Department of Psychology, Ben Gurion University of the Negev.
D'Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2018 Apr;114(4):547-571. doi: 10.1037/pspa0000115.
Taking another person's perspective is widely presumed to increase interpersonal understanding. Very few experiments, however, have actually tested whether perspective taking increases accuracy when predicting another person's thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or other mental states. Those that do yield inconsistent results, or they confound accuracy with egocentrism. Here we report 25 experiments testing whether being instructed to adopt another person's perspective increases interpersonal insight. These experiments include a wide range of accuracy tests that disentangle egocentrism and accuracy, such as predicting another person's emotions from facial expressions and body postures, predicting fake versus genuine smiles, predicting when a person is lying or telling the truth, and predicting a spouse's activity preferences and consumer attitudes. Although a large majority of pretest participants believed that perspective taking would systematically increase accuracy on these tasks, we failed to find any consistent evidence that it actually did so. If anything, perspective taking decreased accuracy overall while occasionally increasing confidence in judgment. Perspective taking reduced egocentric biases, but the information used in its place was not systematically more accurate. A final experiment confirmed that getting another person's perspective directly, through conversation, increased accuracy but that perspective taking did not. Increasing interpersonal accuracy seems to require gaining new information rather than utilizing existing knowledge about another person. Understanding the mind of another person is therefore enabled by getting perspective, not simply taking perspective. (PsycINFO Database Record
从他人的角度看问题被广泛认为可以增加人际理解。然而，很少有实验真正测试过换位思考是否能提高预测他人想法、感受、态度或其他心理状态的准确性。那些确实进行了测试的实验要么结果不一致，要么将准确性与自我中心主义混淆。在这里，我们报告了 25 个实验，这些实验测试了被指示采用他人视角是否能增加人际洞察力。这些实验包括了广泛的准确性测试，这些测试可以将自我中心主义和准确性区分开来，例如从面部表情和身体姿势预测另一个人的情绪，预测真假微笑，预测一个人何时在撒谎或说实话，以及预测配偶的活动偏好和消费态度。尽管大多数预测试参与者认为换位思考会系统地提高这些任务的准确性，但我们没有发现任何一致的证据表明它实际上确实如此。事实上，换位思考总体上降低了准确性，同时偶尔会增加判断的信心。换位思考减少了自我中心偏见，但它所使用的信息并不系统地更准确。最后一个实验证实，通过对话直接获得另一个人的视角确实会提高准确性，但换位思考不会。提高人际准确性似乎需要获取新信息，而不是利用关于他人的现有知识。因此，理解另一个人的心理状态需要的是获得视角，而不仅仅是换位思考。
