Second person pronouns in HR communication

In an online experiment among native speakers of Dutch we measured addressees’ responses to emails written in the informal pronoun T or the formal pronoun V in HR communication. 172 participants read either the V-versions or the T-versions of two invitation emails and two rejection emails by four different fictitious recruiters. After each email, participants had to score their appreciation of the company and the recruiter on five different scales each. We found a small effect of pronoun: Emails written in V were more highly appreciated than emails in T, irrespective of type of email (invitation or rejection) and irrespective of the participant’s age, gender and level of education. At the same time, we observed differences in the strength of this effect across different scales.