The Hungarian hubris syndrome.

Powerful figures, such as politicians, who show a behavioural pattern of exuberant self-confidence, recklessness, and contempt for others may be the subject of the acquired personality disorder, the hubris syndrome, which has been demonstrated to leave its mark on speech patterns. Our study explores characteristic language patterns of Hungarian prime ministers (PMs) with a special emphasis on one of the key indicators of hubris, the shift from the first person "I" to "we" in spontaneous speech. We analyzed the ratio of the first-person singular ("I") and plural ("we") pronouns and verbal inflections in the spontaneous parliamentary speeches of four Hungarian PMs between 1998-2018. We found that Viktor Orbán during his second premiership (2010-2014) used first person plural relative to singular inflections more often than the other three PMs during their terms. Orbán and another Hungarian PM, Ferenc Gyurcsány, who were re-elected at some point showed an increased ratio of first-person plural vs. singular inflections and personal pronouns by their second term, likely reflecting increasing hubristic tendencies. The results show that the ratio of "I" and "we" usually studied in English texts also show changes in a structurally different language, Hungarian. This finding suggests that it is extended periods of premiership that may increase hubristic behaviour in political leaders, not only experiencing excessive power. The results are particularly elucidating regarding the role of re-elections in political leaders' hubristic speech-and behaviour.

Introduction

Over a decade ago David Owen and Jonathan Davidson [1] proposed a new kind of personality disorder, which may be acquired by successful political leaders exactly because of their success: the hubris syndrome (HS). Since then the idea has emerged that particular speech features of political and business leaders may not only report how spoiled they are by power, but could be used as linguistic biomarkers with diagnostic value [1-6]. The present paper sets out to identify individuals affected by HS among Hungarian prime ministers (PMs) based on the linguistic markers expressed in their spontaneous speech.

The overconfidence and sense of invulnerability observed in leadership-behaviour, described originally in behavioural finance as hubris hypothesis [7], was suggested to lead to disadvantageous decisions and misjudgements or even unethical behaviour [8-11], even though some positive consequences have been pointed out recently [12]. Hubristic behaviour of political leaders has got into the spotlight with the recent rise of populism [13, 14]. Based on the behavioural pattern and medical history of politicians, being spoiled by power has been conceptualized as an acquired personality disorder due to a sustained experience of excessive power [1, 2]. Owen and Davidson [1] described HS in medical terms as a disorder with fourteen diagnostic criteria including verbal behaviour, speaking style and word choices. However, HS might be more akin to a personality trait rather than a personality disorder, since it usually appears later in life as a consequence of and during holding a powerful position [15].

In their landmark study, Garrard et al. [3] provided a detailed linguistic analysis of the parliamentary speeches of UK PMs and identified speech patterns linked to HS. Both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair showed a higher ratio of using the first-person plural pronoun, “we” relative to its singular pair, “I”, during periods of their governance, when they expressed multiple additional behavioral markers of HS. Ensuing studies used text analysis tools to study the hubristic language use of CEOs [4, 16, 17]. Akstinaite et al. [17] confirmed that personal pronouns, and specifically the use of “we”, is a strong and diagnostic marker of hubristic language; whereas narcissism, a closely related personality disorder, has been found to correlate with the second person pronoun “you” [18], and not with “we”. In sum, the high proportion of “we” in natural speech seems to be a powerful linguistic biomarker of hubristic personality traits with differential diagnostic value. For this reason, we decided to focus our inquiry on this particular linguistic feature.

While hubristic behaviour can lead to low quality decision making with a high risk of misjudgement, only a few quantitative studies used text-analysis methods to evaluate HS in political leaders [3, 19]. While linguistic markers of HS have been described exclusively in English so far [3, 17, 19], we aimed to analyze political speeches of PMs in a non-Indo-European language, Hungarian in our study.

Among prime ministers of Hungary, Orbán has been in power for the longest period since the fall of the iron curtain, between 1998 and 2002 and since 2010 to this day, which makes him particularly vulnerable to HS. It has also been suggested that subsequent re-elections might increase the chance for hubris [15]. Orbán’s political behaviour and leadership style from his second term onwards (since 2010) is consistent with this idea, even though it is also true that when re-elected, he obtained a supermajority, which provided him excessive power. Since then, he is renowned for limiting challenges to his power by tampering with electoral laws and the constitution, constraining free speech and independent media, and eroding civil and human rights in Hungary [14, 20]. In the past decade he has been regarded as an authoritarian populist leader at the far right of the political spectrum [14], on par with Erdogan in Turkey or Putin in Russia.

The particularities of Hungarian language allow for specific predictions on hubristic linguistic markers. In Hungarian, subject pronouns are regularly dropped in sentences, with number and person expressed by verb conjugation. Personal pronouns can also be included in sentences, but they are utilized usually for emphasis, such that, most personal pronouns in subject roles are contrastively focused [21]. Thus, not only the usage patterns of first-person pronouns but also verbal inflections are highly informative regarding speech patterns in Hungarian.

For our investigation we sought for official but spontaneous political speeches. To this end, we selected speeches from the official records of the Hungarian parliament that were likely not prepared in advance. Our hypotheses are the following: Orbán, due to hubristic personality traits uses the personal pronoun “we” in a higher proportion relative to “I” (increased WE:I ratio) in his speech than other former Hungarian PMs, especially from his second premiership onwards, when he obtained a supermajority and has experienced excessive power ever since. It has been suggested that subsequent re-elections might increase hubristic tendencies [15], therefore, we also hypothesized that both Orbán and Gyurcsány may show increased linguistic markers of hubris after being re-elected. We expect Orbán’s WE:I ratio to remain consistent during his years in power since 2010, as hubris, once triggered, should be present as long as its triggering conditions are met (he retained his supermajority in all ensuing elections). Further on, as verbal suffixes carry number and person marking in Hungarian, we also predict that the WE:I ratio effects will be present in first person verb conjugations as well.

