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Summary: Perspective-Taking |
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| Posted by: | Gordon Hodson |
| Title/Position: | Associate Professor |
| School/Organization: | Brock University |
| Sent to listserv of: | SPSP, SESP, SPSSI |
| Date posted: | September 28th, 2006 |
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Dear SPSP Group:
Last week I asked for help in finding a perspective-taking measure (see original posting at the end of this message).
I received many helpful suggestions, for which I am grateful. These are summarized below.
-Gordon Hodson
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I believe that Ximena Arriaga and Caryl Rusbult (or vice versa) have a 1998 PSPB paper on partner-specific perspective-taking that you might find useful.
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We have used a couple methods, one adapted from Sande et al and one adapted from Lord. Our first major use of them is in our 91 JPSP paper (Aron et al--I don't have the citation at hand but it is my only 91 paper in JPSP), where they are both described in "Study 2".
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A paper published in 1984 by Glen Hass describes a behavioral measure, called the E-drawing task. Here is the reference to the paper:
Hass, R.G. (1984). Perspective-taking and self-awareness: Drawing an E on your forehead. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 788-798.
This study was done here at Brooklyn College, Glen Hass is now chair of the department. He wrote this in the context of self-awareness, but we used the task for a study in group research (long time before I came to Brooklyn College, BTW) and found it very useful and working. We expanded on it a bit by using more than one letter, symmetric and non-symmetric, and measured that way (cognitive) perspective-taking by individuals working in a group. I can give you more detail if that would be of interest to you.
I would be very interested in learning about other contributions, I had the same difficulties like you when I was searching for an appropriate measure.
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Your email made me think of the Glen Hass's research that I read in graduate school.
Hass, G. H. (1984). Perspective taking and self-awareness: Drawing an E on your forehead. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 788-798.
If I recall correctly, they showed that perspective changing varied as a function of individual differences, situation (having a video camera focused on them) and the interaction.
I also use the "E" drawing exercise in class (they love it).
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I think you might be interested in: Batson et al. (1997). Empathy and attitudes: Can feeling for a member of a stigmatized group improve feelings toward the group? JPSP, 72, 105-118. (although the situational manipulation in this appears to be sort of a blend of cognitive and emotional empathy--"imagine how she feels and how it has affected her life").
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Not sure if this is helpful, but Bill Ickes and Sara Hodges are two perspective-taking researchers who have used a methodology more or less like this: you have two people interact, both of them recorded on video. Then, you have them both watch the video of THEMSELF, and stop the video whenever they have a "thought or feeling." Then, they show the other person's (similarly-coded) video, and ask them "what is the thought or feeling they are having right now?" at the relevant time points in the video.
The descriptions of the thought and feeling, as well as the guesses, are evaluated by blind coders.
It's a highly situational measure, though, in the sense that it takes the dyad as the situation... which may or may not be what you're looking for.
Sara Hodges has used this process to code peoples' experience of divorce, and also the thoughts and feelings of new/pregnant mothers.
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I don't think this is quite what you're looking for, but may help you narrow your search. Fletcher et al.'s (1986) attributional complexity has several subscales. I've found that the societal subscale is related to feminist identity development (which in turn is related to reduced sexism/system justification), and Landon Reid is doing some cool stuff with race and cognitive complexity. Here's a blurb from a manuscript for an
overview:
To measure attributional complexity we used the Attributional Complexity Scale (ACS; Fletcher et al., 1986). The ACS consists of 28 items with 7 subscales designed to measure the various aspects of attributional complexity explained above. For example, motivational AC was measured by items such as "I really enjoy analyzing the reasons or causes for people¹s
behavior."
Complex AC was measured by items such as "I have found that the causes for people¹s behavior are usually complex rather than simple." Situational AC was measured by items such as "I believe that to understand a person you need to understand the people who that person has close contact with." Societal AC was measured by items such as " I think a lot about the influence that society has on other people."
Here's the reference:
Fletcher, G. J. O., Danilovics, P., Fernandez, G., Peterson, D., & Reeder, G. D. (1986). Attributional complexity: An individual differences measure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 875-884.
