Psychologist James Pennebaker reveals the hidden meaning of pronouns

One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status. The effects were quite robust and, naturally, I wanted to test this on myself. I always assumed that I was a warm, egalitarian kind of guy who treated people pretty much the same.

I was the same as everyone else. When undergraduates wrote me, their emails were littered with I, me, and my. My response, although quite friendly, was remarkably detached -- hardly an I-word graced the page. And then I analyzed my emails to the dean of my college. My emails looked like an I-word salad; his emails back to me were practically I-word free.

   ... we can predict people’s college performance
   reasonably well by simply analyzing their college
   admissions essays. Across four years, we analyzed
   the admissions essays of 25,000 students and then
   tracked their grade point averages (GPAs). Higher
   GPAs were associated with admission essays that
   used high rates of nouns and low rates of verbs and
   pronouns. The effects were surprisingly strong and
   lasted across all years of college, no matter what
   the students' major.

For example in Polish pronouns are mixed with verbs - you say "szła" (she went), "pójdzie" (he will go) or "idę" (i am going), you can add pronouns "ona szła", "on pójdzie", "ja idę", but that's only stylistic choice.

Most people rarely use pronouns (it's considered verbose, and sometimes egocentric to add "ja" (I) when you don't have to).

I suppose in Polish usage of pronouns would not predict anything, because it is not determined by structure of text (like in English), but by stylistic choices of speaker.

"The first person pronouns (e.g. watashi, 私) and second person pronouns (e.g. anata, 貴方) are used in formal situations. In many sentences, when an English speaker would use the pronouns "I" and "you", they are omitted in Japanese. Personal pronouns can be left out when it is clear who the speaker is talking about."

There are a lot of gems on this wikipedia page that have other interesting correlations.

Such as: "Social standing also determines how a person refers to themselves, as well as how a person refers to the person they are talking to."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pronouns

On my home page the tagline says, "Your perspective guides your thoughts, your choices, your trajectory." I believe your ability to change perspective is one of the keys to life so this idea that you can use pronouns as a signal for one's ability to change perspective is fascinating to me. As Alan Kay was fond of saying at Xerox PARC, "A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points."

Not surprising if you consider this idea has already been entertained. Freud's "Ego", "Super Ego", and "Id" are Latin translations for I, We, and It. Pronouns

Neo-Freudian techniques like Voice Dialogue are training in examining phenomena from all pronoun perspectives. A training tool for horizontal perspective fluidity.