Everyday life is full of recommendations. When leaving an online review or talking to a coworker, people often rely on personal pronouns to deliver their message. They might say, “I really enjoyed this book” or “You will love this book.”
A new investigation examines how these minor phrasing choices influence the effectiveness of a recommendation. The researchers discovered a consistent disconnect between how communicators build messages and how audiences receive them, publishing their findings in Psychology & Marketing.
The research was led by Wenyan Yin of NEOMA Business School, along with Jonah Berger of the Wharton School and Yanliu Huang of Drexel University. The team wanted to understand the impact of first-person singular pronouns, like “I” or “me,” compared to second-person singular pronouns, like “you.”
Almost every sentence features a personal pronoun. The researchers noted that 97.8 percent of a 100,000-review sample from Amazon contained at least one first- or second-person pronoun.
Prior investigations into language have often focused on what words reveal about the speaker. Yin and her colleagues decided to shift the focus to the audience. They designed a series of seven experiments to see how specific pronouns shift attitudes and purchase intentions.
The Disconnect Between Speaker and Audience
In the early experiments, the research team asked one group of participants to imagine writing a product review for a water bottle. Another group was asked to imagine reading a review to help them make a purchase decision.
The communicators believed that a review stating “You’ll like this water bottle” would be highly persuasive. They consistently rated second-person pronouns as a more effective way to reach a reader.
The readers, however, had a very different reaction. Participants in the audience group reported higher product liking and purchase intentions when the review said, “I like this water bottle.” The authors found that first-person language was consistently more persuasive to the actual consumers.
To ensure the results were not tied to a specific sentence structure, the researchers ran a variation with 560 participants. Instead of using pronouns as the subject of the sentence, the reviews read either “A great water bottle for me” or “A great water bottle for you.” The exact same pattern emerged in the data.
Perspective-Taking Versus Reactance
The research team wanted to map the psychological steps that produce this disconnect. They measured the internal thought processes of both the writers and the readers during a new experiment involving blender reviews.
For communicators, the preference for second-person pronouns was linked to a desire to engage in perspective-taking. When writers try to tailor a message to an audience, they often use words like “you” to signal that they are thinking about the reader’s needs. The authors found that emphasizing the importance of perspective-taking led writers to lean even harder into second-person language.
For the audience, the sequence of events went in a completely different direction. When readers saw a review telling them how they would feel, it triggered a psychological state called reactance.
Reactance occurs when people feel their freedom or autonomy is being constrained. When a stranger online says “you will like this,” consumers often feel like they are being told what to think. This sense of being instructed led to an increase in defensive feelings, which then resulted in the audience rejecting the recommendation.
The researchers confirmed this chain of events by measuring individual personality traits among 390 participants. People who naturally have a high disposition for reactance were especially turned off by second-person pronouns. For individuals with low natural reactance, the phrasing made little difference.
When Second-Person Pronouns Actually Work
The negative response to second-person pronouns has a distinct boundary condition. The researchers suspected that telling someone how they will feel is only offensive if the speaker lacks the knowledge to make that claim.
In a final experiment with 593 participants, the team varied the relationship between the communicator and the audience. Some participants were told the recommendation came from an anonymous online review. Others were told it came from a close friend.
The source of the message completely altered the results. When the recommendation came from an online reviewer, the audience experienced reactance, and second-person pronouns were less persuasive. When the message came from a close friend, the reactance disappeared.
The researchers interpret this as a sign that friends possess the necessary credibility to predict our preferences. A close friend saying “you will love this” feels entirely natural to the listener. A stranger making the exact same claim, however, crosses a psychological boundary.
These results present a very specific rule for navigating everyday communication. Unless a speaker has a preexisting relationship with their audience, attempting to guess the listener’s preferences usually backfires. Reverting to first-person language avoids this trap entirely.
