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Julia Fitzgerald May 2016

“The Best Damn Place of All?”: Linguistic Dichotomy at Princeton

After spending some time in the “Orange Bubble,” it becomes apparent that the language

that students use to describe Princeton is diverse and, at times, contradictory. I have found over

the course of my two years here that students often flicker inexplicably between romanticizing

and disparaging Princeton. A senior friend regularly talks about how much she cannot wait to get

out of here—how she cried at the end of last summer just thinking about having to come back.

Still other times, she speaks of Princeton fondly, telling me that she’s going to miss this place so

much. Another classmate of mine posted a photo on Instagram last September of her and a

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aaa 🐯.” aaaa a aaaaaa aaaaa

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“Back behind bars 😩 .”

When and why does this dichotomy in the way that students describe Princeton emerge?

As I began to think about this question, I developed various theories: perhaps students alternate

between positive and negative language when speaking to close friends v. acquaintances, adults

v. peers, during stressful academic weeks v. school breaks. However, I decided to focus on the

possibility that students describe Princeton differently to Princeton insiders and outsiders. Both

to investigate this possibility and to look more closely at the dichotomy I have observed, I

developed a survey to send to Princeton students. I received 130 responses, but due to limitations


of the survey platform that I used, I only have access to 100 of those responses—still a large

enough sample size to draw inferences. Unfortunately, one shortcoming of my survey was that

there were substantially more female respondents (n=81) than male respondents (n=19).

The first question on my survey asked participants to list the first five words/phrases that

they would use to describe Princeton to a friend from home, in the context of a conversation over

a meal with that person. The next question asked them to list the first five words/phrases that

they would use to describe Princeton to a friend from Princeton. The survey also prompted

respondents to rank on a scale of 1 to 5 the prevalence of twenty terms, some positive and some

negative, that are common around campus. I chose these words, which ranged from “best damn

place of all” to “workload,” based on conversations I had with friends and classmates about what

key words they thought cropped up most frequently in idealizing or disparaging Princeton.

Finally, the last page of the survey asked participants to indicate their genders and class years

and to rank their overall Princeton experiences on a scale of 1 to 10.

Once I had collected responses, I began analysis by looking at the most straightforward

data: responses to the third question about the prevalence of common Princeton language.

Respondents ranked “stress,” “workload,” and “sleep deprivation” as the three most prevalent

terms. All of these terms are negative, and all of them seem to be closely related to Princeton’s

academic intensity. This finding is interesting, as it suggests that campus dialogue about the

Princeton experience focuses on the consequences of the academic demands.

The next three most highly ranked terms were “competitive,” “exclusive,” and “work

hard, play hard”—terms that are not explicitly negative, but still have negative connotations.

They all focus more on the nature of Princeton’s general culture, rather than specifically

emphasizing its intense academic demands. Both “competitive” and “exclusive” could apply to


academic settings, but they are also often used in a more social sense. The term “work hard, play

hard” intrinsically straddles the line between social and academic culture. This finding adds

nuance to the insight provided by the first three terms; it suggests that, though students’ most

verbalized feelings of negativity are linked to Princeton’s academic intensity, there is also

negative dialogue surrounding the nature of Princeton’s overall culture.

Positive terms do not begin to appear on the list until after these first six negative terms,

with the most highly ranked positive term as “best damn place of all.” Phrases like “school

spirit” and “close student/faculty relationships” are ranked near the bottom. Students’ rankings of

negative terms as consistently more prevalent than positive descriptors hint that the narrative

about Princeton is not as rosy as might be expected. However, these findings alone do not

provide enough evidence to draw broad conclusions about the way that students describe

Princeton: in this question, respondents were limited to ranking from a set list of common terms

that may not reflect the way that they would describe Princeton in their own words.

In order to get a better sense of how students actually describe Princeton in their voices, I

turned to look at the data from the first two questions. This data was more powerful than the data

from the question about ranking common Princeton terms, as it contained any language that

came to participants’ minds in describing Princeton to a friend from home or from school.

Students’ responses were diverse, and many of them read as remarkably raw and honest. One

student wrote, “This place breaks my spirit, but then puts it back together again.” Another said,

“This place sucks My department sucks. People suck. People here especially suck. So tired.” A

third wrote, “Literally the craziest and most amazing time of my life.”

