The Power of Language

In the article, When Language Can Hold the Answer (The New York Times, April 22, 2008), Christine Kenneally writes about research done on language and perception. In a recent study at Cornell, Dr. Gary Lupyan added onto an experiment done with students at Carnegie Mellon in which he added words to describe pictures of “aliens” as friendly or unfriendly.  Dr. Lupyan discovered that all of the participants learned which label identified the “aliens.”  Most interestingly, the participants who used labels learned more quickly than participants who did not use labels.  Christine Kenneally sums up the debate with this question:  “Does language shape what we perceive, a position associated with Benjamin Lee Whorf, or are our perceptions pure sensory impressions, immune to the arbitrary ways language carves up the world?” Research has demonstrated that language and thought do have a relationship.  Language can enhance thought as an add-on feature to more primitive mental behaviors.  This is a good and bad relationship as language can enhance or interfere with our thinking.  Dr. Lupyan notes that language enables us to learn and understand completely new material and facilitate abstract thinking but it can also get in the way of how we remember specific objects.  Basically, how we put words and objects together in categories can be an aid or a hindrance. In research done by Dr. Dedre Gentner of Northwestern, she discovered that language gives us a structure to organize our thoughts. Steven Pinker of Harvard posits that, while a connection between language and thought exists, it does not force a particular line of thinking, refuting the theory set forth by Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir. The debate may not have an answer yet but it is intriguing material as we consider how we use language in our businesses.  In business, we get advice about what to do in our elevator pitches, first impressions, and presenting a certain professional image. What do you do with this information? What words do you choose in your public messages? What words do you use privately with yourself? One client told me a story about how she was talking with a colleague about launching her business.  He jokingly told her to get some kind of counseling and reflected back to her that she frequently framed going out on her own as a negative. Give the same message consistently, it becomes believable. You can create a new reality for yourself, positive or negative. Self-fulfilling prophecies work both ways.  How do you want to be perceived?