Replacing "you" with "we" can make a message less threatening — and less likely to be censored
Given the increasingly polarized nature of American society, finding ways to boost receptiveness could help bridge the seemingly intractable divide between people with opposing viewpoints.
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Ever been in a situation where you just can’t get your message across? New research by Zakary Tormala and Mohamed Hussein suggests that you might want to rethink which pronouns you deploy.
Tormalaopen in new window, a professor of marketing at Stanford GSB, and Hussein, a PhD candidate who studies the intersection between consumer behavior and politics, looked at how using “you” versus “we” pronouns affected how people responded to messages in settings such as online forums and a simulated workplace scenario.
Their findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, were arresting: In adversarial contexts that held the potential for disagreement or conflict, messages that used “you” and “your” were less persuasive, less likely to be shared, and more likely to be censored than ones that employed “we” and “our.” People who participated in their study were also less inclined to interact or engage with the sources of messages that used “you” rather than “we.”
The work was inspired by the pair’s shared interest in receptiveness, which describes a person’s openness to ideas — and people — with whom they might disagree. “Openness doesn’t mean you agree, but it means you’re willing to engage with a person who holds that view,” Tormala says.
Given the increasingly polarized nature of American society, finding ways to boost receptiveness could help bridge the seemingly intractable divide between people with opposing viewpoints. “Political polarization is at an all-time high,” Hussein says. “Anything we can do to make the few conversations that are still happening more productive is a win.”
This piece originally appeared in Stanford Business Insights from Stanford Graduate School of Business. To receive business ideas and insights from Stanford GSB click here: (To sign up: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/about/emails)