"It's not what you say, but how you say it" is a common cliché for speakers trying to connect with others.
But according to new research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Assistant Professor of Psychology Ariana Orvell and Ethan Kross and Susan A. Gelman of the University of Michigan, it may just be that "you" that really matters when it comes to what we read.
In a series of studies, Orvell and her colleagues found that ideas expressed with what they identify as "generic-you" increased resonance, or a sense of connection, with readers more than phrases or ideas lacking the word.
"Prior research examining the processes that promote [resonance] suggests that altering a message to evoke emotion, highlighting its applicability to a person’s life, or appealing to a person’s beliefs can all contribute to an idea’s resonance," write the researchers. "Here we examine an additional route to cultivating this experience, which is grounded in a message’s form rather than its content: the use of a linguistic device that frames an idea as applying broadly."
In conducting their initial research, Orvell and her colleagues used publicly available data from the Amazon Kindle application.
The researchers analyzed 56 books (1,120 total passages) from Oprah’s Book Club and looked at passages readers highlighted using the built-in highlighting feature. To see whether generic-you was especially likely to appear in highlighted passages they needed to compare rates of generic-you in highlighted passages to rates in other passages that readers had not spontaneously highlighted while reading.
"To do this, we selected sets of 10 control passages (from each book) that were roughly the same length as the highlighted passages," explains Orvell. "We then compared how frequently generic-you appeared in the highlighted versus not highlighted (control) passages. This allowed us to see whether generic-you appeared at higher rates in passages that people found resonant while reading."
They found that highlighted passages were 8.5 times more likely to contain generic "you" than passages that were not highlighted, leading them to identify generic-you as a linguistic device that enhances resonance.
The researchers hypothesize two reasons for generic-you's ability to connect readers and ideas:
Generic-you conveys that ideas are generalizable. Rather than expressing information that applies to a particular situation (e.g., “Leo broke your heart”), generic-you expresses information that is timeless and applies across contexts (e.g., “Eventually, you recover from heartbreak.”). Second, generic-you is expressed with the same word ("you") that is used in nongeneric contexts to refer to the addressee. Thus, even when “you” is used generically, the association to its specific meaning may further pull in the addressee, heightening resonance.
To strengthen the test of their hypothesis, the researchers followed up their initial Kindle study with a series of online experiments in which participants were presented with a series of phrases that alternated between using generic-you, the first-person singular pronoun "I," and the generic "people," finding that phrases with generic-you resonated most with participants.
"Collectively, these findings support the idea that generic-you enhances resonance both because of its capacity to generalize and its ability to pull in the reader," the researchers found.
"Another neat feature of generic-you is its flexibility," says Orvell. "It can allow people to express very idiosyncratic experiences as general and normative, in ways that might be less jarring than if the same idea were expressed with 'one' or 'people'."
Next steps for the researchers include studying how generic-you is used in other languages, as well as studying its effects in children and in other uses, such as social media posts.