories triggered by this cascade. We offer this as a potential explanation for the clarity in which many patients have "out of body experiences" when successfully revived from a near death event.

One of the difficulties, of course, is that although 'near death experiences' are a well-known phenomenon, we only know about them from people who weren't really dying (or even from people who were never actually 'near death' as one of my favourite studies attests).

Nevertheless, neuroscience studies on the dying are likely to be of increasing interest especially as the debate about what counts as death become more prominent.

Link to DOI entry and summary of study.

Sit straight to boost your confidence!
Times of India
... convincing yourself by the posture you're in," Petty added. The research was published in the October issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology .
The Instant Confidence BoostAllure Magazine
Study: Posture Affects Personal ConfidenceOzarks First
Good posture boosts self confidence: StudyTheMedGuru
Tonic -Reuters
all 57 news articles »

Here are some excerpts from “Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of our Ancestors” by New York Times reporter Nicholas Wade:

Out of Africa
It must have a required a … genetic revolution … to make possible the emergence of behaviorally modern humans [from Africa] (p. 31)  Religion, language and reciprocity ... all seem to have emerged [there] some 50,000 years ago. (p. 168) 

Between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago much of Africa was depopulated … The reason may have been a long period of dry climate … The ancestral population itself … shrank to as few as 5,000 people. (p. 50-51) Those departing, a group of perhaps just 150 people, planned to leave Africa altogether. (p. 12) [They] crossed over the Red Sea … traveled along the coasts of southeast Asia, arriving in Australia some 46,000 years ago. (p. 8)

Modern language probably evolved only 50,000 years ago [in Africa] … all languages are probably offshoots of a single mother tongue. (p. 226) The propensity for religious belief [also dating from that time] may be innate … wired into the human mind. (p. 164)

50,000 years ago – the evolution of behaviorally modern humans
After the dispersal of the ancient population from Africa 50,000 years ago, human evolution continued independently in each continent. (p. 9) For much of the period during which the exodus from Africa unfolded, from 50,000 to 30,000 years ago, people everywhere may have looked pretty much the same … It seems likely that the first modern humans who reached Europe 45,000 years ago would also have retained black skin and other African features. (p. 95)

It has long been assumed by historians, archeologists and social scientists that human evolution was completed in the distant past … It now appears the opposite is the case. The human genome has been in full flux all the time. (p. 267)  The genome evolves so fast that whenever any community starts to breed in isolation … within a few centuries its genetics assume a distinct signature. (p. 10)

[For example,] a new version of the microcephalin gene appeared around 37,000 years ago … and is now carried by most people in Europe and East Asia. [Another] gene, a new version of ASPM, emerged 6,000 years ago and is now carried by 44% of Caucasians. Both genes are thought to be involved in determining the number of neurons formed in the cerebral cortex [conferring some cognitive advantage]. (p. 271)

The human genome bears many marks of recent evolution, prompted by adaptation to events such as cultural changes or new diseases. (p. 9)  From a historical point of view, the most interesting class of evolutionary [genetic] changes are those that occurred in response to human culture. (p. 270)

The last 15,000 years – the evolution of less violent humans
Human societies have progressed through several major transitions in the last 15,000 years … accompanied by evolutionary [genetic] as well as cultural changes. (p. 178)  Each … major cultural transition … could have become genetically embedded as the individuals who best adapted to each new social stage left more children. (p. 179)

There is a 45,000-year delay between the time of the ancestral human population [who departed Africa 50,000 years ago] and the first great urban civilizations … A suite of genetic changes [may have led to less aggressive behavior] that made people readier to live together in larger groups, to coexist without constant fighting and to accept the imposition of chieftains and hierarchy. (p. 129) 

Warfare was a routine preoccupation of primitive societies. Some 65% were at war constantly … A typical tribal society lost about 0.5% of its population in combat each year. (p. 151) If warfare was the normal state of affairs, it would have shaped almost every aspect of early human societies. (p. 157)  A willingness to kill members of one’s own species is apparently correlated with high intelligence. (p. 148) When they grow beyond a certain size, of 150 or so people, disputes [in tribal societies] became more frequent, and with no chiefs or system of adjudication, a group would break up into smaller ones along lines of kinship. (p. 72) 

It required … a diminution of [innate] human aggression and probably the evolution of new cognitive faculties, for the first settlements to emerge, beginning 15,000 years ago, and it was in the context of settled societies that warfare, trade and religion attained new degrees of complexity and refinement. (p. 265)  With [innately] tamer people, the path was now set for larger and more complex societies … that would transcend the limited horizons of the hunter-gatherer band. (p. 177)

