Abstract
In general, people tend to rely on egocentric projection when predicting others’ emotions, attitudes, and preferences. However, this strategy is less effective than the more obvious strategy of directly asking others what they feel, think, or desire (‘perspective getting’). In three experimental studies, we investigated how likely people are to ask for others’ perspectives, whether it leads to better predictions, and what factors impede perspective getting. In the first study, we let participants predict how happy another person would be with different money distributions. Only 26% of all people engaged in perspective getting, and it did not lead to better predictions. In the second study, we let people predict how expensive another person would think certain products are. The majority of people engaged in some form of perspective getting, but only 23% of all people did this thoroughly. Perspective getting did lead to better predictions. In the final study, we let people predict another person’s attitudes about a wide range of topics. Here, 70% of the people engaged in perspective getting and 12.5% did so thoroughly. Again, perspective getting led to better predictions. We found that confidence acted as a barrier for perspective getting. We also tested whether pointing out that perspective getting is the best strategy would increase perspective getting. We do not find a positive effect of this intervention. We discuss possible other interventions to increase people’s tendency to get rather than take perspective.
Highlights
How well do you know your partner or your friends? Do you think that you truly know their attitudes and their emotional reactions? Did you ask them about these things? Chances are that you did not and that you still feel confident about your ability to predict their beliefs and feelings
Four people asked about 1 or 2 specific distributions, and four people used a combination of those two strategies. Those who engaged in perspective getting had an accuracy score of M 0.93 (SD 0.48) and those who did not had an accuracy score of M 0.77 (SD 0.32)
We did run a bootstrapped t-test to be complete in our reporting, t(14.61) 1.07, p .302 [−0.14; 0.46], which showed that there was no statistical difference in accuracy between those who engaged in perspective getting and those who did not
Summary
How well do you know your partner or your friends? Do you think that you truly know their attitudes and their emotional reactions? Did you ask them about these things? Chances are that you did not and that you still feel confident about your ability to predict their beliefs and feelings. Studies have repeatedly shown that we frequently overestimate our ability to infer what other people think, feel or desire, especially when we feel we truly know the other person (e.g., Swann and Gill, 1997; Scheibehenne et al, 2011; Eyal et al, 2018). One of the reasons is that the ease by which our own beliefs and perceptions are accessible clouds our ability to acknowledge another person’s unique vantage point. Often, this causes us to overestimate the extent to which others view and evaluate the world
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