Materials and methods

Subjects

Speeches of all Hungarian PMs were studied who governed for various durations between 1998–2018. Parliamentary elections are held every four years in Hungary, but the ruling party may switch PMs, which led to seven governments headed by four PMs during this period. Two out of the four PMs, Orbán and Gyurcsány, held office more than once (Fig 1, and see also Subjects in S1 File).

Fig 1

Timeline of parliamentary cycles and prime ministers in Hungary from 1998 to 2018.

The bottom line shows the name of the PMs and years of change in PM and/or the years of parliamentary elections (the later are in bold). All images are downloaded from Wikimedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org; Orban Viktor Portrait.jpg, kormany.hu, 2010, CC BY-SA 2.5; Medgyessy Péter 2002.jpg, Tamás Griechisch, 2002, CC BY-SA 4.0; Gyurcsány and Medgyessy (Aug 2014).jpg, Tibor Végh, 2014, CC BY 3.0; Bajnai Jerusalem.jpg, Itzike, derivative work by Qorilla, 2009, CC BY-SA 3.0).

Speech samples

Similarly to Garrard et al. [3], transcripts of public speeches on plenary sessions of the Hungarian Parliament were obtained [22]. Instead of analysing spoken utterances of interviews (e.g., see [17]), we used parliamentary speeches because this allowed us to compare spoken utterances arising from a similar context and situation among different prime ministers. The parliamentary records from 1998 include a classification system which helped us to select those speeches which are the most spontaneous and to avoid prepared speeches which might be written by professional speech writers. We chose the following categories of speeches of all politicians who were prime ministers between 1998 and 2018 in Hungary: 1) two-minute interventions: a remark during general debate with permission from the parliament chair. 2) reply: reply by the speaker during general debate; 3) re-replies: one-minute re-replies to replies by speakers to so called immediate questions. Altogether 454 replies and interventions were selected from the four PMs through seven parliamentary cycles from July 6th, 1998 to May 7th, 2018. All selected speech samples were parsed for grammatical structure [23]. Using the grammatical parser, we retrieved personal pronouns (PP) with their variations (i.e., in different cases, see [24]). We also retrieved verbs with first person singular and plural verbal inflections (verb conjugations, VC) for all samples. The form of the nominative case of the first-person plural pronoun, “mi” in Hungarian (“we” in English) is the same as a less frequent variation of the relative pronoun “what”. Therefore, a research assistant checked all speech samples manually and corrected in the data table if the word “mi” was wrongly categorized by the analyser, and the lead author of the study checked again if the manual corrections were well done.

Statistical analyses

The amount of PP and VC within speech samples and the number of speech samples per PM and parliamentary cycles varied considerably, therefore, we used generalized linear mixed-effect model (GLMM) analysis to control for the varying occurrences of these. Binomial GLMMs were fitted on two categorical response variables, 1) on the singular and plural first-person personal pronouns (PP), i.e. “I” and “we” and their variations (singular = 1, plural = 2) and 2) on the singular and plural first person verb conjugations (VC) (singular = 1, plural = 2), using the glmer() function of the lme4 package in R [25]. We included speech sample as a random factor in our models. Fixed effects were the PMs and/or their terms of premiership. Models with more than one fixed effect included an interaction term only if it significantly improved them. The significance of interaction between fixed effects and the significance of the fixed effects were evaluated by model comparison with likelihood ratio test. When the GLMM contained one significant fixed effect with more than two levels, the model was run repeatedly, each time with a different reference-category for the fixed effect. The coefficients of the categories of fixed effects revealed whether they are different from the coefficient of the intercept (i.e., from the reference-category). This way, we could also test the differences between each of the levels of the fixed effect.

Model diagnostics were applied using the DHARMa package [26]. It used a simulation-based approach to create readily interpretable scaled (quantile) residuals for fitted (generalized) linear mixed models. If the model diagnostics returned any errors with the model, we excluded outlier speech samples that contributed extremely high amount of data (more than 50 items) in order to reduce variation between samples. Then, the GLMM analysis was run again on the newly reduced dataset.

Results

Personal pronouns

In the speech samples, 2.9% of all words were personal pronouns. 60.2% of all these pronouns were in nominative case, 14.5% were in dative case, 10.7% were in accusative case, 3.8% in instrumental case, 2.7% in sublative case, 2% in inessive case, 1.8% in ablative case [24]. All other forms were under 1%. Following Tyrkkö’s analysis of pronouns in political speeches [27], we also categorized the personal pronouns according to semantic categories based on their referents. The first-person singular pronouns (“I”) and their variants were considered Self-referential, the second person singular and plural (“you”) and their variants were Audience-referential, and the third-personal singular and plural (“he/she/it” and “they”) and their variants were Other-referential. Tyrkkö categorized the first-person plural pronouns (“we”) as Inclusive-referential assuming that the majority of such pronouns are delivered in an inclusive sense in political speeches. We do not make such assumption; hence, we just call this category “WE”. Fig 2 shows the relative frequency of categories of the personal pronouns in our samples. The Audience-referential pronouns have the overall highest frequency in our data. Audience-referential pronouns are also the most frequent category in each parliamentary cycle for each PM, except of Bajnai who has the same amount of Audience and Self-referential personal pronouns (S1 Table in S1 File).

Fig 2

Frequency of personal pronouns.

Standardized frequency (number of pronouns/1000 words) are shown on the y-axis for each category of pronouns (x-axis) in all speech samples. Self: first-person singular pronouns (“I”), WE: first person plural pronouns (“we”), Audience: second-person singular and plural pronouns (“you”), Other: third person singular and plural pronouns (“he/she/it”, “they”).

The number of first-person PPs and VCs and speech samples used for data analysis are shown in Table 1.

Table 1

Frequencies of first-person personal pronouns and verb conjugations.

