How well do we know each other? An experimental study about the effect of feedback on perspective-taking Giordano Tuvo u679980 – 2021705 Master’s Thesis Communication and Information Sciences Specialisation: Business Communication & Digital Media School of Humanities and Digital Sciences Tilburg University, Tilburg Supervisor: D.J. Damen MA Second Reader: Dr. P.J. van der Wijst July 2019 THE INFLUENCE OF FEEDBACK ON PERSPECTIVE-TAKING 1 Abstract Previous research showed that individuals often fail to correctly take other people's perspective. This mistake is argued to result from a cognitive biased known as empathy gap. When individuals fall prey of the empathy gap, they find it difficult to understand what a person in a different emotional state is feeling. People encounter this difficulty because they overestimate the similarities between their own perspective and the one of the other person. In other words, they project their own perspective onto the other's perspective. Consequently, they generate inaccurate perspective-taking judgments. The focus of the present research was to investigate whether receiving information about the other's perspective could influence the correctness of perspective takers judgments. An experiment was conducted in which participants were asked to react to 30 fictitious money distributions. Participants were informed that the sums were divided between them and another person. Individuals who took part in the study were divided into three groups: one group was given explicit perspective-taking instructions, one group received feedback about the other's perspective and one group did not receive perspective-taking instructions nor feedback (control group). It was hypothesised that participants who received feedback about the other person's emotions would make more accurate perspective-taking judgments than participants in the other two conditions. Furthermore, it was expected that explicit perspective-taking instructions would lead to more instances of egocentric projection than the other two instructions types. The findings showed that the type of conditions in which participants were did not have an influence on the accuracy of their judgments about the other's emotional state. Furthermore, participants who received feedback projected their own perspective onto the other more than individuals who received perspective-taking instructions and more than participants in the control condition. We conclude by reflecting on the reasons why the experiment displayed these unexpected results and with suggestions for future research. Keywords: Perspective-taking, Perspective Getting, Egocentric Projection; Accuracy; Emotions THE INFLUENCE OF FEEDBACK ON PERSPECTIVE-TAKING 2 Table of contents Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 3 Theoretical framework ............................................................................................................ 5 The Empathy gap.................................................................................................................... 5 The Egocentric bias ................................................................................................................ 6 Perspective-taking instructions............................................................................................... 7 Method .................................................................................................................................... 11 Design ................................................................................................................................... 11 Participants ........................................................................................................................... 11 Pretest ................................................................................................................................... 12 Procedure .............................................................................................................................. 14 Measures ............................................................................................................................... 16 Results ..................................................................................................................................... 17 Accuracy of judgments ......................................................................................................... 17 Egocentric projection ........................................................................................................... 20 Conclusion and Discussion .................................................................................................... 23 Accuracy of judgments ......................................................................................................... 24 Egocentric projection ........................................................................................................... 24 Limitations and future research ............................................................................................ 24 References ............................................................................................................................... 27 Appendix..................................................................................................................................32 THE INFLUENCE OF FEEDBACK ON PERSPECTIVE-TAKING 3 Introduction Since the beginning of human history, everyone’s life is characterised by interactions between individuals (Masten, Morelli, & Eisenberger, 2011). When two or more individuals engage in a communication exchange, an underlying process immediately starts taking place: understanding each other’s mind (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). As a matter of fact, for effective communication, it is deemed necessary that communicators are aware of the mental state of the other party (Sperber & Wilson, 2002). This is due to the nature of communication, which is not always explicit. In fact, people might not always explicitly state what they mean (Yus, 1999). There might be information which they may be unable or unwilling to disclose or which is not explicitly formulated (Sperber & Wilson, 2002). Therefore, receivers need to decode and interpret this implicit information themselves (Yus, 1999). Hence, we can state that understanding the mind and mental state of the person to whom we are talking is a fundamental step for successful communication. Luckily, it is well-known that people have an innate ability to understand and represent others’ mental state (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). Individuals can try to do so by observing their counterparts’ explicit and implicit behaviour (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). For instance, when we witness people opening their birthday present, we unconsciously evaluate whether or not they genuinely like the item they have just received by observing their words, facial expressions, body language etc. Nevertheless, reading people's minds seems far from being easy and attempts to fully understand our communication partner are, often , not successful (Epley & Gilovich, 2006). For example, we might think that people like the gift they have just received because we are focusing on the words of gratitude they pronounce, but their facial expression might disclose emotions which we are failing to interpret. The question that arises here is why do these mistakes take place? An answer to this question can be found in the concept of perspective-taking. Perspective- taking revolves around the idea of “putting yourself in other people’s shoes” and trying to perceive the situation from the other individual’s point of view (Batson & Salvarani, 1997). Although the THE INFLUENCE OF FEEDBACK ON PERSPECTIVE-TAKING 4 given definition might lead the reader to think that perspective-taking is likely to result in accurate interpersonal understanding, previous research showed that taking the other person perspective is, oftentimes, not successful (Epley, Morewedge, & Keysar, 2004). One of the reasons why perspective-taking is frequently associated with scarce interpersonal understanding is the fact that people fail to understand the emotional state of someone who is experiencing feelings that differ from their own (Van Boven, Loewenstein, Dunning, & Nordgren, 2013). This cognitive bias is known as the “empathy gap” (Loewenstein, 1996) and is caused by people’s tendency to assume that their perspective and the one of other individuals are more similar than what they actually are (Ross & Ward, 1996). However, it may happen that these similarities are only in the mind of the perspective taker and this might result in erroneous perspective-taking judgments when the other person's state of mind actually differs from these expectations (Van Boven, Loewenstein, Dunning, & Nordgren, 2013). The erroneous judgments caused by the empathy gap raise the question of if perspective-taking is actually effective when it comes to attempting to understand other people's minds. Eyal et al. (2018) discussed a different way in which an accurate picture of the counterpart’s mind can be created: perspective getting. This concept can be described as the case in which people whose perspective is being taken disclose insights about their emotional states (Eyal, Steffel, & Epley, 2018). This information can be seen as a feedback, which is the information given by a person to another about his or her understanding or