For as long as students have been writing English papers, English teachers have been telling them they can’t use generic “you” in formal writing (as in, “You have to be 18-years-old to get your driver’s license in some states”). In spite of all the proscriptive red ink routinely spilt over the issue, however, very few teachers or students ever stop to wonder why people—in both their speaking and their writing—have a tendency to use the word “you” as an indefinite pronoun in the first place. Why, in other words, do we use the pronoun form designated for direct personal address to refer to distinctly impersonal actions performed by generic third person “someones” in the world around us?
 A recent study at the University of Michigan sought to answer just that question, and determined that there’s a lot more to “you” than meets the eye. People’s use of the generic second person pronoun, rather than being a lazy substitute for a more precise pronoun form, actually


Or, to put it another way, you can use “you” to do more than just directly address the “yous” in your immediate environment.  A series of six experiments demonstrated that generic-you is conventionally used to “express norms,” and can, when used in reflecting on a negative experience, “normalize” such an experience by “extending it beyond the self.”


In the first three experiments, participants were presented with questions that caused them to think in terms of “norms versus preferences.”  For example, they could be asked either, “What should you do with a hammer?” or “What do you like to do with a hammer?”  Over the course of the three experiments, the “norms” questions (“What should you do…?”) elicited “you” responses at a significantly higher rate than did the “preferences” questions (“What do you like to do…?”) to which participants were more likely to respond with first person “I.”  This result demonstrates that generic-you is used “to express norms about routine actions associated with everyday objects and behaviors,” or things that people typically do in common situations.


There is nothing particularly surprising or suggestive about this finding, but the results of a series of follow-up experiments were more intriguing.  Participants were either asked to write about negative autobiographical experiences or to write about neutral autobiographical experiences.  People who wrote about the negative experiences were far more likely to use generic-you in their narratives than those who wrote about neutral experiences (56.1% in the former case as opposed to 6.3%in the latter).  In another experiment, participants were asked to recall a negative experience and then either write about lessons they might have learned from it, or simply write about the emotions they felt during the experience.  Participants who wrote about lessons they might have learned (the “Meaning-Making” condition), were significantly more likely to use generic-you than those who merely described their emotions (the “Relive” condition).

For example, in the “Meaning-Making” condition, one participant reflected, “When you are angry, you say and do things that you will most likely regret.”  Another observed, “Sometimes people don’t change, and you have to recognize that you cannot save them.”  Such descriptions of negative personal experiences, and the lessons learned from them, were far more likely to be expressed with generic-you than were narrations of neutral autobiographical experiences.


The researchers attributed this pattern to the “normative” function of generic-you, arguing that “it allows individuals to establish norms that extend beyond their own experience,” creating “the semblance of a shared, universal experience.”  Such normalization of a negative personal experience promotes a sense of psychological distance which enhances people’s ability to make meaning out of it.  If, for example, I look back on an episode from my past when I lashed out at a friend in a fit of anger, permanently damaging the relationship, and think,


 the memory is purely personal and negative, filling me with regret and perhaps even shame.  If, however, I reflect upon same event in the more normative second person point of view (as in “When you are angry, you say and do things you will most likely regret”), my remorse doesn’t sting quite so painfully because I view my behavior as the kind of thing people in general tend to do, instead of the unprecedentedly stupid thing that I did.  The linguistic distance that generic-you places between me and my action helps me to make sense out of my behavior and cope more easily with its consequences.


The researchers who conducted the study see in this “meaning-making” function a possible explanation for the origin of generic-you—a seemingly illogical English construction that is actually not uncommon in languages other than English.  For a pronoun “that is highly specific and context bound” to be used to express “meanings that are general and context-free” appears paradoxical on the surface, but the finding that people use generic-you to create psychological distance from negative events suggests the possibility that the second person pronoun first took on a generic meaning simply because it is the direct opposite of first-person “I,” providing “a stark form of distancing from the self.”


Whatever might have first inspired speakers of English to use the second person point of view to describe third person phenomena in the world around them, this seemingly paradoxical linguistic device cannot be casually dismissed as mere laziness on the part of speakers and writers who employ it.  Whether or not it serves a legitimate grammatical function (depending on what English teacher you happen to ask), generic-you clearly serves a meaningful—and “meaning-making”—psychological function.