Perspective Taking: Reducing Prejudice Towards General Outgroups and Specific Individuals

TLDR

Perspective taking has been shown to improve attitudes toward outgroups. Perspective‑taking enhances intergroup attitudes by fostering empathy, increases liking and helping toward specific outgroup members, and reduces prejudice and discrimination against those individuals, though its effects do not generalize to all outgroups.

Abstract

Previous research has found that perspective taking improves attitudes towards outgroups. We find that taking the perspective of an outgroup member not only improves attitudes towards outgroups, but also reduces prejudice and discriminatory behavior against other specific individual members of that outgroup. Experiment 1 demonstrates that perspective-taking improves liking towards another member of the outgroup, while experiment 2 finds that the improved liking does not generalize to all outgroups, only the group to which the target of empathy belongs. Finally, experiment 3 shows that perspective taking also increases helping behavior towards another member of the outgroup. Moreover, we find evidence that perspective taking improves intergroup attitudes through the induction of empathy.