In the Near East, around 15,000 years ago, people at last accomplished a decisive social transition, the founding of the first settled communities. (p. 9) The first evidence of a successful and long term settled community comes from people called the Natufians, who lived in the Near East from about 15,000 to 11,500 years ago. (p. 126)  The first cities started springing up in southern Mesopotamia [Iraq] some 6,000 years ago … As societies became more intricate, their operations demanded … more specialized cognitive abilities.  The invention of writing around 3400 BC opened the way to the beginning of recorded history. (p. 234) 

Though they were probably egalitarian at first, they soon developed a hierarchical form, with elites, leaders and specialization of roles. (p. 178)  Without specialized roles and some kind of hierarchy, a human society cannot grow beyond a certain level of size or complexity. (p. 69) 

Genetics and race
Today’s races did not appear until about 12,000 to 10,000 years ago [after the glaciers began their final retreat 15,000 years ago.]. (p. 200)  People can be assigned to racial groups based on sampling just a few hundred sites in their genome. (p. 194)

Genghis Khan had nearly 500 wives and concubines … An astonishing 8% of males throughout the former lands of the Mongol empire carry the Y chromosome of Genghis Khan [which] raises the question whether grandiose procreation wasn’t just a perk of Genghis Khan’s power but a motivation for it. (p. 236-7)

Richard E. Nisbett, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, believes there are “dramatic differences in the nature of Asian and European though processes” … Did rice farming encourage the conformity for which eastern societies are known and small-scale farming the rugged individualism of the west? (p 274)

The future of human evolution
For social species the most important feature of the environment is their own society. So to the extent that people have shaped their own society, they have determined the conditions of their own evolution. (p. 267)

The inhabitants of the far future are always portrayed as looking and behaving exactly like people today. [But] all that is certain about future evolution is that people will not remain the same as they are today. (p. 275)  Future evolution will differ from that of the past … new genes inserted into the human genome on a widescale basis to replace existing genes [may supplant] the quaint and hazardous method of conceiving at random. (p. 277)  When the first generation of [genetically modified] humans … turn out to be entirely normal and robustly healthy, various enhancements of desirable traits [like intelligence] are allowed … With germline modification … human intervention can reach a desired outcome much more quickly. (p. 278)

The genes that influence human social behavior are inscribed somewhere in the genome but have not yet been recognized. (p. 141) “The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology,” writes Edward O. Wilson.  (p. 266)

Vaccination drive could use a pollster
The Hill
... 07:08 PM ET One of the dark secrets of the polling trade is that our historical roots are deeply intertwined with the social psychology of propaganda. ...

and more »

George F. Will, "An Olympic Ego Trip", WaPo, 10/6/2009:

In the Niagara of words spoken and written about the Obamas' trip to Copenhagen, too few have been devoted to the words they spoke there. Their separate speeches to the International Olympic Committee were so dreadful, and in such a characteristic way, that they might be symptomatic of something that has serious implications for American governance.

Both Obamas gave heartfelt speeches about . . . themselves. Although the working of the committee's mind is murky, it could reasonably have rejected Chicago's bid for the 2016 Games on aesthetic grounds — unless narcissism has suddenly become an Olympic sport.

In the 41 sentences of her remarks, Michelle Obama used some form of the personal pronouns "I" or "me" 44 times. Her husband was, comparatively, a shrinking violet, using those pronouns only 26 times in 48 sentences. Still, 70 times in 89 sentences conveyed the message that somehow their fascinating selves were what made, or should have made, Chicago's case compelling.

The last time George F. Will trotted out his opinion that president Obama is "inordinately fond of the first-person pronoun", I did some counts ("Fact-checking George F. Will", 6/7/2009). As I explained:

…since I'm one of those narrow-minded fundamentalists who believe that statements can be true or false, and that we should care about the difference, I decided to check. …

I took the transcript of Obama's first press conference (from 2/9/2009), and found that he used  'I' 163 times in 7,775 total words, for a rate of 2.10%. He also used 'me' 8 times and 'my' 35 times, for a total first-person singular pronoun count of 206 in 7,775 words, or a rate of 2.65%.

For comparison, I took George W. Bush's first two solo press conferences as president (from 2/22/2001 and 3/29/2001), and found that W used 'I' 239 times in 6,681 total words, for a rate of 3.58% — a rate 72% higher than Obama's rate. President Bush also used 'me' 26 times, 'my' 31 times, and 'myself' 4 times, for a total first-person singular pronoun count of 300 in 6,681 words, or a rate of  4.49% (59% higher than Obama).

