From "me" to "we": How perspective shifts in language can shape children's judgments about kindness, caring, and inclusivity.

Abstract

Core to kindness, compassion, or consideration of others is the ability to move beyond one's own perspective to imagine how someone else would think or feel. We reasoned that subtle shifts in language may facilitate this process, hypothesizing that speakers who adopted a generalized perspective (generic you, we) versus an individual (me) or specific (another's name) perspective would be viewed by children as more kind, compassionate, and generous. We conducted three experiments with children 6-9 years of age (N = 376) as well as adults (reported in the Supplemental Materials; N = 781) to test this hypothesis. In Experiment 1, participants inferred that an adult speaker was more kind, compassionate, and generous when they used generic pronouns to frame a child's mistake (e.g., "Sometimes you/we drop things"). In Experiment 2, participants inferred that a child speaker was generous when the speaker used generic pronouns to describe classroom norms. In Experiment 3, participants made judgments about the group to which a speaker belonged, inferring that a child speaker was part of a cooperative, inclusive class when they used generic pronouns. In Experiments 2 and 3, results were stronger for we than generic you, a finding we discuss. Altogether, these results suggest that children and adults are attentive to subtle linguistic signals that convey a general, shared perspective, using them to draw inferences about how kind, compassionate, and considerate other people are, and the groups to which they belong. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).