/ Cory Doctorow / 11:38 pm Thu Feb 19, 2009

Second-person in fiction compels you

You sit down at your computer. You blog, "Research published in the journal Psychological Science suggests that, while frequently annoying, the use of the second person in fiction compels readers to form more vivid identification in literature." You save the blog post.
In these experiments, volunteers read sentences describing everyday actions. The statements were expressed in either first- ("I am..."), second- ("You are...") or third-person ("He is..."). Volunteers then looked at pictures and had to indicate whether the images matched the sentences they had read. The pictures were presented in either an internal (i.e. as though the volunteer was performing the event him/herself) or external (i.e. as though the volunteer was observing the event) perspective. Yours, mine, ours: When you and I share perspectives (via Futurismic)
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