However, one of the shortcomings of my survey was the difficulty of analyzing broad

trends in the positivity or negativity of the language that students used, because their responses


were qualitative rather than quantitative. Thus, I needed to code the lists of words/phrases that

participants provided into numerical “scores” for their positivity. The way that I did so drew on

methods that are often used in the field of psychology. I gave each of the words/phrases that

participants listed in describing Princeton—first to a friend from home, then to a friend from

school—a number value based on whether they were positive, negative, or neutral. Any positive

term, such as “idyllic” or “exciting”, was assigned a value of +1. Each negative term, such as

“draining” or “lonely”, was assigned a value of -1. Terms such as “suburban” and “small” that

could not be interpreted as positive or negative without elaboration were considered neutral and

assigned a value of 0. The only exceptions to these three numerical designations were extremely

positive or extremely negative terms, such as “BEST FOUR YEARS” or “worst place in the

world,” which received a value of +2 or -2, respectively.

Once I had coded each individual term that a participant listed, I used that information to

give him/her three different scores. The first score was his/her overall positivity in describing

Princeton to a friend from home; for the sake of simplicity, I call this the “outsider positivity

score.” This score was generated by adding the values assigned to each of the five terms that the

participants listed for the first question. For example, one participant answered the first question

with the terms “grueling,” “stressful,” “exciting,” “stimulating,” and “amazing.” “Grueling” and

“stressful” were both negative, and therefore assigned values of -1; “exciting,” “stimulating,”

and “amazing” were all positive, so each received a value of +1. The sum of these values is +1,

so this participant received an outsider positivity score of +1.

The second score that I calculated was each participant’s positivity in describing

Princeton to a friend from school, or their “insider positivity score.” This score was produced in

the same way as the outsider positivity score, except using the data from the second question


rather than the first question. Finally, I subtracted each participant’s insider score from his/her

outsider score to produce a “difference” score. This difference score depicted how much more

positive a participant was in describing Princeton to a friend from home than a Princeton friend;

if they were more positive to a Princeton friend (which was uncommon, but did occur several

times), then the difference score was negative.

My findings from this data were intriguing. I found that participants had a mean outsider

score of 0.94. In other words, students were mildly more positive than negative in describing

Princeton to friends from home. On the contrary, participants had a mean insider score of -0.91,

suggesting that they were mildly more negative than positive describing Princeton to college

friends. This makes for a difference score of 1.85: students were 1.85 “points” more positive in

describing Princeton to outsiders than insiders. This difference is highly statistically significant,

with a p-value of 4.15 x 10-19. In other words, there is a near 0% chance that this difference was

due to chance. Thus, I can be confident in concluding that there is a real difference in the way

that students describe Princeton when speaking to friends from home v. Princeton friends. This

difference is encapsulated in one senior girl’s response. The language she used when asked how

she would describe Princeton a friend from home was consistently positive: “Good,” “I like it,”

“I have enjoyed it,” “I like my classes,” and “It’s fine.” In contrast, to a friend from Princeton,

she described Princeton as “exhausting,” “draining,” “competitive,” “sucky,” and “tiring.”


Though these findings are interesting, without a control condition with which to compare

them, they are hard to interpret: it is possible that people are always more positive in describing

an

experience to outsiders than insiders, or at least that college students are always more positive in

describing their schools to friends from home than fellow students. With this in mind, I decided

to send a survey to friends that attend other colleges. This survey was identical to the one I sent

to Princeton students, except that it excluded the third question (ranking the prevalence of

Princeton-specific terms) and also asked respondents what college that they attend.

I received 42 responses from students at Claremont McKenna, Emory, Georgetown,

Harvard, University of Michigan, Oberlin, University of Pennsylvania, University of Virginia,

and Washington University in St. Louis. Coding their responses to the first two questions in the

same way I had for Princeton students, I found that non-Princeton students had a mean outsider

score of 1.19 and a mean insider score of 0.52. This difference of 0.62 is not statistically

significant (p-value=0.097). In other words, there is a 9.7% chance that the difference is random.

