Talking About Yourself in the Third Person

I was asked a question recently, which I paraphrase here, "Why is it easier for Sam to modify their behaviour when they say 'Sam doesn't do that sort of thing?'" Here is my answer:

I suppose you mean it is easier than if you had made the equivalent statement in the first person as well as if you hadn't made the statement at all.

If so, we should consider the difference between Sam saying to themselves, 'I don't eat a whole packet of biscuits in one go' and their saying, 'Sam doesn't eat a whole packet of biscuits in one go'.

I can't help seeing an externalisation of will taking place akin to the Feng Shui practice of imagining a royal dragon as your guest and trying to make your home appealing to them. Jo might be prepared to live in a dark, squalid, cluttered home but not be able to assume that such an honoured and noble invitee would wish to enter a home in such a state. Even so, it is Jo who makes the judgements that lead to the two markedly different presentations of their home.

In Sam's case, the assertion in the first person might collapse because they know that they bloody well did pig the lot only two nights ago. By contrast, the same assertion in the third person creates somebody called 'Sam' in Sam's mind. 'Sam' cannot be the same 'Sam' - from Sam's perspective - that is denoted by the perpendicular pronoun a) because 'I' has a unique self-intimacy and b) because anyone addressed in the third person is not 'me' and not 'you'. They are outside the conversation and not directly addressable. They are a person, and a whole person, apart and separate from anybody in this exchange. They have their rights and views and Sam cannot presume to modify them in their narrow self-interest.

But a trick is being played by Sam upon themselves because this 'Sam' really is Sam, what 'Sam' wants really is what Sam wants, and - crucially - what 'Sam' doesn't do really is what Sam doesn't do.

So Sam, in an existential sense, gets to have their cake and eat it (but still not the biscuits). They be themselves, they create an alternative persona with a better ethical code than they've got, and then they realign the two like a car joining a motorway from a slip road, without actually allowing the whole system to collapse into the 'I' whose ethical consistency can be overturned by basic gluttony.

It is more subtle than the dragon method, due to the linguistic prestidigitation involved, but it's fundamentally the same mental process.