	First-person personal pronouns			First-person verb conjugations
Prime ministers	na	%b	n (s.s.)c	n	%	n (s.s.)
P. Medgyessy (2002–2004)	58	31	30	436	32	59
F. Gyurcsány
-First (2004–2006)	26	23	15	210	30	32
-Second (2006–2009)	84	54	12	317	45	17
G. Bajnai (2009–2010)	42	38	17	228	36	27
V. Orbán
-First (1998–2002)	57	42	26	379	32	53
-Second (2010–2014)	203	57	73	875	46	101
-Third (2014–2018)	229	54	92	954	40	137

Data is shown for the four Hungarian PM from 1998 to 2018.

aNumber of items.

bPercentage of plurals.

cNumber of speech samples.

First, we compared the ratio of singular and plural first-person PP (WE:I ratio) among the four PMs (Fig 3A).

Fig 3

Percentage of plurals (WE).

Percentages are shown A) within all first-person personal pronouns (“I” and “we”), and B) within first-person verb conjugations. Data shown for each parliamentary cycle (vertical dotted lines on y-axis) and for each PM (symbols).

The number of all speech samples and the number of PPs (“we” & “I”) were very different across PMs. Orbán had largest number of items and speech samples. However, we hypothesized that Orbán acquired hubristic traits from his second premiership (between 2010–2014). Therefore, we used speech samples of one single term for each PM and we selected the second term of premiership for Orbán and for Gyurcsány (Table 1).

The binomial GLMM showed that the WE:I ratio in PP significantly varied by PM, X(3) = 10.33, p = .016; Intercept (reference category: Orbán), β = 0.288, SE = 0.196, z = 1.467, p = .142; Fig 4A. There were less plurals (“we”) in PP for Medgyessy compared to Orbán (β = -1.219, SE = 0.42, z = -2.90, p = .004). The difference was marginal between Orbán and Bajnai (β = -0.858, SE = 0.469, z = -1.83, p = .067). There were no other differences between PMs.

Fig 4

Mean of the categorical variable coding the first-person plurals and singulars.

Means are shown A) for personal pronouns and B) for verb conjugations for each Hungarian PMs (x-axis). On the y-axis 1 indicates the exclusive use of singulars (“I”), while 2 indicates the exclusive use of plurals (“we”). For Gyurcsány and Orbán, the second term of their premiership is plotted. Error bars show confidence intervals, horizontal lines show significant differences and trends between PMs. (.): p < .1. *: p < .05. **: p < .01. ***: p < .001.

We also tested whether there was a difference between the first and second premiership for Orbán and Gyurcsány (Table 1). There was no difference between the two PMs but there were more plurals in their second term compared to their first premiership, X(3) = 10.33, p = .016, β = 1.09, SE = 0.369, z = 2.953, p = .003. However, there was no difference in the WE:I ratio for PP between Orbán’s second and third term, X(1) = .249, p = .6181, β = -0.138, SE = .276, z = -0.499, p = .618, Table 1. Model diagnostics of these analyses are shown in S1 Fig in S1 File.

An additional analysis of the personal pronouns can be found in the Supporting Information (Supplementary Results and Supplementary Discussion). The analysis compares the changes in the frequency of the first- and third-person plurals relative to the other pronouns in Orbán’s and Gyurcsány’s speeches in their first and second term as PMs.

Verb conjugations

15% of all words were verbs. We did not categorize the inflected variants of verbs into semantic categories of its substantives because the third-person verbal conjugations were overwhelmingly used for second-person subjects, “you”. Although Hungarian singular and plural first, second and third-person verbal conjugations can be differentiated based on their forms, third-person is used instead of the second-person verb conjugations in polite, distant or official interactions (so called, V-forms in language [28]) [29]. In our samples, all Audience-related pronouns were expressed in their V-form variants which shows that PMs’ language use overwhelmingly followed the polite forms of interactions.

The WE:I ratio for verb conjugations were also compared across PMs (Fig 3B). For Orbán and for Gyurcsány, data from their second premiership was entered into this analysis (Table 1). The binomial GLMM showed that WE:I ratio for VC, i.e., the first-person verb conjugation being singular or plural, was significantly influenced by PM, X(3) = 19.01, p = .0006; Intercept (reference category: Orbán), β = -0.259, SE = 0.117, z = -2.204, p = .0275; Fig 4B. There was a higher ratio of WE:I for VC for Orbán compared to Bajnai (β = 0.54, SE = 0.255, z = 2.113, p = .004) and compared to Medgyessy (β = 0.815, SE = 0.211, z = 3.863, p = .0001). The difference was marginally significant between Orbán and Gyurcsány (β = 0.571, SE = 0.301, z = 1.899, p = .058; Fig 4B). However, in an outlier filtered analysis, when some speech samples were excluded from the data due to poor model diagnostics, the statistically improved model showed significantly more plurals for Orbán relative to Gyurcsány (see S2 and S3 Tables in S1 File and S2 Fig in S1 File).

There was also a difference in the WE:I ratio for VC between Orbán’s and Gyurcsány’s terms (first vs second), X(1) = 16.84, p < .0001, and also between persons, X(1) = 7.17, p = .007; Table 1. The number of plural forms increased in the second term compared to their first term (β = 0.668, SE = 0.162, z = 4.12, p < .0001), while Gyurcsány had fewer plural inflections compared to Orbán, β = -0.507, SE = 0.193, z = -2.63, p < .001. When outlier speech samples were rejected to improve model diagnostics (S3 Fig in S1 File), the analysis of the reduced dataset showed similar results (see S2 and S4 Tables in S1 File S2, S4 and S3 Figs in S1 File). In his third term, Orbán’s data showed a marginally lower ratio of plurals compared to his second term, X(1) = 3.77, p = .0521; β = -0.27, SE = 0.139, z = -1.947, p = .052. An improved model showed similar results (see S2 and S5 Tables in S1 File and S4 Fig in S1 File).

A tentative analysis of speeches of Gyurcsány and Orbán as a Member of Parliament and not as PM can be found in Supplementary Results and Supplementary Discussion of the Supporting information.

