6: HARNESS SIMILARITY (AND DIFFERENCE)

“They found that people’s behavior on the site could be broken into two distinct stages. When users first joined, they were relatively flexible. They learned the language of the community and started using it themselves, adopting whatever conventions others were using at the time.

But after that initial period of accommodation, users entered a more conservative phase. They stopped adapting new words and phrases and their language calcified. The community and its norms kept moving forward, but older users no longer moved with it.

Because rather than suggesting that some words are good and others are bad, it highlights the importance of linguistic similarity. In this case, people whose language matched the group’s tended to be more likely to stick around.

Understanding whether people are going to keep contributing to an online community, though, is only one of the many things distance helps explain. And to harness its power we need to know (1) when to signal similarity, (2) when to be different, and (3) how to plot the right progression.

Employees whose linguistic style was more similar to their coworkers’ were three times more likely to be promoted. They received better performance evaluations and higher bonuses…

Indeed, people with a dissimilar linguistic style weren’t so fortunate. They were four times more likely to be fired…

Adaptability, in turn, helped explain success.

Using similar language seems to pay off at the office, but using different language makes songs more successful. So when is similarity good and when is difference better?

But at its core, the difference is really about what similarity and difference evoke or connote, and which is better in the particular context being considered.

Linguistic similarity has a number of benefits. Using similar language often requires listening to what someone else said, so, not surprisingly, it is associated with everything from better dates to more successful negotiations.