Perspective-taking: Debiasing social thought
by Galinsky, Adam Daniel, Ph.D., Princeton University, 1999, 128 pages; AAT 9927798
The experiments in this dissertation explored the role of perspective-taking in debiasing social thought and improving intergroup relations. In the first four experiments, perspective-taking was contrasted with stereotype suppression as a possible strategy for achieving stereotype control. Previous research has found that stereotype suppression can ironically make stereotypic thoughts more, rather than less, accessible. In Experiment 1, participants were shown a photograph of an elderly male and asked to write a short narrative essay about the typical day in the life of that individual. After a series of filler tasks, participants then completed a lexical decision task that was used to measure the accessibility of the stereotype of the elderly. The results showed that both perspective-takers and stereotype suppressors expressed fewer stereotypic thoughts in their narrative essays about the elderly male compared to a control condition, but only perspective-takers expressed more positive evaluations of the target. Only suppressors, on the other hand, demonstrated heightened accessibility of the stereotype compared to perspective-takers and participants in the control condition in the subsequent lexical decision task. Experiment 2 replicated the basic procedure and effects of Experiment 1 using a more socially sensitive stereotype (i.e., the photographed individual was an African-American male). In Experiment 3, after taking the perspective of an African-American male, perspective-takers rated discrimination against African-Americans to be a continuing, unsolved problem, but they did not rate, compared to suppressors, that contemporary discrimination was still a significant liability for women (Experiment 4), suggesting that the benefits of perspective-taking may be group specific. Experiment 5 utilized the minimal group paradigm in order to test whether perspective-taking could affect intergroup relations. Perspective-taking reduced evidence of in-group bias by increasing evaluations of the out-group. In addition, perspective-taking increased the positivity of the connotative meaning of group-relevant words (e.g., cooperative, kind) in the context of the out-group. Finally, perspective-taking led to the selection of more hypothesis-disconfirming questions, but only when the perspective-taking instructions were particularly vivid and descriptive (Experiment 6). Across the six experiments, perspective-taking reduced a variety of biases suggesting that it is a robust strategy for debiasing thought in an increasingly multicultural and diverse social world.