Discussion

We investigated the speech patterns of Hungarian PMs in order to establish whether the current PM, Viktor Orbán’s speech exhibits the key linguistic biomarker of hubristic personality trait, that is, the excessive use of the personal pronoun “we” instead of its first-person counterpart “I”. Our study also extends earlier research of the linguistic biomarkers (e.g., [5, 17, 19]), because the Hungarian language also allowed us to examine the WE:I ratio in terms of verb conjugations besides personal pronouns. We found that Orbán had a higher WE:I ratio both for personal pronouns and for verb conjugations in his second compared to his first premiership. Moreover, in his second term, Orbán’s WE:I ratio for verb conjugations was higher than any other Hungarian PMs’. Another PM, Gyurcsány, who also governed for more than one parliamentary cycle, also had higher WE:I for personal pronouns and for verb conjugations in his second compared to his first term.

Earlier works found personal pronouns to be a reliable marker of personality traits and social hierarchy [5, 17, 30–32]. However, most of these studies used computerized text analysis of English texts or English translation of texts written in other language (e.g., [31]). Here, our results showed that the relative frequency of first-person personal pronouns can be still a relevant linguistic marker of hubris even in a non-Indo-European language, like Hungarian, in which the frequency and linguistic behaviour of pronouns are governed by to different rules compared to English. Moreover, first-person verb conjugations in Hungarian might also fulfil similar diagnostic role as personal pronouns in identifying hubristic behaviour. In our study, we found that the ratio of the plural first person pronouns and verb inflections showed almost similar results. Therefore, future research could further study whether there are the differences in the function of the two types of linguistic forms as markers of hubris.

The increase between the first and second terms for both Orbán and Gyurcsány is in line with description of the hubristic personality that states that hubris tends to develop over time following the acquisition of power. For example, Garrard et al. (2014) showed that Margaret Thatcher’s usage of “we” compared to “I” peaked in the year of her re-election. But other speech corpus data confirming the effect of re-election is scarce. Orbán’s WE:I ratio did not increase from his second to his third term, which suggests that the effect of hubris on these linguistic markers remained at its peak. The first re-election might be of particular importance. Crucially, we also found that Gyurcsány’s speeches also exhibited a higher WE:I ratio in his second compared to his first term. Although we could show the effect of re-election only for two (male) PMs due to our restricted sample size, these results suggests that re-elections may have a general effect of increasing hubristic tendencies in political leaders. Future research could target especially, the effect of re-election on hubris for more PMs and for more individual variation (for example, such as variation in gender and in political-geographical context).

In general, high status individuals use a higher WE:I ratio that may reflect that they are more collectively minded or other-oriented compared to lower ranking persons [31]. Hence, frequent usage of “we” might not be a simply hubristic marker after all. However, it has been shown that higher frequency of “we” differentiates higher ranked people with and without hubristic personality [3, 17]. In our study, we also found that Orbán’s WE:I ratio in verb conjugations was higher compared to all other PMs, a control group of similarly high-ranking politicians.

In our analysis we focus on the changes in the relative ratio of the singular and plural personal pronouns (WE:I). While the frequent usage of certain pronouns could be also related to other personality traits (e.g. narcissism [18]), to rhetorical strategies (e.g., [27, 33]) or to the communication of ideologies (e.g., [34]), the relative increase of the plural first-person personal pronouns compared to its singular form have been exclusively described as a correlate of hubristic behavior ([5, 19]).

For example, the plural first-person pronouns (“we”, “us”) was found to be the most frequent among all other pronouns in pre-written political speeches [27, 35]. The frequent use of “we” and “us” in such speeches is assumed to be a rhetorical strategy to foster a sense of community with audience [27]. In this study, we analyzed remarks, replies and re-replies of parliamentary speeches which were probably not prepared in advance. In contrast with pre-written political speeches, we found that the Audience-referential (i.e., second-person plural and singular) were the most frequent pronouns in our sample (Fig 2, S1 Table in S1 File). We cannot exclude the possibility that such a pattern is specific to Hungarian because quantitative studies of political speeches typically rely on English texts. However, in our view, it is more likely that Audience-related pronouns had the highest frequency in our study, exactly because the speeches were uttered in the heat of political debates directed towards specific communicational partners spontaneously. Such a finding further corroborates the spontaneity of the selected speech samples.

The WE:I ratio might change in spontaneous speech because it is especially a unique hubristic trait to use “we” where its singular form would be suitable just as well. Two of the symptoms of hubris refer to such language use: 1) when one uses the “royal we” and 2) when own interests or desires are identified with a nation’s (or organization’s) needs [1, 2]. There are such typical examples of the usage of “we” in Orbán’s speeches when he speaks not only in the name of his party or the government but in the name of his voters. An example of this when Orbán said that “we, the Hungarians of the 21st century could accomplish our own revolution based on the April election” (kormany.hu, on 29.05.2010, 2nd speech). This illustrates that Orbán identifies his opinions and actions with those of his audience and talks to his voters as if they were the Hungarian nation as a whole. Future qualitative studies would be necessary to reveal the pragmatic function and referent of “we” in political speeches and whether there is a change also in their function accompanying the change in the WE:I ratio.

Politicians with no or few constraints on their decisions and behaviour, such as authoritarian leaders are particularly sensitive for acquiring hubris [1]. Viktor Orbán, the current PM of Hungary emerged into a powerful position during his second premiership in 2010 when his party obtained a two-thirds majority of the Parliamentary seats. This enabled Orbán to eliminate constraints on his power: he has been criticized world-wide since then as a leader who abuses his power to build an authoritarian, “illiberal” democracy [14]. Here we showed that linguistic markers of hubris unique to and typical for HS have become more frequent in Orbán’s semi-spontaneous parliamentary speeches exactly in this period of unlimited political “success”.

Hubristic traits in leaders might lead to low quality decision making and potentially unethical behaviour, hence, it is particularly important to identify hubristic traits in politicians’ behaviour for which linguistic markers may provide a powerful tool.

Our results suggest that in Eastern-Europe, a region with limited history with liberal, parliamentary democratic norms and governance, hubris emerges and increases in power positions, just as in Western democracies. In other words, the dynamics of democratic deterioration may not be reversed in less developed countries, such that power hungry strongmen emerge to power, but democratic institutions may resist less when leadership success makes leaders power hungry and authoritarian.

