With or Without You: How Second Person Pronouns Engage Listeners

What makes cultural products popular? Could products that literally speak to “you” be more engaging? Academics have long been interested in whether the use of second person pronouns (e.g., you, your, and yours) shapes audience involvement (Pennebaker 2011). While some have argued that this small category of words seems to enhance engagement (e.g., increasing likes of online posts, Cruz et al. 2017), other work has found little impact of second person pronouns on listeners (Packard et al. 2018). We predict that “you” pronouns do enhance engagement with listeners. Importantly, however, rather than being narratively transported (Escalas 2007) as the driver of a story or by making them the focal subject or actor (e.g., “You’re driving down the street…”) as described in research on self-referencing (Burnkrant and Unnava 1995; Meyers-Levy and Peracchio 1996), we propose that “you” pronouns engage audiences by inducing a feeling of social attachment (Hazan and Shaver 1990). In short, “you” pronouns could work by evoking a “you” other than the listener: a person to whom the listener could imagine singing or speaking the words. We examine this proposition—that other-referencing underlies the positive impact of “you” pronouns—in three ways. First, from a linguistic perspective, other-referencing “you” use should typically occur when this pronoun is presented as the object of a protagonist’s thoughts or actions (“I love you”) rather than as a self-referencing protagonist (“You love me”). Second, if other-referencing drives the engagement benefit of “you” pronouns, this relationship will be mediated by second person pronouns’ ability to evoke an other to whom the listener is socially attached (Hazan and Shaver 1990). Third, we expect that the effect of “you” use should be enhanced when second person pronoun references appear in a positively valenced manner. People are motivated to hold positive perceptions of the self, and these perceptions are maintained in part through the belief that others regard them in a positive light (Baumeister 1982, 1998; Leary 1996).