Like many other people who have been watching the COVID-19 press conferences held by Trump and Cuomo, I came away with a very different feeling from each. Beyond the obvious policy and partisan differences, I felt there is something more going on.
Coincidentally, I’ve been doing some research on text analytics/natural language processing on a different topic. So, I decided to use these same research tools on the transcripts of their press conferences from April 9 through April 16, 2020. (Thank you to the folks at Rev.com for making available these transcripts.)
One of the best approaches is known by its initials, LIWC, and was created some time ago by Pennebaker and colleagues to assess especially the psycho-social dimensions of texts. It’s worth noting that this assessment is based purely on the text – their words – and doesn’t include non-verbal communications, like body language.
While there were some unsurprising results to people familiar with both Trump and Cuomo, there are also some interesting nuances in the words they used.
Here are the most significant contrasts:
- The most dramatic distinction between the two had to do with emotional tone. Trump’s words had almost twice the emotional content of Cuomo’s, including words like “nice”, although maybe the use of that word maybe should not be taken at face value.
- Trump also spoke of rewards/benefits and money about 50% more often than Cuomo.
- Trump emphasized allies and friends about twenty percent more often than Cuomo.
- Cuomo used words that evoked health, anxiety/pain, home and family two to three times more often than Trump.
- Cuomo asked more than twice as many questions, although some of these could be sort of rhetorical – like “what do you think?”
- However, Trump was 50% more tentative in his declarations than Cuomo, whereas Cuomo had greater expressions of certainty than Trump.
- While both men spoke about the present tense much more than the future, Cuomo’s use of the present was greater than Trump’s. On the other hand, Trump’s use of the future tense and the past tense was greater than Cuomo’s.
- Trump used “we” a little more often than Cuomo and much more than he used “you”. Cuomo used “you” between two and three times more often than Trump. Trump’s use of “they” even surpassed his use of you.
Distinctions of this kind are never crystal clear, even with sophisticated text analytics and machine learning algorithms. The ambiguity of human speech is not just a problem for machines, but also for people communicating with each other.
But these comparisons from text analytics do provide some semantic evidence for the comments by non-partisan observers that Cuomo seems more in command. This may be because the features of his talks would seem to better fit the movie portrayal and the average American’s idea of leadership in a crisis – calm, compassionate, focused on the task at hand.
© 2020 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved