How Culture Shapes Language and Shapes Us

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In Spike Lee’s documentary covering the famed Rumble in the Jungle, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Norman Mailer recalls one of the many memorable moments from the life of Muhammad Ali. Speaking to a group of students at Harvard, a spontaneous call from the crowd invites Ali to “give us a poem.” Mailer recalls that Ali pauses for a moment before pronouncing, “Me, we.” Mailer, the gifted wordsmith, fawns over Ali’s understated eloquence and suggests this is the shortest poem in the English language.

Ali was a dynamic figure: quintessentially American in his rags-to-riches, self-made success, yet global in stature and political dissent. This dynamism is embodied in his turn of phrase, which collapses the individualist approach into a collectivist one.

Collectivism and individualism are much discussed within the field. According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, languages encode distinct cultural cognitions that encourage speakers of the language to adopt specific cultural perspectives.

Intra- and Intercultural Differences

Across three experiments, Na and Choi (2009) showed that collectivist Koreans were more likely to rely on wuri, which is equivalent to “our,” than nae, which is equivalent to “my,” when translating compared to compatriots who scored highly on individualism. When Americans and Koreans were exposed to a third language, Wezwe (spoken in New Guinea), Koreans relied significantly more on first-person plural pronouns than Americans.

Shifting Trends

Yu and colleagues analyzed first-person pronouns in nine languages using Google Ngram, spanning 59 years (2016). What they found was fascinating. Eight of the nine languages saw an increased use of first-person singular pronouns, which the authors argue is evidence for a rise in individualism. Interestingly, the only language where this trend was not reported was British English. The authors suggest this might be due to the use of British English among people of collectivist cultures (South Asia and Southeast Asia), or due to a diversification of meaning for words like we. The others included Chinese, American English, Hebrew, Italian, and Russian, and a clear increase in the use of first-person singular pronouns was reported: “We can conclude that a majority of the cultures we examined became more individualistic over time,” the authors note in their conclusion.

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Shifting Your Thoughts and Behavior?

Experimental researchers have reported on ways to change decision-making and behavior based on pronouns used.

Mishra and Bost Jr. used a priming task involving first-person singular pronouns (I/me/my) or first-person plural pronouns (we/us/our) and found that priming significantly affected the weighting of different performance behaviors when assessing others’ job performance (2018). Specifically, those primed with the plural pronouns and collectivist mindset rated citizenship behaviors as more significant and relevant when assessing overall performance. They also found that the collectivist priming correlated with lower weighting of counterproductive workplace behaviors; the authors suggest this might reflect a collectivist tendency to be less forthcoming with criticism. This explanation can be challenged by suggesting that collectivist mindsets will be concerned with group performance.

Jiao and Zhao relied on a dictator game; the participant decides several payoffs for themselves and another person to investigate individualist-collectivist priming (2023). They also used a pronoun-circling exercise used by Mishra and Bost Jr., adding a task in which participants were asked to imagine and describe two scenarios: one with an individual tennis player playing a final match, and the other with a tennis team doing something similar. They reported that participants primed toward collectivism proposed a higher offer on average, which participants were also more likely to accept.

Results have not always been uniform, though. He and colleagues used a social-value orientation task by Murphy and colleagues, another dictator game, to assess prosocial behavior among a group of participants (2020, 2011). Prosociality is assessed by how fair the payoffs are. Participants were manipulated by reading one of two sets of instructions. The “with-I” condition’s instructions were laden with the first-person pronoun “I” (I will receive $100; I will decide how to split it). The second set of instructions were written without the first-person pronoun (Receive $100_). Counterintuitively, participants primed with the “I” condition generally made more prosocial decisions.

Conclusion

This lack of uniformity speaks to challenges to priming efficacy in general. In my own study that relied on framing to effect change, we found a stark difference between the strength of moral foundations in predicting prosocial behavior and that of our framing effect. In short, moral foundations themselves were robustly predictive while experimental manipulations were fleeting. Embodying prosocial attitudes and behaviors is likely about more than being primed or framed into things and behaving differently, with our use of language as one potential starting point to affect change. The language we use runs deeper than a prime and is encoded with meaning and assumptions; training ourselves to adjust it could be a powerful means to change how we think about the world. This is the wisdom that Ali seemed to capture in just two words.