Here’s What A Language Researcher Says About The January 6th Hearings

The ninth and final January 6th hearing concluded this week, culminating in the committee’s vote to subpoena former President Trump. Reactions to the hearings have been mixed, but also quite predictable along party lines.

Some Democrats, for example, have been hopeful that the hearings will impact the upcoming midterm elections in swing states. Some Republicans, on the other hand, have dismissed the hearings altogether. Critics have even gone so far as to suggest the committee and its members are putting on a show, not a hearing. If this is the case, we should find evidence of such theater in the communication style of the January 6th committee.

Let’s look at the data.

I collected transcripts from all nine hearings (over 80,000 words) and isolated the text from the nine committee members (Bennie Thompson, Liz Cheney, Zoe Lofgren, Pete Aguilar, Adam Schiff, Adam Kinzinger, Stephanie Murphy, Jamie Raskin, and Elaine Luria). I evaluated two types of language: analytic thinking (measured as an index of style words) and emotion (measured as a percent of words per speech).

Analytic thinking considers the degree to which a speaker’s thinking style is complex, formal, and impersonal versus simple, informal, and personal. Prior work has used this metric to evaluate intelligence among university students, bias in medical records, and other psychological dynamics.

The data suggest that as the hearings progressed, the committee became more structured and formal in their thinking, and they focused less on personal stories (and perhaps, more on the evidence). In other words, the committee spoke from a distance and focused less on themselves over time.

A look at the rate of emotion in the committee’s speech suggests that after the first hearing, members focused less on feelings and emotional topics. The idea that the committee was attempting to stoke fear and chaos is just not found in the data.

Altogether, this brief analysis suggests the communication style of the January 6th committee indicates their psychological processing and strategies of how to present the findings. Putting emotions aside, and focusing on the evidence, might have been purposeful to draw in viewers and to avoid appearing partisan.

Whether the hearings impact major midterm races or the 2024 presidential election is worth monitoring.