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: This study is clearly reported and warrants publication. It makes the case of proving the hypothesis of Hubris syndrome among the re-elected Hungarian prime ministers, especially in the case of Orbán. Some of the remarks on the spontaneous speech and discussions on the political meanings of the syndrome appear superficial for an interactional and discourse analysis point of view, thus the authors could make the paper more robust by remaining in the psycholinguistic paradigm. Among others, parliamentary replies are a special genre with a long history (studied by e.g. rhetorics), and the PM's usually have received training for it, too, since they are often mediatized as well. Conclusions on the political dimensions would require a more critical discourse analysis of the particular speeches and their contextualized interpretations and the role of the first plural in them.

Reviewer #2: This paper reports the results of a text analysis of Hungarian PMs over the period 1998-2018, which focuses on the usage of pronoun and verb conjugation usage by these PMs in spontaneous parliamentary speeches. The authors posit that increased usage of these pronouns and conjugations corresponds to increased levels of “hubris”. The results suggest that two PMs stand out: Gyurcsany and Orban and that, generally speaking, both these PMs have higher WE:I ratios after re-election.

There is a lot to like about this paper. The text analysis is straightforward and the statistical analysis is coherent and appropriate. However, I have reservations about the inherent value of the study as it currently stands as well as the theoretical framework.

Starting first from the theory, it is not clear from the text why we should believe that an increased WE:I ratio in PM utterances in parliament should necessarily correspond to increased levels of “hubris”. The paper fails to offer alternative explanations for such usage, and it is reasonable to expect that such alternatives exist. Both Gyurcsany and Orban are controversial political figures in their own respects, with the former resigning from his position in 2009 and the latter espousing anti-LGTB, nationalistic, and Euroskeptic positions in his second and third terms. The current paper does not consider the possibility, for example, that the usage of plural pronouns and verb conjugations could be the result of rhetorical strategies to share responsibility (see, e.g., Håkansson, 2012). Further, there could be multiple factors at play, with rhetorical strategies used as a form of communicating the actors’ ideology as in the case of Orban. It is well known that post-2010 Orban has a radically different ideological disposition with that of first term Orban. The usage of singular versus plural pronouns and verb conujugations clearly maps onto the “us-versus-them” rhetoric employed by political populist leaders, such as Victor Orban. By referring to “we”, the populist leader is illustrating the in-group (i.e. the Hungarian “people”) and by “them/they” he would be referencing the out-group (e.g. elites). The current paper does not consider this alternative explanation for the increased usage of “we” by now-populist Victor Orban, even though this is a well-studied issue among scholars of populist rhetoric (see, e.g. Tyrkkö, 2016). The study must be able to take into account these alternative explanations in the analysis, if we are to believe that the observed increase in the WE:I ratio is directly attributable to a “hubris syndrome”

Furthermore, even if we are to believe that Orban, for instance, has indeed succumbed to an increase in hubris and that his rhetoric is an indicator of this, the study does not provide a solid discussion of the implications of these findings. Why should we care if Orban is now exhibiting features of increased hubris? Does this offer a new insight into his decisionmaking processes? Would other EU leaders learn anything new from this analysis which might assist them when dealing with him? Are there implications for voters in Hungary? More work needs to go into the policy implications of these findings.

References:

Håkansson, J. (2012). The Use of Personal Pronouns in Political Speeches: A comparative study of the pronominal choices of two American presidents.

Tyrkkö, J. (2016). Looking for rhetorical thresholds: Pronoun frequencies in political speeches. Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English, 17.

Reviewer #3: Recommendation: Minor Revision

1. Comments to Authors

1.1. Overview and general recommendation

1.1.1. The authors analysed and discussed the occurrence of symptoms of the Hubris Syndrome (HS) for Hungarian Prime Ministers (PMs), through the analysis of spontaneous speeches (e.g., shift from first singular person “I” to first plural person “we”).

1.1.2. The paper is fluent, technically sound and interesting to be read. However, few improvements can be still made before publication in PLOS ONE journal, which I highlighted as follows. Hence, I suggest a minor revision of the paper.

1.2. Major comments

1.2.1. I believe the authors should better explain the added value of their contribution with respect to the current scientific literature. Indeed, though the contribution of the research work clearly appears, it is not appropriately discussed in the introduction section.

1.2.2. Moreover, has any other research work investigated the Hubris Syndrome for Hungarian PMs or for other countries’ PMs? If not, please explicitly highlight this absence in the section.

1.2.3. In the Introduction section you mentioned: “Our hypotheses are the following: Orbán, due to hubristic personality trait uses the personal pronoun “we” in a higher proportion relative to “I” (WE:I ratio) in his speech than other former Hungarian PMs from his second premiership onwards.”: could you please elaborate and discuss more in depth your hypotheses related to Orbán?

1.2.4. In the Conclusion section, you mentioned that “Two of the symptoms of hubris refer to such language use: 1) when one uses the “royal we” and 2) when own interests or desires are identified with a nation’s (or organization’s) needs (Owen, 2008; Owen & Davidson, 2009). There are such typical examples of the usage of “we” in Orbán’s speeches when he speaks not only in the name of his party or the government but in the name of his voters.”: it may be interesting to evaluate the occurrence of both symptoms and perform an additional analysis concerning the differences between those two categories of symptoms. Indeed, is there any specific pattern observed for the different PMs considering such language usage?

1.3. Minor comments

1.3.1. At lines 63-64 you mentioned that “[..] (even though some positive consequences have been pointed out recently; Zeitoun et al., 2019).”: please modify it as “[..], even though some positive consequences have been pointed out recently (Zeitoun et al., 2019).”

