The inner speech of behavioral regulation: Intentions and task performance strengthen when you talk to yourself as a You

Abstract People often talk to themselves using the first‐person pronoun (I), but they also talk to themselves as if they are speaking to someone else, using the second‐person pronoun (You). Yet, the relative behavioral control achieved by I and You self‐talk remains unknown. The current research was designed to examine the potential behavioral advantage of using You in self‐talk and the role of attitudes in this process. Three experiments compared the effects of I and You self‐talk on problem solving performance and behavioral intentions. Experiment 1 revealed that giving self‐advice about a hypothetical social situation using You yielded better anagram task performance than using I. Experiment 2 showed that using You self‐talk in preparation for an anagram task enhanced anagram performance and intentions to work on anagrams more than I self‐talk, and that these effects were mediated by participants' attitudes toward the task. Experiment 3 extended these findings to exercise intentions and highlighted the role of attitudes in this effect. Altogether, the current research showed that second‐person self‐talk strengthens both actual behavior performance and prospective behavioral intentions more than first‐person self‐talk. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.