This is partly due to the small size of the difference, but also partly due to the small sample.

Princeton respondents’ difference in outsider and insider scores: This histogram shows the distribution of differences in the way that Princeton respondents described Princeton to friends from home v. friends from school. Evidently, the most frequent difference was a score of 2. It is interesting to note that the maximum difference score of +11 is much greater in magnitude than the minimum score of -4.


For the sake of comparison between non-Princeton and Princeton students, I will briefly

treat this difference as though it’s statistically significant. This value suggests that non-Princeton

students are slightly more positive in describing their schools to outsiders than insiders.

However, the difference of 1.85 found in Princeton students’ descriptions is three times as large

as the difference of 0.62 found in non-Princeton respondents’ descriptions of their schools.

Furthermore, the Princeton difference straddles the neutrality line of 0: Princeton students are, on

average, somewhat positive in describing Princeton to outsiders (outsider score=0.94), while they

are more negative than positive in describing it to fellow Princetonians (insider score= -0.91). In

contrast, non-Princeton students are mildly more positive than negative in describing their

schools to both outsiders and insiders, as indicated by the fact that both their mean outsider score

(1.19) and mean insider score (0.52) are positive.

However, the contrast between Princeton and non-Princeton respondents may be even

stronger than the data originally suggests. On closer examination, I discovered that there was a

strong outlier within my pool of data: the nine respondents from Washington University had a

Non-Princeton respondents’ difference in outsider and insider scores: This histogram shows the distribution of differences in the way that non-Princeton respondents described their colleges to friends from home v. friends from school. Evidently, the most common difference score is 0; however, there are more positive difference values than negative difference values, making for a mean difference of 0.62.


very large average difference score of 2.7, a score even larger than Princeton respondents’

difference score. In fact, it is so large that it is statistically significant (p=0.024) despite the very

small sample size. When I ran analyses excluding Wash U, the non-Princeton difference score

fell from 0.62 to 0.16. This discovery suggests that students at most colleges display almost no

difference in positivity describing their schools to outsiders v. insiders. The Princeton difference

value is twelve times greater than the non-Princeton difference value when Wash U is excluded.

It would be easy to interpret this finding as an indication that students here feel they need

to romanticize Princeton when talking to friends from home. However, in speaking to friends and

classmates, I asked whether they felt that they were being dishonest in describing Princeton in

one context or the other (to home or college friends). Interestingly, most people did not feel that

this was the case. One friend did say that she “felt obligated to love Princeton, because it’s

Princeton,” but she specified that she only felt that way when talking to people from outside of

Princeton that she did not know well—not real friends. Conversely, another student mentioned

that he actually felt a degree of pressure to complain about Princeton in order to fit in. He said,

“It’s hard to be relatable at Princeton if you’re chipper all the time.” However, overwhelmingly,

even those who openly identified a difference in the dialogue they use to describe Princeton to

outsiders and insiders had difficulty putting a finger on why that difference exists.

The fact that many students had difficulty identifying the reason for the difference in their

descriptions of Princeton suggests to me that this difference is likely driven by an unconscious

mental process. One theory that could help explain this difference is called construal level theory

(Fujita et. al., 2005). According to construal level theory, a person’s psychological distance from

an object affects whether they think about it in abstract (“high level”) or concrete (“low level”)

terms. For example, thinking about taking a very hard class on a high level might involve


“challenging oneself” or “furthering one’s education”; thinking about it on a low level would

look more like “spending hours in the library.”

When students describe their college to a friend from home, they experience a

considerable degree of psychological distance, because they are spatially and temporally distant

from Princeton. The language of my survey ensured that this condition was true for all

respondents, because it told them to imagine they were having a meal with a friend from home—

they could not have envisioned talking on the phone with that friend. This psychological distance

made it easier for respondents to think about Princeton in broad brushstrokes.

Often, the positive language that respondents used to describe Princeton—both to

outsiders and insiders, but more often to outsiders—did seem to reflect high level thinking.

