Perspective Takers Research Articles

Proactivity Is Not Enough: The Role of Perspective Taking In Enhancing the Beneficial Outcomes

The paradox of proactivity suggests that a proactive personality might be destructive for employees and organizations. However, the boundary conditions that allow proactivity to result in positive outcomes remain unclear. In line with proactivity research and emotional dissonance theory, the authors investigate whether and how a proactive personality influences employees’ emotional labor strategies, job performance, and career satisfaction. They also note the potential moderating role of perspective taking, along with the benefits of perspective taking on perspective takers. A three-wave study involving 145 frontline employees and their immediate supervisors in the Chinese hospitality industry tests the research model and reveals that employees’ deep acting mediates the interactive effects of a proactive personality and perspective taking on job performance and career satisfaction. In addition, surface acting mediates the influence of this interaction on career satisfaction but not job performance. These findings have theoretical and managerial implications for proactivity, perspective taking, and emotional labor theory and practice.

Taking versus confronting visual perspectives in preschool children.

Recent evidence suggests that 3-year-olds can take other people's visual perspectives not only when they perceive different things (Level 1) but even when they see the same thing differently (Level 2). One hypothesis is that 3-year-olds are good perspective takers but cannot confront different perspectives on the same object (Perner, Stummer, Sprung, & Doherty, 2002). In 2 studies using color filters, 3-year-olds were unable to judge in what color they and an adult saw the same picture. This was the case irrespective of whether children replied verbally (pilot study) or by pointing to color samples (main study). However, 3-year-olds readily took an adult's perspective by determining which of 2 objects an adult referred to as being a certain color, independently from how the children saw the objects (main study). Taken together, these results suggest that preschoolers' difficulty is not so much taking perspectives as it is directly confronting another's view with their own-an ability that seems to be acquired between 4 and 5 years of age.

Empathy, motivation, and P300 BCI performance.

Motivation moderately influences brain–computer interface (BCI) performance in healthy subjects when monetary reward is used to manipulate extrinsic motivation. However, the motivation of severely paralyzed patients, who are potentially in need for BCI, could mainly be internal and thus, an intrinsic motivator may be more powerful. Also healthy subjects who participate in BCI studies could be internally motivated as they may wish to contribute to research and thus extrinsic motivation by monetary reward would be less important than the content of the study. In this respect, motivation could be defined as “motivation-to-help.” The aim of this study was to investigate, whether subjects with high motivation for helping and who are highly empathic would perform better with a BCI controlled by event-related potentials (P300-BCI). We included N = 20 healthy young participants naïve to BCI and grouped them according to their motivation for participating in a BCI study in a low and highly motivated group. Motivation was further manipulated with interesting or boring presentations about BCI and the possibility to help patients. Motivation for helping did neither influence BCI performance nor the P300 amplitude. Post hoc, subjects were re-grouped according to their ability for perspective taking. We found significantly higher P300 amplitudes on parietal electrodes in participants with a low ability for perspective taking and therefore, lower empathy, as compared to participants with higher empathy. The lack of an effect of motivation on BCI performance contradicts previous findings and thus, requires further investigation. We speculate that subjects with higher empathy who are good perspective takers with regards to patients in potential need of BCI, may be more emotionally involved and therefore, less able to allocate attention on the BCI task at hand.

Perspective Taking, Empathy, and Relational Conflict at Work: An Investigation Among Participants in a Workplace Conflict Resolution Program

Evidence for an intriguing pattern has recently emerged, that of higher-empathy individuals — who have shown prosocial and self-sacrificing behaviour in other contexts (Batson, 1991; Batson & Ahmad, 2001) — becoming retaliatory under threat, such that joint resources are destroyed and conflict escalates (Gilin Oore, Maddux, & Galinsky, 2008). We investigate this phenomenon by contrasting how trait perspective taking and empathy may restrain versus escalate conflict, respectively. Perceptions of relational conflict were reported by health care workers seeking services (including education, coaching, mediation) through a conflict training and resolution program. Preliminary results (n=64; data collection still in progress) replicate the expected patterns of empathy-escalation versus perspective taking-restraint under threat: Workers reported significantly higher relational conflict the higher their empathy levels, with negative emotions — a proxy for emotionality — trending toward mediation of the effect. In contrast, higher perspective takers showed lower relational conflict perceptions, mediated by cognitive flexibility. We develop hypotheses to guide future research regarding how empathizing with others may ironically lead to greater conflict escalation under threatening or distressing circumstances.

Perspective Taking Undermines Stereotype Maintenance Processes: Evidence from Social Memory, Behavior Explanation, and Information Solicitation

Four experiments examined the effects of perspective taking on processes contributing to stereotype maintenance: biases in social memory, behavior explanations, and information seeking. The first two experiments explored whether perspective taking influences memory and spontaneous explanations for stereotype-relevant behaviors. Relative to participants in an objective-focus condition, perspective takers exhibited better recall of stereotype-inconsistent behaviors (Experiment 1) and spontaneously generated more dispositional explanations for them (Experiment 2). Perspective taking had little effect, however, on memory and explanations for stereotype-consistent behaviors. The final two experiments examined the effects of perspective taking on information seeking. Employing a trait hypothesis-testing paradigm in which interviewers tested whether an interviewee was an extravert (Experiment 3a) or an introvert (Experiment 3b), we found that perspective-taking interviewers solicited more hypothesis-inconsistent...

The Social Perspective Taking Process: What Motivates Individuals to Take Another's Perspective?

