Talking About Behaviors in the Passive Voice Increases Task Performance

Summary: Self-talk can help people redirect their attention focused on themselves to the tasks they are working on with important consequences for their task performance. Across four experiments and two different types of languages, Turkish and Slovak, people describing their own behaviors to themselves, as well as merely reading or writing sentences depicting some fictitious events, in the passive (vs. the active) voice performed better on various tasks of motor and verbal performance. The effect was present to the extent that people maintained their control over task-distracting thoughts or felt more responsible for their task success/failure. In sum, talking about task behaviors in the passive voice may increase the perceived role of task-related factors while decreasing the role of agent-related factors in achieving task success, whereby the task focus, hence performance, increases. The results are important for understanding the role of self-talk in performance with implications for changing important outcomes. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. After it was first proposed by L.S. Vygotsky (1934/1987), numerous studies have shown the fundamental role played by self-talk in the control of thoughts and behaviors (e.g., Winsler, Fernyhough, & Montero, 2009). In the present investigation, we focus on self-talk about task performance. We ask if the grammatical structure of self-talk can give us a clue about its role in improving task performance. Can, for example, a subtle difference in the way in which we linguistically think of our behaviors as the causes of task success, such as the difference between ‘I will do it’ versus ‘It will be done’, change our task performance? If yes, we can not only better understand the phenomenon of self-talk as it links language and behavior but also improve behavioral performance in various domains of psychology including athletic performance, work, school, health, and clinical contexts. Self-talk can improve task performance by directing people’s attention either to themselves or to the tasks they may be working on. In athletic performance settings, for example, athletes use self-talk for two basic purposes: selfinstruction and motivation (for a review, see, e.g., Hardy, 2006). The self-instructional self-talk relates to the technical aspects of tasks (e.g., ‘I see the target’) whereas the motivational self-talk focuses on people’s own role in these tasks (e.g., ‘I can do it’). Given the beneficial effects of both types of self-talk on task performance (Hardy, Gammage, & Hall, 2001), it becomes critical to understand how agents versus tasks can be differentially highlighted via language.