For a third data point, I took William J. Clinton's first two solo press conferences as president (from 1/29/1993 and 3/23/1993), and found that he used 'I' 218 times, 'me' 34 times, 'my' 22 times, and 'myself' once, in 6,935 total words. That's a total of 275 first-person singular pronouns, and a rate of 3.14% for 'I' (51% higher than Obama), and 3.87% for first-person singular pronouns overall (50% higher than Obama).

As a result of this previous experience, I had a first-person-counting script all ready to go, and it took only a few seconds to check the new transcripts. This time around, Barack Obama's Olympic remarks included 26 first-person-singular words out of 1130, for a rate of 2.3%. This is slightly below his typical rate for presidential press conferences, and a bit more than half the rate of the George W. Bush pressers that I measured earlier (2.3/4.49 = 51%, to be precise).

[Give me some links for presidential remarks at events more comparable to these, and I'll check them out as well — I don't have time to look around this afternoon.]

It's true that Michelle's tally was higher — 45 first-person-singular words out of 781, for a rate of 5.76%.

This is almost as much as the 6.4% first-person-singulars registered by Nancy Reagan's statement on Edward Kennedy's death, or the 7.0% achieved by her remarks at the christening of the USS Ronald Reagan in 2001, or the 10.0% notched by her discussion of the assassination attempt on her husband. [Again, give me pointers to ceremonial remarks by former first ladies on occasions like the Geneva meeting, and I'll tally them as well.]

Mr. Will also complains about the

…  egregious cliches sprinkled around by the tin-eared employees in the White House speechwriting shop. The president told the Olympic committee that: "At this defining moment," a moment "when the fate of each nation is inextricably linked to the fate of all nations" in "this ever-shrinking world," he aspires to "forge new partnerships with the nations and the peoples of the world."

Unfortunately, I don't have a program ready to hand for measuring cliche-density, much less cliche egregiosity, but I'll work on it. My prediction: in speeches prepared for ceremonial occasions like this one, the cliche density of presidential rhetoric has been fairly constant for decades if not centuries.

There are two interesting questions here, it seems to me. The first one is why George F. Will is so struck by rates of first-person usage, on the part of Barack and Michelle Obama, that are significantly lower than has been typical of recent presidents and first ladies on similar occasions. The second question is how many pundits and talking heads will follow his brainless lead this time around.  For some attempts to tally the score from the last go-round, you could check out these LL posts:

"Fact-checking George F. Will" (6/7/2009); "Obama's Imperial 'I': spreading the meme" (6/8/2009); "Inaugural pronouns" (6/8/2009); "Another pack member heard from" (6/9/2009); "I again" (7/13/2009); "'I' is a camera" (7/18/2009).

And if you're curious about what inferences, if any, can be drawn from someone's rate of first-person-singular usage, see Jamie Pennebaker's guest post "What is 'I' saying?",  8/9/2009.

[Now that I think of it, there's another significant question here as well. How in the world did our culture  award major-pundit status to someone whose writings are as empirically and spiritually empty as those of George F. Will?]

[Update — I clearly haven't been paying attention to the right pundits. The "Obama is a narcissist" meme has seen a surge among Republican beltway insiders in recent weeks:

Mona Charen, "Obama's Self-Worship", Real Clear Politics, 9/25/2009:

President Obama's speech to the United Nations has been called naive and even "post-American." It was something else, as well: the most extravagant excursion into self-worship we have yet seen in an American leader.

Michael Gerson, "All about Obama", 9/26/2009, Washington Post:

I can recall no other major American speech in which the narcissism of a leader has been quite so pronounced.

David Frum, "Obama's Narcissism", newmajority, 9/26/2009:

Michael Gerson's reading of President Obama's speech to the U.N. is both shrewd and damning.

Marty Peretz, "Rio, 1 — Chicago, 0. The Politics of Narcissism and General McChrystal", TNR, 10/4/2009:

What I suspect is that the president is probably a clinical narcissist. This is not necessarily a bad condition if one maintains for oneself what the psychiatrists call an "optimal margin of illusion," that is, the margin of hope that allows you to work. But what if his narcissism blinds him to the issues and problems in the world and the inveterate foes of the nation that are not susceptible to his charms?

