Clearly, politicians might use Illeism for purely rhetorical purposes but, when applied
to genuine reflection, it appears to be a powerful tool for wiser reasoning.
While the control participants
showed no overall change in their wise-reasoning scores, those using Illeism improved in their intellectual humility,
perspective-taking, and capacity to find a compromise.
Working with Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan in the United States, Grossmann has also looked for ways to improve these scores-
with some striking experiments demonstrating the power of Illeism.
Instead, the scientific research suggests that you should adopt an ancient rhetorical method favoured by the likes of Julius Caesar and
known as“Illeism”- or speaking about
yourself in the third person(the term was coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge from the Latin ille meaning“he, that”).