Pronouns matter when psyching yourself up | Hacker News Reader

Pronouns matter when psyching yourself up

hbr.org

71 pointsbreitling29 comments

> We found that cueing people to reflect on intense emotional experiences using their names and non-first-person pronouns such as “you” or “he” or “she” consistently helped them control their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

In Marine Corps basic training (i.e. bootcamp) recruits must refer to themselves in the third person and as "Recruit LastName". I always assumed it was to dehumanize us (and that was probably the initial reason), but now I wonder if it had the added side effect of helping us "control [our] thoughts, feelings, and behaviors" during the prolonged period of "intense emotional experiences" that is bootcamp.

I also wondered that when I went through, later I got clarification that it was for those reasons, and to remove the individual, so that we can follow commands faster and with less hesitation.

I assume it's the same in all militaries (in Finnish Defence Forces, when talking to superiors you're always supposed to begin with "sir/ma'am <his/her rank>, <my rank> <my last name>" (in reality people are rarely that formal after basic training)). I always assumed it was mainly to ensure that the other person knows who you are. It's certainly helpfull when you go as an NCO to a new unit and need to learn everyones names.

The Malala story is a really terrible example of this for three reasons:

1. Her native language is not English, so she presumably does not speak to herself in English. She is translating what she says to herself to English. She may or may not speak to herself in the third person.

2. She is relating a story about speaking to herself to other people. Just because she described it in the third person does not mean that the thought occurred in the third person. People tell stories for dramatic effect.

3. Culturally, she is very different from broke undergrads at the University of California Berkeley. Perhaps culture plays a much larger role than pronouns.

The paper described in the article is available as PDF here: http://cpl.psy.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Kross-et-a...

People always make fun of Swizec for referring to himself in third person. Apparently it's pretentious.

But I do it a lot, especially when I mess up. I'll be like, "jeezus swizec, you really didn't have to say that"

No idea why I do it. I think it just makes the dialogue flow better because it gives you a faux outside perspective

"Swizec, you really didn't have to say that" is second person, not third person.

"Swizec didn't have to say that" (or "Swizec thinks he didn't have to say that") would be third person.

IIRC, there is a period in early development where children frequently use the third person to talk about themselves (likely related to the development of the theory of mind, i.e. the distinction between one's own mind and others, which develops during early childhood too).

I'm not sure where the prentiousness comes from (though I'm aware of it), but this style of speech is also frequently used when trying to portray someone as severely lacking intelligence (likely to make them appear more like a child): "Hulk angry. Hulk smash!" comes to mind as an obvious example.

I'd guess that people who think "you can do this" instead of "I can do this" heard the phrase "you can do this" often, for example from their parents, other relatives, or friends. If that's true, then this article just confuses causation with correlation: The causal link is more likely to be "people from a supportive environment worry less (and they also talk to themselves in the second person)".

> I'd guess

No need to guess, the paper explicitly deals with this:

    Thus, individuals who scored high versus low on trait
    social anxiety benefited similarly from introspecting using non-
    first-person language.

In your terms, you'd expect people from less supportive environments to have higher social anxiety. Study 6 shows this doesn't matter.

My own observation from trying this out: I sometimes experience negative self-talk when thinking about my day. If something undesirable or embarrassing happened, I might say "I'm an idiot", almost reflexively. However, forcing myself to say "jmckib, you're an idiot" is much harder to do, because it feels like I'm insulting someone else, an obvious no-no.

It is funny how everyone engages in writing his own explanation on why this works. Here is mine:

By having the self-talk in first person you are in the scenario of being alone; while using any of the other forms, you are playing two different roles, therefore you are actually accompanied instead of alone, which I guess, helps to control anxiety...

Alternatively: if you "psych yourself up", using second person or third person positions the praise outside yourself, as if it would come from a peer or third party. It builds on similar things you may have heard from other people trying to cheer you up in the past (and thus taps into the feelings associated with those memories) and helps you visualize how other people might judge you positively if you succeed.

I.e. visualizing success mixed with recalling positive experiences in the past. "You can do it! You're a good person. You rock!" etc.

This would also match with the idea of people who inflict self-harm chastising themselves in the second person (though I'm not sure whether that is actually a thing or just something you find on tumblr and in movies): "You're no good. You don't deserve this. You're a failure." etc (which sounds like something you'd expect an abusive parent to tell you).

I personally use "We" which is not mentioned. Awkward. (In French we have "On" a sort of informal "We" and mix between first and third person without equivalent in English).

I sometimes think in terms of "we", but then I start feeling like Gollum and snap myself out of it once the phrase "my precious" appears in my head.

We is scientific and mathematical, precious.

We is also the "Royal We" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we)

There is something similar in Hindi. 'Hum' means 'we' but it is used to imply your superiority. There are two types of 'you' as well. Gives out a lot of unavoidable information about your stance for that person.

"One" is actually reasonable close, e.g. "one does not simply walk into Mordor" but it certainly lacks the informality (and therefore frequency of use) that "on" has in French or the reflexive "se" in Spanish.

Sometimes formality/informality gets jumbled up and mistaken for 'frequency of use'. Just witness the informal thy,thee,thou which are now seen as formal through long lack of use.

Just to be completely clear on this word, would that be used to say something within a group rather than to outsiders of that group? example: "here at this group, we do things" vs "here at this group, we don't like any of you"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_personal_pronouns#On

TL;DR: 1) a very close analog to (pronoun, non-numerical) "one" in English, 2) an informal stand-in for nous, that is, "we", as in on y va[1].

[1] http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=81144

Thanks for the clarification, I was fairly wrong before.

I'm not completely sure now, but at least i'm not wrong.

This reminds me of the poor[0] management technique of avoiding I vs you ("there's no I in team") to project a feeling of ownership:

e.g. "We don't do things this way." vs "You're not meant to do things this way." or "We think it's best to let you go." vs "I think it's best to let you go."

[0]: Not saying that this is never appropriate, but in many cases this is just used as a tool to shift personal responsibility onto the entire team/company or present subjective opinions as something everyone agreed on. Team-building isn't something you can just define into existence.

Tangentially-related note: does anyone happen to know of a (preferably Firefox) browser extension (or perhaps some sort of addition to AdBlock) that will block the incredibly-annoying full-screen in-page popups that seemingly-ever-other site harasses its viewers with?

It's getting to the point where I'm - without fail - simply closing whatever article I was hoping to read rather immediately. Perhaps I should just start using NoScript or whatever JS-blocking add-on happens to be the latest fashion.

I kind of interpret this as playing on our insecurities of others testing our abilities to perform an action. Saying "You/your name can do this" to yourself is like another person saying it to you. Psychologically hearing/thinking that someone else is depending on you to do a task is enough to kick your ass in gear.

Interesting, but are there any negative side-effects of (prolonged use of) this technique?

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Not really digging the plots with no error bars or labels on the y axis

If you look at this selftalk like Shannon entropy and information transfer, then by definition, to successfully "talk" to someone requires both a sender and receiver, two parties, which data is transferred between, and groked, so entropy decreases. If viewed in this context, the activity of "Talking to oneself using I/me" then becomes non-sensical, information transfer requires at least two parties, not one.

It then follows and makes sense that using 3rd person, or one's name, increases chance of successful information transfer to the "I/me" receiver: the semblance of two separate parties is maintained, thus creating the medium for decreasing Shannon entropy.

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