Empathy has been proposed as a solution to alleviate interparty antipathy. Recent findings from the US suggest that one aspect of empathy – empathic concern – increases rather than decreases affective polarization. Perspective-taking, another aspect of empathy, has no effect on affective polarization. In this article, we describe a preregistered replication and extension of these findings in the contrasting political context of the Netherlands, to see whether this relationship generalizes beyond the US. First, using a cross-sectional nationally representative sample of 1,258 Dutch voters, we show that empathic concern indeed fuels affective polarization while at the same time we find that perspective-taking reduces it. Second, using a two-arm survey experiment (n = 438), we show that perspective-taking reduces ingroup bias, whereas empathic concern does not. Reflecting on the American and Dutch findings, we conclude that while empathic concern likely contributes to affective polarization, perspective-taking may reduce it.

Stakeholder perspective taking is a critical skill in early-stage problem exploration and framing. We examined stakeholder perspective taking within an early-stage design team of engineers at NASA to begin to understand in what ways and under what conditions designers adopt stakeholder perspectives in the context of professional engineering organizations. Our findings identify a spectrum of perspective taking during problem framing deliberations that ranges from (1) fully taking the stakeholder's point of view (POV), (2) interpreting the stakeholder's POV using the designer's POV, (3) implanting the stakeholder's POV into the designer's POV, to (4) fully taking the designer's own POV. We also identify and describe conditions that appeared to encourage or hinder perspective taking in this setting. These findings are significant because they suggest ways to gauge and encourage the skill of stakeholder perspective taking among professional engineers working on real-world design challenges with societal implications.

Social networking sites (SNSs) provide users with an efficient interface for distributing information, such as photos or wall posts, to many others simultaneously. We demonstrated experimentally that this type of indiscriminate one-to-many (i.e., monologue) communication may induce self-focused attention and thereby impair perspective taking. The present study used multiple paradigms to explore the link between engaging in online one-to-many communication and a decrease in perspective taking. Experiment 1 revealed that Facebookers who published a personal photo to the public or their friends were less likely to adopt another person’s visual perspective than were those in the control group. Experiment 2 showed that Facebookers who engaged in indiscriminate one-to-many wall posting were more likely than those in the control group to rely heavily on their own perspectives. A state of self-focus, as measured by greater Stroop interference in naming the color of self-relevant versus neutral words, mediated the detrimental effect of indiscriminate one-to-many communication on cognitive perspective taking. These findings suggest that indiscriminate one-to-many communication on SNSs may promote public self-focus, leading to self-referential processing when making social judgments. Online monologue communication may be more harmful to perspective taking than previously understood.

People need to take others’ perspectives into account in order to successfully coordinate their actions and optimally allocate limited resources like time, attention, or space. And yet, people often face frequent, but avoidable, coordination failures in the form of wait times, crowding, and unavailability of desirable options. Such poor coordination suggests that the necessary perspective taking (i.e., considering the likely motivations and behavior of others) may be either inadequate or incorrect. The current research suggests that coordination in such situations is frequently unsuccessful, not because people try to take others’ perspectives and are mistaken, but because they neglect to consider those perspectives sufficiently in the first place. Six experiments across a range of limited-resource contexts (e.g., choosing when to visit a store, stream on a limited bandwidth service, go to a popular vacation location, etc.) find that encouraging decision makers to consider what others might do and why they might do it can ameliorate such coordination problems. We further demonstrate a boundary condition: in situations where people’s motivations are inherently obvious, decision makers are naturally able to coordinate without an explicit nudge to perspective take. This research sheds light on a unique class of coordination problems in which people must consider others’ motivations without directly communicating with them, and provides theoretical and practical contributions with the potential to ameliorate common coordination failures.

Taking the perspective of users and stakeholders can help designers incorporate human-centricity in their practice. However, we know relatively little of the dynamics of perspective taking – a cognitive facet of empathy – in design processes as a situated cognitive and behavioural activity, rather than as an overall orientation. To illuminate how perspective taking is used in design, we carried out a longitudinal multiple case study of 49-month-long graduate-level product and service design projects, exploring differences between high and midscale performance in different design phases. Through thematic analysis of review session discussions, we find that perspective taking in high-performing sessions involves three aggregate dimensions: gathering data to form perspectives, scoping and making sense of perspectives and using perspectives in creative processing. We identify phase-dependent characteristics for the scope and emphasis of perspective taking in concept development, system design and detailed design. We also describe different ways in which novice teams struggled to create and apply user perspectives. As a result, the current study sheds light on perspective taking and the changing nature of effective perspective taking across the design process.

