"A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience": Using the self to take another person's perspective

Improving the ability of individuals to take other people’s perspectives is an essential aspect of initiatives that aim to increase empathic and compassionate responding across multiple contexts such as health care, social and intimate relationships, and offender rehabilitation. However, in spite of the demonstrated importance of perspective taking to experiencing empathic concern, compassion, and sympathy for others, there has been little direct research on the ways in which people take another person’s perspective. This presentation will discuss a program of social psychological research and theoretical consideration my colleagues and I have undertaken on the strategies used to take others’ perspectives, with a focus on the use of similar past experiences and knowledge about the self. In particular, the focus will be on our studies that have investigated the relation of perspective taking to anger, empathic emotion, forgiveness, and conflict resolution in general community, offender, and health professional samples. From this examination, it will be argued that a central component of understanding others is the ability to develop an insightful understanding and self compassionate approach to one’s own experiences. When self-reflection is motivated by one’s own concerns, this self-focus becomes one in which perspective taking is inhibited, as personal distress, inaccurate perceptions, and negative emotions predominate. Ways in which clinical psychological approaches may improve perspective taking through increasing self-reflection and assimilation of problematic experiences in clients for whom empathic responding is an issue will be discussed.