Is Perspective Taking Always a Good Thing?

We are often told that in order to better understand others we should put ourselves in their shoes.  

The ability to take another’s perspective is associated with empathy and both empathy and taking

others points of view are thought to be important skills for human relationships.  It is generally

believed that perspective taking develops in childhood and those who are not able to see things

from others points of view are thought of as narcissistic or worse. Yet new research suggests that

perhaps taking other people’s perspectives isn’t always good advice.

A new paper, examines 25 studies that look at what happens when people are told to take another’s

perspective compared to when they are no asked to do so. Fifteen of the studies explored people’s

judgments about strangers. Eleven of these asked people to determine the mood of pictures of people

from their facial expression, posture, or their eyes. Three studies asked people to rate whether people’s

smiles were genuine and fake smiles on videos. The last study had people listen to a story told by

strangers about their memories and to determine whether the person was telling the truth or lying.

Participants for these studies were recruited from many different populations including universities

in the U.S. and other countries and online samples.  Analysis of these studies showed that there was

a tendency for those told to take others perspectives to be less accurate than those not told to do so.

In the other ten studies, participants were told to make judgments about the attitudes and beliefs of

either their romantic partner or strangers they had just met. The studies asked people to judge whether

the other individual liked specific activities, jokes, videos, or art or whether they were likely to hold

certain opinions.  Again, people told to take the other person’s perspective did slightly worse on the

task than people in the control condition. Minimally, the findings from these 25 studies suggest that

when making judgments about others, taking their perspective doesn’t seem to help.

While this paper states it examines perspective taking the experiments included largely require snap

judgments of pictures or videos of strangers.  Simply instructing someone to take the perspective of

others when judging certain characteristics does not they did so or even that they knew how to do so,

and the conditions did not provide the opportunity to be able to do this.  While there are different types

of perspective taking, some more complex than others, this article was about social judgments and thus,

should have included social perspective takings. This however, would require some type of relationship

that existed before the participant could possibly take another person’s perspective.

Therefore the conclusion reached in this research, specifically that perspective taking does not help us

when making judgments or interpreting emotions or social attitudes about others is not well founded.  

The ability to see things from another person’s perspective allows us to bond with and relate to each

other and to share positive and negative emotions and experiences. These are aspects that make us

human and that enable us to fully appreciate and enjoy life, our world and those who are in it.

Reference

Eyal, T., Steffel, M., & Epley, N. (2018). Perspective mistaking: Accurately understanding the mind of another requires getting perspective, not taking perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(4), 547-571.