**********

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Reviewer #3: Yes: Sebastiano Di Luozzo

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14 Jul 2022

Dear Dr. Andrea Fronzetti Colladon,

We thank the reviewers for providing us with highly valuable feedback and suggestions to improve our manuscript. We implemented major changes in our manuscript by revising our Abstract, Introduction and Discussion. In the revised manuscript, we also moved Table 1 from the Materials and Method section to the Results as it contains descriptive statistics. We also included a new analysis with a new figure (Fig 2) in our Results section. We also updated the manuscript according to PLOS ONE’s style requirements. In the marked-up copy of our manuscript we did not mark changes in style if those did not affect the text or content of the manuscript. Below we reply in each specific comment in turn.

Response to Reviewer 1

Reviewer #1: This study is clearly reported and warrants publication. It makes the case of proving the hypothesis of Hubris syndrome among the re-elected Hungarian prime ministers, especially in the case of Orbán. Some of the remarks on the spontaneous speech and discussions on the political meanings of the syndrome appear superficial for an interactional and discourse analysis point of view, thus the authors could make the paper more robust by remaining in the psycholinguistic paradigm.

Authors: We would like to thank the Reviewer for the careful evaluation of our paper. We are grateful for pointing out that we did not discuss interactional and discourse analysis studies of political speeches in the earlier version of our manuscript. In our study, we focused on presumably spontaneous speeches of politicians (replies, re-replies, remarks during debates) which are very different from pre-written, classical political speeches typically analyzed in other studies. Our research methods and questions are also rather far from classical discourse analysis. The main focus of our paper is a quantitative analysis of specific, focused linguistic markers, instead a content driven and/or comprehensive descriptive analysis of political discourse. We analyzed a particular linguistic marker, ratio of WE:I in our study which has been related exclusively to hubristic behaviour in the literature so far. However, we agree that studies of discourse analysis provide very important insight on the possible function of “we” in political speeches. Therefore, we included a discussion of such studies in the revised Discussion (5-6 paragraphs, p 15.).

Reviewer #1: Among others, parliamentary replies are a special genre with a long history (studied by e.g. rhetorics), and the PM's usually have received training for it, too, since they are often mediatized as well.

Authors: We also agree with the reviewer that parliamentary responses may reflect training in rhetoric. However, we would like to point out that rhetoric training may focus on a number of factors, but we are not aware of any rhetorical school or approach that would emphasize (and successfully implement) the enhanced use of WE over I in relatively spontaneous responses. Should the Reviewer have any particular author in mind, we are ready to consider the idea in further depth. One may of course still assume that the WE:I ratio changed due to rhetoric training, but then such training should have happened systematically prior the reelection of each PM. We believe that such an explanation of our results is much less likely than being under the influence of Hubris Syndrome (HS), as changes in WE:I ratio has been associated with this syndrome.

Reviewer #1: Conclusions on the political dimensions would require a more critical discourse analysis of the particular speeches and their contextualized interpretations and the role of the first plural in them.

Authors: We completely agree that the role of “we” in the context of the speeches could be better assessed by a qualitative analysis which is out of the scope of our study. At the same time, our aim in the current paper was a rather different one. Instead of providing an in-depth analysis of content and context of political speeches and discourse in the Hungarian Parliament, our focus has been on a particular quantitative linguistic marker, associated with hubristic behavior in prior research. In other words, while the role of the first plural may be of particular interest of additional analyses indeed, it would go in a quite different direction we set out to investigate. In the updated version of our manuscript, we nevertheless added in the Discussion that “Future qualitative studies would be necessary to reveal the pragmatic function and referent of “we” in political speeches and whether there is a change also in their function accompanying the change in the WE:I ratio” (p 16, lines 346-348).

We also slightly modified our Abstract and the Discussion to moderate our conclusion (e.g., we changed “The results (…) confirm the hypothesis” to “This finding suggests” in the Abstract (line 31) and we changed “Our results demonstrate” to “Our results suggest” in the last paragraph of the Discussion (line 361)).

Response to Reviewer 2

Reviewer #2: This paper reports the results of a text analysis of Hungarian PMs over the period 1998-2018, which focuses on the usage of pronoun and verb conjugation usage by these PMs in spontaneous parliamentary speeches. The authors posit that increased usage of these pronouns and conjugations corresponds to increased levels of “hubris”. The results suggest that two PMs stand out: Gyurcsany and Orban and that, generally speaking, both these PMs have higher WE:I ratios after re-election.

There is a lot to like about this paper. The text analysis is straightforward and the statistical analysis is coherent and appropriate. However, I have reservations about the inherent value of the study as it currently stands as well as the theoretical framework.

Starting first from the theory, it is not clear from the text why we should believe that an increased WE:I ratio in PM utterances in parliament should necessarily correspond to increased levels of “hubris”. The paper fails to offer alternative explanations for such usage, and it is reasonable to expect that such alternatives exist.

Authors: We thank the Reviewer for the valuable suggestions to improve our manuscript. Following the Reviewer’s suggestion, we included additional alternative explanations in our text (5-6 paragraphs of the revised Discussion, p 15.). More specifically, we discuss studies that relate the frequent usage of “we” to rhetorical strategies (even though they do not address the question of spontaneous and pre-prepared political speeches). Importantly, we would like to point out that by comparing Hungarian PMs to one another is expected to mitigate such differences: opportunities and/or requirements for rhetorical training were likely to be comparable among them (even though there is no information in the public record in this matter in Hungary). We are of course very much open to any additional alternative explanations the Reviewer may have in mind, and we are ready to consider and potentially address them in our manuscript. Further on, we still believe that the explanation included in the first version of our paper, that high-status individual might use more “we” because of their social skills and leadership position, is one of the most powerful alternative accounts (p 14, lines 311-317). The latter explanation, nevertheless has limited explanatory power regarding our data, because all analyzed individuals were equally top ranking MPs, therefore, status is insufficient to account for the relative difference in the WE:I ratios among them.

It is true that an increased WE:I ratio does not necessarily and exclusively correspond to HS. However, we also would like to point out that a change in the WE:I ratio has been linked to hubristic behaviour in the literature, via both quantitative and qualitative analyses of language use, behavior and political and business decision making. Importantly such a pattern has been observed in spontaneous (as opposed to pre-prepared) speech, which is a crucial detail: such a change of speech pattern seems to be very likely not under the deliberate control of the speaker.