Background/Context A growing literature describes multiple benefits of social perspective taking—many of which are particularly important for schools. Despite these potential benefits for administrators, counselors, teachers, and students, little is known about social perspective taking as a process. Purpose/Research Question If educational researchers are ultimately to design interventions to help improve the perspective-taking capacities of those in schools, they need to fully understand the underlying process. Particularly important is the need to understand: What initially motivates individuals to take the perspective of others? Participants To investigate this question, a sample of 18 adults from an array of different professions (who were nominated as adept perspective takers) and 13 high school students (who were nominated as struggling with social perspective taking) participated in the study. Research Design Participants completed a survey, a performance task, and in-depth interviews as part of this mixed-method exploratory study. The interviews served as the primary source of data and were coded for evidence of what triggered (or inhibited) participants’ motivation to engage in the social perspective-taking process. Findings The interview data established the existence of 13 specific factors that impacted participants’ motivation to engage in social perspective taking across a wide array of contexts. Seven factors generally enhanced individuals’ motivation to engage in social perspective taking; three factors were mixed; and three factors inhibited their motivation. Conclusions/Recommendations This research indicates that not only might individuals be motivated to engage in social perspective taking through multiple pathways, but these pathways might be combined and/or interact with one another. These motivating factors raise important issues for further research. In addition, at a practical level, they provide a foundation for developing structures to motivate individuals in schools to engage in perspective taking more often.

The Social Perspective Taking Process: Strategies and Sources of Evidence in Taking Another's Perspective

Background/Context Research indicates that social perspective taking—the capacity to discern the thoughts and feelings of others—plays a role in many important outcomes in schools. Despite the potential benefits for students and educators, little is known about social perspective taking (SPT) as a process. Purpose/Research Question If educational researchers are ultimately to design interventions to help improve the perspective-taking capacities of those in schools, they need to fully understand the underlying process, that is, how social perspective taking actually happens. Particularly important is the need to understand what strategies individuals use and what sources of evidence they draw from when they take the perspective of others. Participants To investigate this question, a sample of 18 adults from an array of different professions (who were nominated as adept perspective takers) and 13 high school students (who were nominated as struggling with social perspective taking) participated in the study. Research Design Participants completed in-depth interviews and a “think-aloud” protocol as part of this mixed-method exploratory study. The interviews and think-alouds were coded for the type of social perspective taking that strategy participants employed and for the sources of evidence they relied on, respectively. Findings Results indicated that participants relied on 12 different types of SPT strategies and drew from seven different sources of evidence when discerning others’ thoughts and feelings. Conclusions/Recommendations These findings provide foundational knowledge that lays groundwork for ultimately developing approaches to teach social perspective taking. At a practical level, these findings provide options for students and educators to experiment with as they attempt to take the perspective of one another.

Perspective taking combats automatic expressions of racial bias.

Five experiments investigated the hypothesis that perspective taking--actively contemplating others' psychological experiences--attenuates automatic expressions of racial bias. Across the first 3 experiments, participants who adopted the perspective of a Black target in an initial context subsequently exhibited more positive automatic interracial evaluations, with changes in automatic evaluations mediating the effect of perspective taking on more deliberate interracial evaluations. Furthermore, unlike other bias-reduction strategies, the interracial positivity resulting from perspective taking was accompanied by increased salience of racial inequalities (Experiment 3). Perspective taking also produced stronger approach-oriented action tendencies toward Blacks (but not Whites; Experiment 4). A final experiment revealed that face-to-face interactions with perspective takers were rated more positively by Black interaction partners than were interactions with nonperspective takers--a relationship that was mediated by perspective takers' increased approach-oriented nonverbal behaviors (as rated by objective, third-party observers). These findings indicate that perspective taking can combat automatic expressions of racial biases without simultaneously decreasing sensitivity to ongoing racial disparities.

The Effect of Culture on Perspective Taking

People consider the mental states of other people to understand their actions. We evaluated whether such perspective taking is culture dependent. People in collectivistic cultures (e.g., China) are said to have interdependent selves, whereas people in individualistic cultures (e.g., the United States) are said to have independent selves. To evaluate the effect of culture, we asked Chinese and American pairs to play a communication game that required perspective taking. Eye-gaze measures demonstrated that the Chinese participants were more tuned into their partner's perspective than were the American participants. Moreover, Americans often completely failed to take the perspective of their partner, whereas Chinese almost never did. We conclude that cultural patterns of interdependence focus attention on the other, causing Chinese to be better perspective takers than Americans. Although members of both cultures are able to distinguish between their perspective and another person's perspective, cultural patterns afford Chinese the effective use of this ability to interpret other people's actions.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Perspective Taking in Groups

Group members often reason egocentrically, both when allocating responsibility for collective endeavors and when assessing the fairness of group outcomes. These self-centered judgments are reduced when participants consider their other group members individually or actively adopt their perspectives. However, reducing an egocentric focus through perspective taking may also invoke cynical theories about how others will behave, particularly in competitive contexts. Expecting more selfish behavior from other group members may result in more self-interested behavior from the perspective takers themselves. This suggests that one common approach to conflict resolution between and within groups can have unfortunate consequences on actual behavior.

Sibling-directed Internal State Language, Perspective Taking, and Affective Behavior

This study examined relations among preschoolers' sibling-directed internal state language, perspective-taking abilities, and sibling-directed affective behaviors in 32 sibling dyads (aged 14 months and 3-4 years) during naturalistic home observations. Preschooler references about internal states (emotions, wants, abilities) were significantly more likely to be (a) about the toddler than the self, and (b) made in the mother's absence and during sibling conflict and play. Relative to poor perspective takers, skillful perspective takers (a) engaged in more instances of internal state discourse and (b) talked more frequently about both the toddler and themselves. Preschoolers engaging in high levels of positive affective behavior also spoke more frequently about internal states than children engaging in low levels of positive affective behavior. Discussion of results highlights the notion that internal state language may be one way of regulating sibling interaction and also a potential means for siblings to construct shared meanings about their world.