Problematising expressives: The case of magical affirmations in the pick-up artist paradigm

In this article, we examine positive statements (usually about self) known as ‘affirmations’. Affirmations are employed in positive psychology as an intervention tool but have also become popularised by pop psychology influencers. Our corpus of affirmations stems from the pick-up artist (PUA) paradigm, a community of men revolving around the ‘speed seduction’ of women. We examine affirmation videos posted by ‘expert’ community members to YouTube for their linguistic features and their fit into the speech act taxonomy by Searle. Our results show that most affirmations in the PUA affirmations are of the declaration type and thus diverge from uses of affirmations described in positive psychology literature. They are largely contingent on external appraisal and target a type of world-to-words fit that is impossible to achieve, leading to our designation of them as ‘magical’ affirmations. We argue that this potentially leads to frustration by community members and further radicalisation. Beyond the immediate analysis, we use this data set and our analytical procedure to problematise the notion of the speech act type of expressives, in particular when set in relation with assertives and declarations. As we show, magical affirmations, due to their position on the fuzzy borders between declarations, expressives, and assertives, are a particularly suitable data type to interrogate this taxonomy and especially expressives' place within it. • Problematises the established speech act type of ‘expressives’. • Draws on data from a novel YouTube genre known as ‘affirmation videos’. • Compares affirmations to historical forms of ‘magical’ language. • Contrasts speech activity to interventions from positive psychology.