Variations of the phrases “rewarding,” “fulfilling,” and “worthwhile” appeared 49 times in the

Princeton survey responses. All of these terms are positive, but they have an abstract quality:

they focus more on outcomes than on the actual nature of the Princeton experience. Negative

language that participants used was often more concrete, such as “homework homework

homework” and “perpetually sleep-deprived.” This was not universally true, as there were also

abstract negative descriptors and concrete positive descriptors, but it did seem to be a pattern.

Non-Princeton respondents also experienced a difference in psychological distance when

talking to a friend from home as opposed to a friend from school. However, it did not result in a

significant difference in the positivity of their language, because there does not seem to be as

great a difference in the way that they thought about their schools concretely v. abstractly. One

respondent described UPenn to a home friend as “fun,” and to a college friend as “has great

parties.” Another described WashU to a home friend as “homogeneous” and to a college friend

“nerdy” and “not very diverse.” Both of these respondents’ concrete descriptions to college


friends elaborate on their abstract descriptions to home friends, but they do not fundamentally

conflict.

Though looking at the data from the first two questions quantitatively provides a lot of

information, it actually washes out other information—especially in the Princeton survey. In

particular, turning the 5 words/phrases that participants listed for each question into a “sum” has

the potential to neutralize extremes within that list. One participant described Princeton to a

friend from school using the following five phrases: “stressful,” “the worst,” “the best,” “love it

here,” “hate it here.” This language embodies positive and negative emotions so extreme that

they seem inconsistent. However, these positives and negatives work to cancel each other out:

this response received a coded score of -1, a value near zero that does not reflect the range of

emotion expressed in the response. Evidently, looking only at the contrast between the language

students use with insiders and outsiders can mask contrasts within both of those categories.

There were countless examples like this one, in which extreme positive and negative

emotions summed up to “near-neutral” scores, in the Princeton survey results. However, there

were almost no similarly extreme examples in the non-Princeton survey results: though non-

Princetonians used positive language alongside negative language, these sentiments seemed to be

more compatible. For example, one respondent described UPenn as “exciting,” “scary,”

“rushed,” “different,” and “fun.” Though “exciting” has a positive connotation while “scary”

reads as more negative, excitement and fear seem to come hand-in-hand in a natural way.

One of the most fascinating trends that I found in analyzing the survey emerged from

comparing the language that

students used to describe

Princeton with how they

Princeton respondents’ rankings of their overall Princeton experience: This histogram shows the distribution of respondents’ ranking of their Princeton experience on a scale of 1 (terrible) to 10 (amazing). Despite the fact that the language that students


ranked their overall Princeton experiences. Averaging respondents’ outsider and insider scores

produced a near-neutral value of 0.015, which suggests that they use about as much positive and

negative language in describing Princeton to outsiders and insiders. However, students ranked

their overall Princeton experiences very positively: the mean score on a scale of one to ten (from

terrible to amazing) was 7.7. For many individual respondents, this dichotomy was even more

pronounced. One respondent described Princeton to both a friend from home and from school in

strongly negative terms, including “sucks,” “GPA TOILET,” “I regret not going to Harvard,”

and “Let’s drop out and become strippers in Alaska.” In spite of this extreme negativity, she

ranked her overall Princeton 8 out of 10. This trend was similar, though less pronounced, for

non-Princeton students: their language describing their colleges was mildly more positive than

negative, but the mean of their rankings of their overall college experiences was 7.9.

Why is such extreme, seemingly incompatible language used side-by-side by students

describing Princeton? And how can Princeton students report such high scores for their overall

experience, while their descriptions of Princeton are rarely overwhelmingly positive, and often

overwhelmingly negative? Again, construal level theory can help answer these questions. When

students rank their overall Princeton experiences, the level of abstraction is much higher than

when they imagine describing Princeton in the context of a conversation with a friend. Thus, it is

easier for them to see the big picture while overlooking more tedious, concrete realities.

Another psychological theory that I believe can help make sense of these paradoxes is

called cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1962). According to this theory, people experience

a state of anxiety (known as cognitive dissonance) when there is inconsistency in their attitudes

and behaviors. In order to rid themselves of this feeling of dissonance, people need to make

changes to align their attitudes and behaviors. Because it is impossible to change behaviors that

Princeton respondents’ rankings of their overall Princeton experience: This histogram shows the distribution of respondents’ ranking of their Princeton experience on a scale of 1 (terrible) to 10 (amazing). Despite the fact that the language that students


have already been performed, cognitive dissonance generally results in attitude change. If a

person knows that smoking is unhealthy but smokes anyway, they ultimately may convince

themselves that smoking can’t really be all that bad.