However, we indeed measured only WE:I ratio and did not analyze specific behavioral patterns, therefore, we are not in the position to establish a causal link. Our prediction, nevertheless, and a hypothesis driven research question was whether the WE:I ratio change in accordance with obtaining and experiencing high political power. To reflect on this correlation, we slightly modified our Abstract and the Discussion to moderate our conclusion (e.g., we changed “The results (…) confirm the hypothesis” to “This finding suggests” in the Abstract (line 31) and we changed “Our results demonstrate” to “Our results suggest” in the last paragraph of the Discussion (line 361)).

Reviewer #2: Both Gyurcsany and Orban are controversial political figures in their own respects, with the former resigning from his position in 2009 and the latter espousing anti-LGTB, nationalistic, and Euroskeptic positions in his second and third terms. The current paper does not consider the possibility, for example, that the usage of plural pronouns and verb conjugations could be the result of rhetorical strategies to share responsibility (see, e.g., Håkansson, 2012).

Authors: We are grateful for the useful reference the Reviewer recommended. We also acknowledge in the revised Discussion that qualitative analysis could give insight about the exact role and function of “we” in our speech samples (lines 346-348). Along with Håkansson’s, we also refer to a study by Karapetjana (2011) which describes the function of exclusive “we” as sharing responsibility in political interviews (line 320).

At the same time, aim of the current paper is not a qualitative analysis of the content of political debates and messaging, but a quantitative study of a linguistic marker that may be telling of a change in the overall psychological functioning of political leaders in general.

Reviewer #2: Further, there could be multiple factors at play, with rhetorical strategies used as a form of communicating the actors’ ideology as in the case of Orban. It is well known that post-2010 Orban has a radically different ideological disposition with that of first term Orban. The usage of singular versus plural pronouns and verb conujugations clearly maps onto the “us-versus-them” rhetoric employed by political populist leaders, such as Victor Orban. By referring to “we”, the populist leader is illustrating the in-group (i.e. the Hungarian “people”) and by “them/they” he would be referencing the out-group (e.g. elites). The current paper does not consider this alternative explanation for the increased usage of “we” by now-populist Victor Orban, even though this is a well-studied issue among scholars of populist rhetoric (see, e.g. Tyrkkö, 2016). The study must be able to take into account these alternative explanations in the analysis, if we are to believe that the observed increase in the WE:I ratio is directly attributable to a “hubris syndrome”.

Authors: Thank you for the suggestions and we are grateful for the suggested literature on this topic. In the revised Discussion, we refer to Trykkö (2016) and van Dijk (2006) (p 15). We, however, also note that Trykkö (2016) and Håkansson (2012) focused on pre-written, not spontaneous speeches. Both found that the first-person plural (“we”) was the most frequent among other types of personal pronouns, and Trykkö also showed that there is a tendency for using increasingly more “we” in political speeches from 1920. However, rhetorical strategies may play a stronger role in such speeches, while our study aimed at spontaneous speeches, exactly because of the prediction in the literature that uncontrollable alterations of speech patterns may emerge due to HS.

Regarding the expression of populist ideological polarization by ingroups and outgroups, the above works imply that both the first-person plurals and also the third-person plural would increase. Following up on this idea, we have carried an analysis of the occurrence frequencies of all pronouns in the speech samples we analyzed and found that for all politicians, in each parliamentary cycles, the second-person pronouns (“you”) were the most frequent ones in the selected spontaneous speech samples. This finding further corroborates that our speech samples might be different from classical political speeches in that they are born out of heated parliamentary debates, spontaneously (please, see the first paragraph if the revised Results section on p 8-9, Fig 2 on p 9, and the sixth paragraph of the revised Discussion on p 15). Moreover, we also found that while the frequency of “we” increased for both Orbán and Gyurcsány from their first premiership to the second, the frequency of „they” did not change even in ther case (please see Supporting information, Supplementary Results). We included and discussed these results in the revised manuscript and Supporting information.

In the context of populist rhetoric, it should be noted, however, that even the pronoun “we” could be used either in an exclusive (“we” the Fidesz party and its followers) or inclusive manner (“we”, all the Hungarians), and Orbán strategically uses the inclusive “we” in an exclusive manner (“we”, the Fidesz are the real and only Hungarians, the rest are traitors). In other words, identifying exclusive vs. inclusive “we” (and the referent of “we” in general) is in and by an interpretive and highly challenging question, where it is often not clear what matters more, the intention of the speaker or the interpretation by the audience. Our analyses were not aimed to capture such fine-grained nuances, as they require qualitative speech analysis of each “we” uttered.

Finally, we would also like to point out that, in our view, Orbán was a nationalist populist prior to 2010 as well, already during his first term, from 1998 to 2002. Our hypotheses were driven by the fact that he obtained excessive, complete power in Hungary in 2010 (a supermajority with the power to change the constitution, which he did), which, in turn, may have made him more prone to express hubristic traits, including a change in his spontaneous speech pattern. It is true that Orbán was considered a moderate conservative in the West prior to 2010, but in fact he has borrowed skillfully and unabashedly from the far right even back then, such as utilizing national symbols (“kokárda” or the national flag) for political purposes during elections, and flirted openly with the legacy of Miklós Horthy, the autocratic leader of Hungary in the interwar period (which remained largely underreported and labelled mostly as “leftist” concerns). It is also true that in the late 1980s, Orbán’s political party, Fidesz was indeed affiliated with liberal forces, but this episode ended after the 1994 elections, when Orbán decided to fill the power vacuum appearing on the political right. Although in our original manuscript we have already mentioned supermajority in the Discussion (lines 351-353), we also refer to the supermajority now in the revised Introduction (lines 78, 96, 102).

Reviewer #2: Furthermore, even if we are to believe that Orban, for instance, has indeed succumbed to an increase in hubris and that his rhetoric is an indicator of this, the study does not provide a solid discussion of the implications of these findings. Why should we care if Orban is now exhibiting features of increased hubris? Does this offer a new insight into his decision making processes? Would other EU leaders learn anything new from this analysis which might assist them when dealing with him? Are there implications for voters in Hungary? More work needs to go into the policy implications of these findings.

