Using "I" instead of "You" can boost Self-Motivation

Posted on July 16, 2014

We know self-talk can help people's self-control (e.g. "Don't do it!"), and boost their morale (e.g. "Hang in there!") in sporting situations. However, before now, no-one has investigated whether self-talk is more effective depending on whether you refer to yourself in the grammatical first person (i.e. "I can do it!") or the second person (i.e. "You can do it?").

Sanda Dolcos and her team first asked 95 psychology undergrads to imagine they were a character in a short story. The character is faced with a choice [strangely, we're not given any detail about these vignettes], and the participants are asked to write down the advice they would give themselves in this role, to help make the choice. Crucially, half the participants were instructed to use the first-person "I" in their self-advice, the others to use the second-person "You". Right after, the participants completed a series of anagrams. Those who'd given their fictional selves advice using "You" completed more anagrams than those who'd used the first person "I" (17.53 average completion rate vs. 15.96).

Dolcos and her colleagues said theirs was the "first experimental demonstration" that second-person self-talk is more effective than the first-person variety, thus complementing "past intuitions and descriptive data" suggesting that people resort to second-person self-talk when in more demanding situations.

Click on the link below to read the full article


Source material from British Psychological Society