Yours, mine, ours: When you and I share perspectives

You are pleased to find scientific evidence of a phenomenon that you had been familiar with all along through your love of interactive fiction. You check BoingBoing, where you find exactly the same lame second-person intro gimmick.

When the volunteers read statements that began, “You are…” they
pictured the scene through their own eyes. However, when they read
statements explicitly describing someone else (for example, sentences
that began, “He is…”) then they tended to view the scene from an
outsider’s perspective. Even more interesting was what the results
revealed about first-person statements (sentences that began, “I
am…”). The perspective used while imagining these actions depended on
the amount of information provided – the volunteers who read only one
first-person sentence viewed the scene from their point of view while
the volunteers who read three first-person sentences saw the scene from
an outsider’s perspective.


The authors suggest that when we read second-person statements (“You are…”), there is a greater sense of “being there” and this makes it easier to place ourselves in the scene being described, imagining it from our point of view.– Association for Psychological Science