And so on.  So George Will was just adding his pebble to a pot of stone soup that was already on the boil.  I'm not sure whether this makes his column less stupid — because he's chiming in to support one of his cohort's talking points — or more stupid — because the idea, though apparently vacuous, is not even his.]

[Update #2 — in the comments, Sinfonian points us to his tally of FPS pronouns in three pages of George Will's essay "The Cubs and Conservatism": 29 in 853 words, or 3.4%.  Less than George W. Bush's press conference, but more than Obama's Copenhagen speech.]

That's what I called my own piece on William Safire, which runs today on "Fresh Air" and is online here. I cover some of the same ground that Ben does in his pitch-perfect Times magazine piece, mentioning his generosity to his critics and his willingness to acknowledge his mistakes. A very different tenor from his weekday columns — I think his Sunday readers got the best of him. I also pay tribute to his disinclination to engage in the rhetorical high jinks of other popular grammarians:

He was no snob. You can't imagine him comparing a poet who confused between and among with someone picking his nose at a party, the way John Simon once did. And he wasn't susceptible to the grammatical vapors that affect writers like Lynne Truss — the people who like to describe lapses of grammar as setting their teeth on edge, making their skin crawl, or leaving them gasping for breath, as if they'd spent all their lives up till now closeted with Elizabeth and Darcy in the morning room at Pemberley. 

Above all, there was his ability to convey his pleasure in ruminating on language: "It wasn't just that he loved words — who doesn't? But he really, really liked them."

Other things on Safire worth looking at include Jan Freeman's piece in the Boston Globe (if I had read this before I wrote mine I probably wouldn't have bothered) and Todd Gitlin's in the New Republic, as well as a Newsweek reminiscence by Aaron Britt, who served as Safire's assistant for a while. (The New Republic also posted part of a 1987 review of one of Safire's language books by Louis Menand.) For a more unforgiving take, see David Bromwich's "Wars Made Out Of Words." Feel free to add links to other pieces in the comments.

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The widely-watched PBS documentary The Civil War included this commentary by Shelby Foote:

Before the war, it was said "the United States are." Grammatically, it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. And after the war, it was always "the United States is," as we say today without being self-conscious at all. And that sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an "is."

Innumerable history lectures have featured similar rhetoric, but as a biologist friend of mine once said about a popular but flamboyantly inventive documentary in his area of specialization, "this is, well, poetically true". In real life, that is, it's false. The civil war may have "made us an 'is'", but it doesn't seem to have brought about any abrupt change in the grammar of "the United States".

I write "doesn't seem to" because no one seems ever to have checked, at least not very thoroughly. So after a few years of intending to get to it, I've done a bit of poking around. And I've discovered two things. First, we need a change in how historical text archives are managed. (At least, I do.) And second, number-agreement — on whatever time scale it happened — is not at all, in my opinion, the most interesting historical change in the grammatical treatment of "the United States".

The executive summary of these two points: First, web-based search of digital text archives is well and good, but it's also critical for scholars to be able to run arbitrary computer programs over entire historical text corpora. In most cases, there's no provision for distribution of the texts that would make that possible; in some cases, the "business model" for the digitization process may actually prevent it.  Second, and more substantively, there's a striking increase during the 19th century in the propensity of the phrase "the United States" to occur in subject position, reflecting an increase in perceived agency and perhaps even in animacy (i.e. personification). In the early decades of the 19th century, "the United States" hardly ever occurs as a grammatical subject; today, about half of all textual occurrences are in subject position. Much more research will be needed to determine the time course of this change, but in newspaper text, it may have been associated with reporting and editorializing about military and diplomatic activities in the 1840s such as the struggle over Oregon and the Mexican-American War.

Let me start by tracing Shelby Foote's pontification to its historical roots. Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve wrote in Hellas and Hesperia; or, The vitality of Greek studies in America (1909) that

Not that I am ashamed of being a grammarian, and if I chose I might enlarge on the historical importance of grammar in general, and Greek grammar in particular. It was a point of grammatical concord which was at the bottom of the Civil War — "United States are," said one, "United States is," said another; and a whimsical scholar of my acquaintance used to maintain that the ignorance of Greek idiom that brought about the mistranslation "Men and brethren" (Acts ii, 29) is responsible for the humanitarian cry, "Am I not a man and a brother?" which made countless thousands mourn.

