Unusual scientfic reason for why John Edwards is lagging

Why is John Edwards lagging Clinton and and Obama in the Democratic presidential race? It may be his use of language. Not the words and “messages,” but his style.

A study published in the Journal of Research in Personality, “Winning words: individual differences in linguistic style among U.S. presidential and vice presidential candidates,” computer analyzed the linguistic styles of Bush, Cheney, Kerry and Edwards during the 2004 campaign across six linguistic style categories related to voting behaviors and political personality characteristics.

Some highlights of the findings, by James Pennebaker, Richard Slatcher, Cindy Chung and Lori Stone:

• Edwards’ language was the most feminine. (Studies show that when asked to describe ” a good president” 61% of the participants characterized the role as masculine and 0% as feminine. The remaining percent were androgynous or undifferentiated.)

• Edwards’ language use was the least presidential. (The Republicans used much more presidential language than the Democrats. Presidential language is has high levels of articles, prepositions, positive emotions and big words.)

• Edwards used more depressive language than Bush or Cheney; Kerry was most similar to a depressed person. (Studies show voters are most favorable toward candidates who are the most optimistic.)

• Edwards and Bush were the least cognitively complex in their use of language. (Cheney was the most cognitively complex — his style being the most concrete, complex, and detached.)

• Edwards and Cheney were similar in honesty of their language; both of the vice presidential candidates’ language was more honest than Kerry or Bush.

According to James Pennebaker, professor and chair of the psychology department at the University of Texas at Austin and developer of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software program that categorizes words into linguistic and psychological categories:

“Over the years it has become apparent that is far more important to see how people talked about a given topic than what they were talking about. People’s linguistic styles provide far richer psychological information than their linguistic content.”

It is possible that Edwards’ language use has changed since the last election. Yet this scientific use of language analysis does provide some fascinating clues into why he’s lagging.

PS — I’ll be writing more about what our words can say about us, particularly as it relates to business, when I guest blog at the International Association of Online Communicators next week.