Authors: Thank you for raising this crucial issue. We agree with the Reviewer that political implications could be spelled out in greater detail. However, our main goal is to analyze speech patterns that may be telling of a change of personality that my lead to bad decision making in general. Therefore, we would like to draw more general conclusions instead of a warning about Orbán for the EU. Populist or not, hubristic behavior leads to bad governance and ill-suited political and economic decisions, which Orbán may exemplify well, but our main point is that the deterioration of leadership abilities may be detected in linguistic markers of spontaneous speech. Along these lines, we extended now the revised Discussion by emphasizing that it is important to study hubris in the case of powerful politicians, because it might also lead to political misjudgments and even to unethical behaviour (p 16, lines 358-360). HS theory does not provide insight into the mechanisms of the deterioration of decision making, but the matter is certainly worth future exploration.

Reviewer #2:

References:

Håkansson, J. (2012). The Use of Personal Pronouns in Political Speeches: A comparative study of the pronominal

choices of two American presidents.

Tyrkkö, J. (2016). Looking for rhetorical thresholds: Pronoun frequencies in political speeches. Studies in Variation,

Contacts and Change in English, 17.

Authors: We thank you for the references.

Response to Reviewer 3

Reviewer #3: Recommendation: Minor Revision

1. Comments to Authors

1.1. Overview and general recommendation

1.1.1. The authors analysed and discussed the occurrence of symptoms of the Hubris Syndrome (HS) for Hungarian Prime Ministers (PMs), through the analysis of spontaneous speeches (e.g., shift from first singular person “I” to first plural person “we”).

1.1.2. The paper is fluent, technically sound and interesting to be read. However, few improvements can be still made before publication in PLOS ONE journal, which I highlighted as follows. Hence, I suggest a minor revision of the paper.

1.2. Major comments

1.2.1. I believe the authors should better explain the added value of their contribution with respect to the current scientific literature. Indeed, though the contribution of the research work clearly appears, it is not appropriately discussed in the introduction section.

Authors: We are grateful for the suggestions. We extended the Introduction of the revised manuscript with emphasizing the gap which is filled by our study. We explain that there are only a few studies dealing hubristic behaviour in politicians, although hubristic behaviour can lead to bad decisions and has a risk for failure. Moreover, linguistic markers of hubris have been described in English, hence, this study also gives insight about linguistic markers in a very different (non-Indo-European) language, Hungarian (p 4, lines 68-72).

In the revised Discussion, we emphasize again that hubristic traits in leaders might lead to bad decisions and unethical behaviour, hence, it is extremely important to study hubris in powerful politicians’ behaviours (p 16, lines 358-360).

Reviewer #3: 1.2.2. Moreover, has any other research work investigated the Hubris Syndrome for Hungarian PMs or for other countries’ PMs? If not, please explicitly highlight this absence in the section.

Authors: To the best of our knowledge, no other study investigated hubris in Hungarian PMs. We also did not find studies investigating PMs in other countries in the English language international journals, except for those two that inspired our own research, studying hubris in British PMs (Garrard et al., 2014), and comparing British PMs and US Presidents (Owen, Davidson, 2009). In the revised Introduction, we now make a stronger emphasis of the lack of deeper research into hubristic behaviour of politicians (p 4, lines 68-70).

Reviewer #3: 1.2.3. In the Introduction section you mentioned: “Our hypotheses are the following: Orbán, due to hubristic personality trait uses the personal pronoun “we” in a higher proportion relative to “I” (WE:I ratio) in his speech than other former Hungarian PMs from his second premiership onwards.”: could you please elaborate and discuss more in depth your hypotheses related to Orbán?

Authors: We added more explanation to the hypothesis in the revised Introduction, thank you for pointing out this matter (p 5, lines 95-102).

Reviewer #3: 1.2.4. In the Conclusion section, you mentioned that “Two of the symptoms of hubris refer to such language use: 1) when one uses the “royal we” and 2) when own interests or desires are identified with a nation’s (or organization’s) needs (Owen, 2008; Owen & Davidson, 2009). There are such typical examples of the usage of “we” in Orbán’s speeches when he speaks not only in the name of his party or the government but in the name of his voters.”: it may be interesting to evaluate the occurrence of both symptoms and perform an additional analysis concerning the differences between those two categories of symptoms. Indeed, is there any specific pattern observed for the different PMs considering such language usage?

Authors: We agree that it would be very interesting to evaluate the role of “we” in our samples. However, answering such a question requires quantitative content-analysis, which lays outside of the scope of our current question and quantitative approach. We agree with the Reviewer that this is an important question and it would be important to further specify the role of “we” once it becomes proportionately more frequent in spontaneous speech of high-power politicians. Therefore, we included in the revised Discussion that future qualitative studies reveal the role of “we” in PMs spontaneous political speeches (lines 346-348). Please also see our response above to Reviewer 2, who raised similar points.

Reviewer #3: 1.3. Minor comments

1.3.1. At lines 63-64 you mentioned that “[..] (even though some positive consequences have been pointed out recently; Zeitoun et al., 2019).”: please modify it as “[..], even though some positive consequences have beenpointed out recently (Zeitoun et al., 2019).”

Authors: We corrected this sentence, thank you.

Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx

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5 Aug 2022

The Hungarian hubris syndrome

PONE-D-22-05588R1

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Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

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PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

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Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: my concerns have now been addressed and the revised draft is publishable now. I congratulate the authors for the rigorous analysis of data.

Reviewer #2: I wish to thank the authors for addressing my concerns and suggestions. I am satisfied with the revisions.

Reviewer #3: The authors addressed all the reviewers' comments, which improved the research manuscript. For this reason, I feel that the manuscript is now suitable for publication in PLOS One.

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15 Aug 2022

PONE-D-22-05588R1

The Hungarian hubris syndrome

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