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A long time ago, I was interested in cognitive perspective taking and communication effectiveness. I found it almost impossible to find a good measure of situational perspective taking. It is no good to ask people how good they are at perspective taking, anymore than it is to ask them how empathetic they are. Very good, is the modal answer.
I was using a behavioural task, "Password", which you can read about in an old paper of mine, Foddy, M. (1978b). Role-taking in a communication task. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 4, 388-392. After I did the study for this paper, I tried to find a measure of perspective taking, and did use one that involved telling a story about a photograph with several actors depicted (I used one from "The trouble with Harry"). The participant got points for assuming the perspective of each person, and with an overall account they gave of the scene in the photo. Seems clear enough, but if you have an overall story that says one of the characters is retarded, do they get points for understanding the perspective of other actors in the photo, is is this the participant injecting a privileged point of view of the scene. And so on. The main lesson I learned from this was that there were definitional issues in both cognitive and emotional perspective taking, and as far as I can see, no one has been crazy enough to invest the time it would take to get a good one.
Anyway, I did get a measure of cognitive perspective taking, which predicted performance on the "Password" task, but the main independent variable of any magnitude was shared meaning, that is, Psychology students were better at communicating psych related words (shared meaning), than were non-psych students, or mixes of these two types of participant.
I can't remember the name of the person I got the picture task from, but I think I found it in Flavell's work on perspective taking. Let me know how you go on this.
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I have spent 15 years trying to create a situational measure of perspective taking!! It is very difficult to do. I would love to see other ideas that people send you.
I have had people respond open-endedly, and coded their responses (Frantz & Janoff-Bulman, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 2000). The coding system is pretty easy and reliable, but it is time-consuming, and not adaptable to all experimental paradigms. I've tried numerous other coding systems as well, but they have all turned out to be very difficult to implement.
I don't recommend asking people to self-report on the degree to which they took another person's perspective. I don't think people can report this accurately (see Frantz, BASP, 2006, for more on this). But there are other "side effects" of perspective taking that you could potentially measure. We know that perspective taking results in more positive attitudes towards the target (even if the target is negative; see Batson et al. JPSP, 1997). Mark Davis (1996, 2000) also shows that perspective taking results in more self-other overlap, and the priming of self relevant information. I have pilot data suggesting this may only hold for neutral, typical targets, however.
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There is very good task which is writing an E on your forehead while looking to another person. Some citations with studies that used this task are:
Hass, R.G. (1984). Perspective taking and self awareness: drawing an E on your forehead. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 788 798.
Steins, G., & Wicklund, R.A. (1996). Perspective-taking, conflict, and press: Drawing an E on your forehead. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 18, 319-346.
Another task is tracking a way through a "labyrinth" vis à vis to another person:
Stephenson, B., & Wicklund, R.A. (1983). Self directed attention and taking the other's perspective. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 58-77.
Stephenson, B., & Wicklund, R.A. (1984). The contagion of self focus within a dyad. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 163 168.
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We (Arriaga & Rusbult, 1998) examined perspective-taking in romantic relationships, which is similar to situational perspective-taking in that it is specific only to situations with the partner (as opposed to a general disposition to adopt others' perspectives). We adapted Davis and Oathout's (1987) perspective-taking instrument to our purposes by changing the wording of items so that they relate to partner perspective-taking. That might work for your purposes.
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I just used the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, created by Mark Davis in 1980 for my dissertation. He has a book out called "Empathy" but he also created the IRI and it's been in use since the 1980's. It has four scales, including perspective taking. It may have been one of the "general measures" you mentioned, but I found the results useful for my purposes. I compared the results of two groups on the instrument. Dr. Davis was also very responsive and supportive when I contacted him concerning the norms and some questions about the instrument.
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Original Posting:
Message From: Gordon Hodson
Position/Title: Associate Professor
School/Organization: Brock University
Dear Colleagues:
I am looking for a measure of situational perspective taking. I am interested in the cognitive angle (what some call "cognitive empathy" or "perspective taking"), rather than an emotional empathy measure.
My search has largely uncovered general dispositional measures (e.g., "I find it easy to put myself in someone else's shoes"). I am looking for a measure that can be used to tap perspective taking of a particular group (or individual).
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I will post a summary email reply for the group.
-Gordon Hodson
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