Generalizing or personalizing: Effects of three types of second person pronouns in service ads

Second person pronouns have both generalizing and personalizing functions. Netherlandic Dutch distinguishes three types of address pronouns in the singular: a weak informal pronoun je, a strong informal pronoun jij, and a formal pronoun u. The latter two seem more suitable for personalization thanks to their predominantly deictic reading, while the former easily obtains a generic reading and is therefore best suited for generalization. An experiment tested four hypotheses about the effects of these pronouns on the evaluation of service ads. The results show that hedonic service ads generally receive better evaluations than utilitarian ones. Moreover, while je is associated with higher scores than u in hedonic service ads, no reliable effect of pronouns was observed in utilitarian ads. Exploratory post-hoc data analyses reveal that, when participants are generally more positive in their evaluation of the ad, they give higher scores to ads with je than with jij and especially u. Interestingly, this effect seems to be reversed among participants who generally give more negative evaluations. For them, use of u actually improved the evaluation, although the differences between the pronouns were less credible. These contrasting results suggest that the effects of pronouns strongly depend on the overall positive or negative evaluation of a service or ad.