Cognitive dissonance theory has been supported in a large and diverse body of research,

including investigations into why people suffer for a cause. For example, it has been found to

explain why people feel strongly loyal to groups, such as fraternities, that they are brutally hazed

when joining. Undergoing such hazing can only be justified in one’s mind by strong positive

attitudes: if one’s feelings for the group weren’t so positive, then undergoing such suffering to

join it would result in great cognitive dissonance.

Comparing the difficulties of the Princeton experience to physical hazing is perhaps

unfair; however, in reading through the things that respondents wrote about Princeton in my

survey, I think that many students do experience a degree of psychological and physical

suffering during their time here. My survey suggests that college is universally challenging: the

terms “hard,” “difficult,” “challenging,” and “tough” appeared 42 times in the 43 non-Princeton

responses, and 99 times in the 100 Princeton responses. However, for Princeton students, terms

like “hard” and “difficult” were mild compared to language such as “struggle,” “grueling,”

“painful,” “crushing,” and “brutal”—language that never appeared in non-Princeton responses.

To be clear, many students spoke very positively of their Princeton experiences, from the classes

they have taken to the friends they have made. Such students generally ranked their Princeton

experiences positively, as one would expect. But I am more interested in the surprising finding,

described earlier, that many students who wholeheartedly disparaged Princeton in the first two

questions still ranked their Princeton experiences very highly overall.


If Princeton students do experience the sort of hardship that their responses described,

from sleep deprivation to isolation to intense feelings of inadequacy, then they likely

subconsciously question why they are here—why they are willing to continue to suffer. Some

respondents even made this question explicit in writing that they wonder if they should have

gone to other schools. However, students rarely transfer out of Princeton. The inconsistency

between their behavior (choosing to stay at Princeton) and their attitude (that the suffering they

have experienced is painful, unpleasant, etc.) likely creates a state of cognitive dissonance. I

suspect that, in order to resolve their state of dissonance, students need to justify their behavior

by developing strongly positive and loyal attitudes toward Princeton. This loyalty is made

manifest yearly, when thousands upon thousands of Princeton graduates return to campus to

celebrate reunions—the largest purchase of beer in the US since Indy 500 went dry.

Ultimately, I am unable to test whether the psychological theories that I propose

(construal level theory and cognitive dissonance theory) can explain the dichotomy in the ways

that students describe Princeton. Furthermore, though such psychological processes may be at

work, they cannot explain all the diverse responses that I received: it would be a vast

oversimplification to assume that all Princeton students are operating under the influence of

construal level theory or cognitive dissonance theory, and therefore reject the various positive

descriptions of Princeton that they provided. However, my survey revealed the fact that there is

clearly great tension in the way that students describe Princeton, both when talking to an outsider

as opposed to an insider and within conversations with a single friend.

The findings of this investigation are important for the University to understand. They

suggest that we need to reevaluate the assumption that students have highly positive Princeton

experiences, just because the enthusiastic dialogue about Princeton is often so resounding. In


fact, this survey suggests that the difficult Princeton experiences that students have and the

negative feelings that they develop can be difficult to expose—not only because people are often

unwilling to be open with others, but also because there are psychological processes obstructing

even them from fully recognizing their negative sentiments. For the University to make sense of

this issue, it will need to move beyond traditional survey questions asking students to rank their

Princeton experiences, because such questions evidently have the power to hide the grimmer

realities. Finally, it seems that the University needs to take steps toward relieving students’

academic burden in order to cultivate a more genuinely positive Princeton experience.

References

1. Festinger, L. (1962). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University

Press.

2. Fujita, K., Henderson, M. D., Eng, J., Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2006). Spatial Distance and

Mental Construal of Social Events. Psychological Science, 17(4), 278-282. Retrieved

May 2, 2016, from http://psych.nyu.edu/tropelab/publications/.

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