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>> No discussion of words would be complete if we didn't talk
about love and relationships.
Can we look at a young couple and listen to the two --
the ways the two are speaking and figure out: Are they in love?
Will they go out on a date?
If they are starting to date, will they continue to date?
Will they be married?
Will they live happily ever after?
Can't answer all those questions, but we are looking at some.
We've been -- when I say "We," my students and I have been looking
at a phenomenon called "language style matching."
And what it is is a marker of how much a speaker and the person
to whom they are speaking are using these function words
at comparable rates.
Are they using "I" words at the same rate, "We" words, and so forth.
But what we found is that this matching does a surprisingly good job
at telling us about relationships.
For example, in collaboration with a group at Northwestern University
and Texas A&M, we've done a project looking at speed dating.
Speed dating is this fascinating and, frankly, slightly bizarre occurrence
in our culture where maybe you'll get 10 males, 10 females.
You'll bring them all into a room.
And you will have one group one sex.
It could be just males or just females sitting at 10 different tables.
And then the members of the opposite sex will then sit down and talk
for four minutes with this person.
Then the next person.
Then this person.
All the way around.
We got permission from them to tape record -- to audiotape the interactions.
And then these were all transcribed.
And then we did an analysis of this style matching.
And what we found was that those people
who style matched the most were much more likely to go on a subsequent date
than people who did not style match.
And here's what I love.
We did a better job at predicting if they'd go
on a date than they did themselves.
So you have these two people trying to make it --
an evaluation: Well, was I interested in her?
Do I want to go out on a date?
Yeah, she was really appealing.
And she might be thinking: You know, what a loser.
I don't want to deal with him.
Whereas, the style matching statistic tells us really how the two are clicking
with one another.
We did another study where we looked at instant messages
between young dating couples.
And then we tracked them several months later.
The more they style matched in their text message --
text messages to each other, their IM's, the --
the more likely they were to still be dating several months later.
The fact is is we had this metric --
it's not perfect, but it's pretty good --
giving us the sense of how two people are essentially connecting
with one another, to what degree are they on the same page.
We've tracked relationships that have gone bad in a lot of ways too.
And often you'll have a relationship that starts off
that they're style matching very well.
And then who knows what happens that their style matching starts to drop.
And that often predicts the breakup of a relationship.
We've studied famous relationships.
For example, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes;
kind of a star-crossed couple of poets.
And what you see is their style matching starts off at --
at not a very high level to be quite --
quite honest, and this is looking at their poetry.
And it goes up a little bit after they've met and they first are married.
And then it kind of drops afterwards.
We compared that with other poets.
For example, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and look at them
from before they -- they met to their courting years to their first part
of their marriage to the end.
And they've always been held up as kind of this ideal couple.
And you find across their relationships
that their style matching is much higher.
Not perfect, but it gives us just a marker
of perhaps how couples are getting along.