It is a way of expressing universal, shared experience and creating some emotional distance.
People use the word ‘you’ when they really mean ‘I’.
It helps to distance them from negative emotional experiences, new research finds.
For example, the expression “you win some, you lose some” probably means the person has failed, but that it could happen to anyone.
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The pronoun, therefore, helps you to feel better about the experience.
Ariana Orvell, the study’s first author, explained:
“When people use “you” to make meaning from negative experiences, it allows them to ‘normalize’ the experience and reflect on it from a distance.”
Ms Orvell continued:
“Or saying that ‘when you are angry, you say and do things that you will most likely regret’ might actually explain a personal situation, but the individual attempts to make it something many people relate to.”
Ms Orvell concluded:
“We suspect that it’s the ability to move beyond your own perspective to express shared, universal experiences that allows individuals to derive broader meanings from personal events.”
The study was published in the journal Science (Orvell et al., 2017).
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This site is all about scientific research into how the mind works.
It’s mostly written by psychologist and author, Dr Jeremy Dean.
I try to dig up fascinating studies that tell us something about what it means to be human.
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