Hearing what we would like to hear: The prima facie view of indirect self‐talk

Subtle variations in the way we address ourselves—using the first‐person pronoun I versus the second‐person pronoun You or one's own name—have distinct effects on motivation, emotion regulation, and performance. The dominant explanation of these effects appeals to the notion of psychological distance. In this paper, I argue against this explanation and develop an alternative account, drawing on the prima facie view of perceptual imagination. On my view, the differential effects of indirect self‐talk are better explained by associative responses to the grammatical structures typically used by others when addressing us.