Gildersleeve, who fought for the Confederacy, is referring to a popular anti-slavery medallion by Josiah Wedgwood showing a kneeling slave in chains with the inscription "Am I not a man and a brother?". His little joke about United States number agreement was not apparently founded on any textual scholarship, but neither was it original — a similar thought can be found in G H Emerson, "The Making of a Nation", The Universalist Quarterly and General Review, January 1891:

For about a decade the states, under the technical name, "The United States of America," were a Confederacy; but when the Constitution was adopted the United States was. "They" gave place to "it." And as Mr. Fiske in his latest book, "Civil Government in the United States," has noted, the change from the plural to the singular was vital, though it has taken a War of Rebellion to make the difference unmistakable.

And Fiske in turn expressed the thought this way, in his 1891 work Civil Government in the United States Considered with some Reference to its Origins:

From 1776 to 1789 the United States were a confederation; after 1789 it was a federal nation. The passage from plural to singular was accomplished, although it took some people a good while to realize the fact.

All of these pre-Foote versions of the meme assume that the grammatical consequence of this political change was a gradual one, starting with the Constitutional Convention and proceeding through the 19th century. In this picture, the Civil War was one episode in a long argument over interpretation, starting earlier and continuing later; it was not the cause of any abrupt change in grammatical behavior.  Foote's contribution to this area of  meta-linguistic ideology was to invent (or at least popularize) the whole abrupt behavior-change story.

I've taken these citations from Ben Zimmer's discussions in alt.usage.english ("These United States", 10/5/2004), Language Log ("Life in these, uh, this United States", 11/24/2005) and in his Word Routes column at the Visual Thesaurus ("The United States Is… Or Are?", 7/3/2009). As Ben observes, there is at least one limited attempt at genuine textual scholarship on this point, in the form of a newspaper article by John W. Foster, "ARE OR IS?; Whether a Plural or a Singular Verb Goes With the Words United States", NYT, May 4, 1901:

The reason which has largely controlled the use of the plural verb with "United States" is one of euphony. It seems more natural and euphonistic to couple with this phrase "have" or "were," rather than "has" or "was." In public documents, such as the Presidents' messages, I find a number of examples where both the singular and plural forms are used in the same paper, and sometimes in the same sentence. For instance, Secretary Bayard: "The United States have no reason to believe that any discrimination against its citizens is intended." As the writer gets away from the phrase in the plural form, he escapes the euphonistic influence, and recurs to the the true significance of the words.

[…]

The result of a somewhat cursory examination of the treatment of "United States" by our public men and official bodies may be found curious, if not decisive of the proper or permissive use of the verb and pronoun in connection with that phrase. It is found that in the earlier days of the Republic the prevailing practice was the use of the plural, but even then many of our pulbic men at times employed the singular. Among statesmen who have used the the singular form may be cited Hamilton, Webster, Silas Wright, Benton, Schurz, Edmunds, Depew. Of our Secretaries of State Jefferson, Marcy, Sweard, Fish, Evarts, Baline, Frelinghuysen, Bayard, Gresham, and Olney. Among diplomats Motley, C. F. Adams, E.J. Phelps, and Reid. Of living professors of international law and lawyers Woolsey of Yale, Moore of Columbia, Huffcut of Cornell, and James C. Carter of New York. In the earlier message of the Presidents the use of the singular verb is seldom found, Jackson's being the only one noted; but in later years Lincoln, Grant, Cleveland, Harrison, and McKinley. Messages of the last three are found in which the singular verb alone is used throughout the message in connection with "'United States."

The decision of the Supreme Court in the earlier years rarely show the use of the singular, but several cases have been found, and in later years its use has been growing much more frequent.

The result of my examination is that, while the earlier practice in referring to the "United States" usually followed the formula of the Constitution, our public men of the highest authority gave their countenance, by occasional use, to the singular verb and pronoun: that since the civil war the tendency has been toward such use; and that to-day among public and professional men it has become the prevailing practice.

For today, I'll close with a few counts and examples from the Pennsylvania Civil War Newspapers archive at Penn State, "A collection of newspapers from the civil war era dated from February 23,1831 to February 14,1877."

I checked the first 50 articles containing the phrase "the United States" in the year 1836, published between January 1 and April 25. These involved roughly 150 tokens of the phrase (I didn't try to count them, but there are typically several in an article where there is one). Of all of these, there was only one in subject position (with plural verb agreement), in a story about the Texas War of Independence:

Volunteers arrive daily; and our marine is in a state to blockade the Mexican ports. The result of the delay in the actual strife with the central government will be a radical separation; and if we may credit rumors, the United States propel to this; we shall see hereafter.

