Many ways to walk a mile in another’s moccasins: Type of social perspective taking and its effect on negotiation outcomes

Abstract

for their helpful comments in revising this manuscript and to Maxim Antinori for his programming of the virtual environment. The conclusions reached are those of the investigators and do not necessarily represent the perspectives of the funder.1 Abstract:The process of social perspective taking holds tremendous promise as a means to facilitate conflict resolution. Despite rapidly accumulating knowledge about social perspective taking in general, scholars know little about how the type of social perspective taking affects outcomes of interest. This study tests whether different ways to "walk a mile in another's shoes" cause different outcomes. By taking advantage of a computer-based simulation (where participants can learn about others by virtually walking around in the shoes of other characters), we assigned participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (N = 842) to five different perspective taking treatments or a control condition. Results show that perspective takers who receive information about the other party foster more positive relationships and make greater concessions than participants who did not receive information about the other party.Furthermore, those who experientially learned about the other party's perspective felt more positive about their relationships and made greater concessions during the negotiation than those who were simply provided information about the other party's perspective. No differences were found between virtually and imaginatively taking the perspective of others. These findings suggest the importance of accounting for the type of social perspective taking in studying how this social-cognitive process may facilitate conflict resolution.Keywords: conflict resolution; interpersonal relationship; negotiation; social cognition; social perspective taking; virtual environment 2 Many Ways to Walk a Mile in Another's Moccasins: Type of Social Perspective Taking and its effect on Negotiation OutcomesOf the many levers that might be applied to resolving intergroup conflicts, social perspective taking (SPT) appears to be one of the most promising. If members of one party can more frequently and more accurately take the perspective of the other party, a wide array of outcomes are likely to improve (Batson, Early, & Salvarani, 1997;Galinsky, Ku, & Wang, 2005;Ickes, 2003). Thus, there has been increasing interest in techniques to cultivate and develop individuals' perspective taking capacity towards ends such as improving conflict resolution (e.g., Johnson & Johnson, 2009b).Virtual environments represent a particularly intriguing context for helping individuals develop their perspective taking capacities (Amichai-Hamburger, 2013). In these settings, individuals can inhabit the virtual character of someone who either shares their values, beliefs, and attitudes-or whose perspective differs in fundamental ways. By presenting increasingly challenging perspective taking tasks (i.e., asking participants to walk around in the shoes of increasingly different individuals), designers of virtual enviro...

Experiencing Nature: Embodying Animals in Immersive Virtual Environments Increases Inclusion of Nature in Self and Involvement With Nature

“…Ahn and colleagues () tested this notion and demonstrated that embodying the experience of a person with a visual disability in a perspective‐taking task using IVEs led to greater helping behavior in the physical world than perspective taking, which relied upon imagining the disability. Another study demonstrated that direct experiences of an opponent simulated through virtual worlds prior to a negotiation task encouraged individuals to develop a positive attitude toward the opponent and make more concessions than indirect experiences (Gehlbach et al, ). Body transfer extends the concept of embodiment to a point where individuals not only share sensory cues but also feel as if they are the virtual body.…”

“…Perspective taking has been shown to facilitate a variety of favorable outcomes including helping (Batson et al, 1981), stereotype reduction (Batson et al, 1997), and improved interpersonal communication (Fussell & Krauss, 1989). A recent set of studies extended these findings by using IVEs to assist interpersonal perspective taking, demonstrating that it led to greater involvement, caring and helping behavior (Ahn, Le, & Bailenson, 2013), and facilitation of environmental negotiation tasks (Gehlbach et al, 2015).…”

BABO Negotiating: Enhancing Students’ Perspective‐Taking Skills

“…Perspective taking can enhance relational negotiating (Ingerson, DeTienne, and Liljenquist 2015). Students who experientially learn about their negotiating partners feel more positive about their relationships (Gehlbach et al 2015).…”

Web-Based VR Experiments Powered by the Crowd

“…A number of work hinted at conducting VR studies using crowdsourcing. Gehlbach et al replicated in 2015 an earlier study on perspective taking conducted in VR [59] using AMT-though the researchers replaced VR with Web-based 2D simulation [12]. In 2016, Oh et al proposed the concept of Immersion at Scale, testing out collecting data on mobile VR devices outside of the lab by setting up physical tents at different locations (e.g., at local events, museums) [36].…”