Psych Essays - Avoiding First Person

This is intended to be a growing resource.
Include your specific issue as a comment at the bottom of the page and I will suggest a work around that avoids using first person pro-nouns.

I, we, our, my. If you have used any of these in a pscyhology essay chances are they have been circled, crossed out, or highlighted. You probably also lost marks.

Why are you marked down?
To be perfectly honest I don't really know. My best guess would be that psychology essays are supposed to be objective and formal. The use of first person pro-nouns suggests the use of subjective opinion and often comes across as casual. Most likely it is simple convention. In the same way that you have to have an introduction and a conclusion you should not have first person pro-nouns.

How can it be avoided?
The short answer is to restructure your sentences in a way that allows you to get around the use of personal pro-nouns. Unfortunately that answer is somewhat rediculous as, chances are, if you knew how to structure a sentence that didn't use a personal pro-noun you probably would have written a sentence that didn't use a personal pro-noun. The simplest solution then is to give a few alternatives:

The easy ones:
our data shows that
becomes
THE data shows that

when you/I/we go to the supermarket
becomes
when people go to the supermarket

The harder ones:
I think that...<- often comes at the start of a paragraph
becomes
This suggets that...<- often comes at the end of a paragraph

The cost AND benefits of avoidance
You may have noticed that some of the phrases outlined above become concluding or summarising statements when the personal pro-nouns are removed. While these statements could theoretically be included on their own they would clearly be much stronger towards the end of a paragraph where support for the proposed position had been outlined.
Clearly this is a cost in that it appears that more work must be completed to make the same point.
HOWEVER it is best viewed as a BENEFIT as, through providing relevant research evidence, your point will be strengthened and you will have shown an ability to find and integrate relevant research evidence.

How can I show my thinking if I can't say it's my thinking?
Perhaps surprisingly this point comes back to referencing. Remember that anything that is not referenced is assumed by the reader to be your own thinking.