There is one other where "the United States" refers to the frigate rather than to the nation:

The United States, we believe, was built in Philadelphia. [refers to the ship "which has recently undergone a thorough repair at New York"]

The other examples are all attributives (the United States Mint, the United States Senate, the United States Infirmary, the United States Bank, the United States ports), or heads of prepositional phrases (the government of the United States, the president of the United States, the Bank of the United States, trade with the United States, the northern coasts of the United States), or verbal objects, or etc.

Searching similarly in the year 1846, I looked at the first 50 articles containing the phrase "the United States", published between January 1 and June 27. These contained 18 cases where the phrase occurs in subject position. (And singular agreement is almost as common and plural agreement.) FWIW, here the examples are:

It is contended, on the part of Great Britain, that the United States acquired and hold the Spanish title subject to the terms and conditions of the Nootka Sound convention

In the mean time, the United States were proceeding with the discoveries which served to complete and confirm the Spanish American title to the whole of the disputed territory.

Will the United States allow 20,000 of these bitter and irreconcilable foes [the Mormons] to take possession of any portion of the Pacific coast that is now or may hereafter by purchase become ours?

In the discussion on the address in the Chamber of deputies, the United States and Texas have likewise come in for a good deal of observation. […] He observed that it was appeared to him, from the remarks in the President's message, that the U. States were dissatisfied in the Texas affair, …

The United States in annexing Texas had assumed the responsibility that devolved upon Texas antecedent to that event.

The unprejudiced of all parties, we doubt not, will freely admit that the United States have a clear right to the territory on which Gen. Taylor is stationed with his troops, and if so, the charge of the Gazetter, that the President has invaded Mexico, is utterly untrue.

Certain it is, that if Texas had not that right, then the United States had not;

He attempted to show that President Polk had trampled upon the constitution of his country — that Gen. Taylor, by his orders, had invaded Mexico — that his army was posted upon soil which did not belong to Texas, and over which neither the Republic or the United States had even exercised civil jurisdiction.

This newspaper has always maintained that neither England nor the United States is entitled to Oregon, and it seizes this occasion to recommend the French government to insist on the whole territory being declared neutral.

…it is now entirely proper to remind our readers that the United States has for a long series of years in terms mild and conciliatory, been endeavoring to obtain from Mexico a fair and just rumuneration for the "injuries and wrongs"; sustained by our citizens.

Against Mexico the United States had a black catalogue of robbery, insult and perfidy, anterior to the Texan controversy.

As we said before, we have those in our midst who declare that the United States is in the wrong.

Is he really willing to vote for resolutions recommending a vigorous prosecution of the war, and in the same breath to declare that it is an unjust war, and that the United States is in the wrong?

From what I can collect, I am of opinion that if the United States, at present, were to attempt to conquer Mexico, or even to annex any considerable portion of its territory, they would cause great dissatisfaction in France; …

This calculation is based somewhat upon the idea that the United States will order an expedition from the Missouri river upon the northern provinces.

The United States of America will never recede in the face of Monarchy; they must greet a kindred Republic across the Rio Grande, or advance and entrench themselves upon the ragged steeps and defiles of the Sierra Madre.

In other words, while the treaty of peace and commerce between Mexico and the United States is in full force, the United States, presuming on her strength and prosperity, and on our supposed imbecility and cowardice, attempts to make you the blind instrumnets of her unholy and mad ambition, and force you to appear as the hateful robbers of our dear homes, and the unprovoked violators of our dearest feelings as men and patriots.

Two swallows don't make much of a summer, but that's all for now.

I've done a bit more research, which I'll cover in a later post, along with an account of the ideas about animacy, agency and subjecthood pioneered by Michael Silverstein ( "Hierarchy of Features and Ergativity", in R.M.W. Dixon (ed.), Grammatical Categories in Australian Languages, 1976), and widely discussed since by linguists (e.g. Judith Aissen, "Markedness and Subject Choice in Optimality Theory", Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 1999) and psycholinguists (e.g. F. Ferreira, "Choice of Passive Voice is Affected by Verb Type and Animacy", Journal of Memory and Language, 1994; Willem Mak et al. "Animacy in processing relative clauses: The hikers that rocks crush", Journal of Memory and Language, 2006).

If I could get hold of the underlying texts, then rather than painfully reading all this stuff by hand, I could classify examples automatically on a large scale, and make more serious progress much more rapidly on a picture of this phrase's changes in number agreement and subjecthood — and their relationship — over time and space. That's just what I hope to do, if the archivists are kind.

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