When Focusing on Differences Leads to Similar Perspectives

Abstract

The current research investigated whether mind-sets and contexts that afford a focus on self-other differences can facilitate perceptual and conceptual forms of perspective taking. Supporting this hypothesis, results showed that directly priming a difference mind-set made perceivers more likely to spontaneously adopt other people's visual perspectives (Experiment 1) and less likely to overimpute their own privileged knowledge to others (Experiments 2 and 3). Given that intergroup encounters typically evoke a difference mind-set, we also explored the possibility that such contexts might help perceivers to step outside their own perspectives. As predicted, perceivers were less "cursed" by their own privileged knowledge when mentalizing about out-group targets than when mentalizing about in-group targets (Experiment 4) and communicated more effectively with interaction partners whose minimal-group membership differed from their own (Experiment 5). Overall, acknowledging self-other differences allowed perceivers to look beyond the limits of their own perspectives and thereby provided an efficacious route to intuiting other people's minds.

Anxious and egocentric: How specific emotions influence perspective taking.

“…We determined our sample size in Experiment 1 based on our own prior work (Todd & Galinsky, 2012;Todd et al, 2011) using Tversky and Hard's (2009) spatial perspective-taking task and an a priori heuristic of at least 40 participants per cell. Post hoc power for the critical contrasts in Experiment 1 fell short of 80% (Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007); thus, to increase a priori power in our subsequent experiments, we increased our target sample sizes to at least 50 participants per cell in Experiment 2 and at least 60 participants per cell in In all experiments, data were collected until this target number was reached or surpassed.…”

An Exploratory Investigation of the Process of Perspective Taking in Interpersonal Situations

“…For example, using one's own perspective might not be seen as suitable if the empathizer is dissimilar to the other person. The literature on the use of self-information is somewhat equivocal; Ames stereotyping more likely when dissimilarity is highlighted, while Todd, Hanko, Galinsky, and Mussweiler (2011) suggest that when interacting with others "focusing on differences increases perceivers' ability to step outside their own perspectives" (p. 139).…”

Rethinking the Baseline in Diversity Research

“…Moreover, evidence from other domains offers one reason why these effects may occur. When people are prompted to think about social category differences, as they are in diverse groups, they are more likely to step outside their own perspective and less likely to instinctively impute their own knowledge onto others (Robbins & Krueger, 2005;Todd, Hanko, Galinsky, & Mussweiler, 2011). The lack of this social prompt in homogeneous groups, by comparison, may thus help explain why individuals' subjective responses in these settings tend to be less objective and more narrowly construed (for a related discussion regarding minority influence in groups, see Moscovici, 1980;Nemeth, 1986).…”