Frames and framing make one dimension of a decision problem particularly salient. In the simplest case, frames prime responses (as in, e.g., the Asian disease paradigm, where the gain frame primes risk-aversion and the loss frame primes risk-seeking). But in more complicated situations frames can function reflectively, by making salient particular reason-giving aspects of a thing, outcome, or action. For Shakespeare's Macbeth, for example, his feudal commitments are salient in one frame, while downplayed in another in favor of his personal ambition. The role of frames in reasoning can give rise to rational framing effects. Macbeth can prefer fulfilling his feudal duty to murdering the king, while also preferring bravely taking the throne to fulfilling his feudal duty, knowing full well that bravely taking the throne just is murdering the king. Such patterns of quasi-cyclical preferences can be correct and appropriate from the normative perspective of how one ought to reason. The paper explores three less dramatic types of rational framing effects: (1) Consciously framing and reframing long-term goals and short-term temptations can be important tools for self-control. (2) In the prototypical social interactions modeled by game theory, allowing for rational framing effects solves longstanding problems, such as the equilibrium selection problem and explaining the appeal of non-equilibrium solutions (e.g., the cooperative solution in the Prisoner's Dilemma). (3) Processes for resolving interpersonal conflicts and breaking discursive deadlock, because they involve internalizing multiple and incompatible ways of framing actions and outcomes, in effect create rational framing effects.

We manipulated perspective taking and measured romantic intimates’ attention to their partners’ context. Participants read a letter supposedly from their romantic partner describing the partner's precarious situation (e.g., stress and financial issues) and either imagined their partner's difficult situation (n = 87) or remained objective and detached (n = 85). Afterwards, they drew a picture of their romantic partner in the situation (drawing task) and wrote about the thoughts they had while reading the letter (writing task). As predicted, when adopting their romantic partner's perspective (vs. remaining detached), geographically close intimates focused more on their partner's context, whereas long-distance intimates relied on self-anchoring processes to produce knowledge about their partner's feelings and thoughts in that specific situation. We discuss theoretical, clinical, and therapeutic implications of the findings for the study of differential perspective-taking processes and mechanisms in long-distance and geographically close relationships.

This article reviews current knowledge about how the tendency to reflect on personal experience is related to the tendency to take another's perspective. While it is well established that self-reflection leads to a greater understanding of one's own emotions, cognitions, and behaviours, the extent to which it is associated with understanding others is less well understood, despite the implications of this for the development of more effective interventions to improve empathy. The types of self-reflection that are used in clinical and psychotherapeutic interventions are used to illustrate the possibilities here, and ways in which clinicians may increase their own self-reflection are also considered.

Empathy involves being able to understand and respond to others’ emotional experiences. Whilst deficits in empathy have been observed in frontotemporal dementia, the extent to which empathy is disrupted in dementia syndromes with predominant language impairment remains unclear. The current study investigated cognitive and affective empathy in the two non-fluent primary progressive aphasia syndromes: progressive non-fluent aphasia (PNFA) and logopenic progressive aphasia (LPA). Informants of 23 PNFA and 16 LPA patients completed the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), regarding patients’ capacity for empathy pre- and post-disease onset. Twenty-four healthy control participants completed the self-rated IRI for comparison of post-disease empathy capabilities. Within-group analyses revealed reduced cognitive empathy and increased personal distress in both patient groups. In addition, lowered affective empathy was reported in PNFA, with a similar trend observed in LPA. Interestingly, reduced affective empathy was associated with greater carer burden in LPA. Between-group analyses revealed reduced cognitive empathy in both patient groups relative to controls. The current study is the first to document empathy changes in PNFA and LPA, offering insight into the social cognitive deficits experienced in these syndromes. Future neuroimaging studies are needed to identify the underlying neural correlates and mechanisms driving empathy deficits in PNFA and LPA.

Although the role of top teams has been recognized in ambidextrous organizations, it remains unclear which characteristics and how the cognitive processes of top teams are used to address the dual cognitive challenges of ambidexterity. To address this puzzle, I developed a model in which I theorize that a top team with task-related diversity engaging in perspective taking will influence the achievement of an ambidextrous organization. Moreover, I further theorize that transformational leadership of the CEO will help diverse top teams master ambidexterity by influencing the team's cognitive processes. The results show that diverse teams can address the differentiating-integrating challenges of ambidexterity when they engage in perspective taking. The results also confirm that transformational leadership strengthens the relationship between a diverse top team's perspective taking and ambidextrous orientation.