AUSTIN, Texas – A new University of Texas study found that President Donald Trump has the lowest level of communication out of all former presidents.
- Study finds Trump has lowest level of communication
- Compared him to former presidential counterparts
- Used computer programs to analyze natural language
Researchers became interested in the study shortly after Trump won the election in 2016. UT Austin Psychology Professor Jamie Pennebaker and his team hadn't seen anything like Trump at the podium. They wanted to compare him to his former presidential counterparts.
Pennebaker said Trump is the low end of a decline in speech complexity that's been happening for decades.
"In terms of complexity of speaking, American presidents had always been pretty high," Pennebaker said. "Starting about WWI, Woodrow Wilson, a little bit after Teddy Roosevelt, all of a sudden American presidents started getting less and less complex, more and more simple."
Researchers used various computer programs that analyze natural language for the study. Pennebaker said they can use the data to create profiles of anybody.
"We can go through and calculate the percentage of words that tell if a person is speaking in a complex way or a simple way, if they're positive in their tone," Pennebaker said. "It's almost like a fingerprint, a linguistic finger print of people."
That linguistic fingerprint can also tell researchers the confidence level of each individual president. Trump's simple and strong strategy kept his confidence level high. Pennebaker said as speech complexity dropped with each passing president, confidence level soared.
"Here we have a series of presidents getting increasingly confident even though they have less and less experience being a politician," Pennebaker said.
Pennebaker and his team hope this trend doesn't continue. He says voters are the only hope to turn it around.
"We as voters need to be more accepting that we are electing humans who are making really complex decisions," Pennebaker said. "They need to be aware of what they do know and what they don't know."