RUNNING HEAD: PERSPECTIVE TAKING IN GROUPS The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Perspective Taking in Groups

Group members often reason egocentrically, both when allocating responsibility for collective endeavors and when assessing the fairness of group outcomes. These selfcentered judgments are reduced when participants consider their other group members individually or actively adopt their perspectives. However, reducing an egocentric focus through perspective taking may also invoke cynical theories about how others will behave, particularly in competitive contexts. Expecting more selfish behavior from other group members may result in more self-interested behavior from the perspective takers themselves. This suggests that one common approach to conflict resolution between and within groups can have unfortunate consequences on actual behavior. Perspective Taking in Groups 3 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Perspective Taking in Groups People in the midst of disagreements often fail to “see eye to eye.” When such problems with psychological vision arise, it would seem advantageous for each party to actively adopt the other person’s perspective in order to determine the best way of achieving an optimal outcome. An employer in a hiring context, for example, would seem well advised to think about an employee’s sense of worth before entering into salary negotiations. So too would a prosecuting attorney in a legal dispute seem well advised to think carefully about the defense attorney’s case before entering into a lengthy court trial. Or a spouse to consider his or her partner’s perspective before reacting negatively to a perceived insult. The problem for most social interactions, however, is that people rarely think completely about others’ perspectives and interests. As a result, much of social judgment is egocentrically biased. This failure to fully consider another’s perspective is an obvious antecedent to conflict, misunderstanding, and strong disagreements about what is morally right or fair. An employer who fails to consider an employee’s sense of worth can leave the employee feeling undervalued, underappreciated, and under pressure to find a new job. A prosecuting attorney who fails to consider all the subtleties of a defense team’s arguments can risk losing a case, along with considerable time and money. And “communication problems” is among the most commonly cited reason for marital divorce (Wolcott & Hughes, 1999), much of which may stem from attempting to communicate with another person without attempting to adopt their perspective. Carefully considering another’s differing perspective may be all the more problematic in larger groups with multiple diverging perspectives. Consider, for Perspective Taking in Groups 4 example, common decisions about how a group should divide collective resources. Because people tend to focus on their own contributions or needs, they also tend to overestimate their own contributions or needs relative to others (Ross & Sicoly, 1979). As anyone who has ever been part of a group knows well, disagreements can therefore arise when members of groups seem to claim more than their fair share of resources. One problem with this egocentrism, at least from an ethics standpoint, is not simply that people fail to see eye to eye, but that people generate cynical explanations for these perspective-taking failures. Employees, for instance, may come to believe that management is filled with greedy or self-interested administrators who only care about their bottom line. These cynical attributions—while occasionally true—are also quite caustic. Once a negative impression about another’s moral or ethical character is formed, little may be done to repair it. This may be particularly true when the impression is that such egocentric disagreements arise from deliberate self-interest or egoistic thought. As it happens, however, such egocentrism is a hallmark of our perceptual lives, and these biases are the product of mental operations that can occur very rapidly, without conscious awareness or intention (for a review see Epley & Caruso, 2004). This means that such egocentric perceptions of fairness, justice, or resource allocation are often not the product of deliberate or conscious attempts to engage in unethical or self-interested behavior. Because such egocentric reasoning occurs so quickly and automatically, egocentric perceptions do not feel biased or distorted. As a result, others with differing views appear misguided or mistaken. These erroneous cynical attributions made about the moral or ethical intentions of other group members have been described as the Perspective Taking in Groups 5 “sinister attribution error” (Kramer, 1999) – an error that can obviously increase group conflict and dissatisfaction. Actively considering the point of view of other group members—by deliberately adopting their perspectives—might therefore seem to be a simple and efficient way to reduce these automatic egocentric biases or sinister attribution errors, thereby increasing group members’ abilities to determine fair and ethical behavior for all group members. Although this makes intuitive sense, we will suggest in this paper that the road to group cohesion is actually much more rocky and uneven than intuition might suggest. Considering the thoughts of another person might be a helpful reminder of their possible beliefs and feelings, but such perspective taking might also inadvertently highlight motives in another that run counter to one’s own. When an employer considers an employee’s sense of worth, the strong desire to maintain a tight budget might make an employee’s high salary demand appear irrational and selfish. Or when a spouse considers how his or her partner could have forgotten their 10 wedding anniversary, the salience of the event might make it appear like yet another example of insensitivity rather than a regrettable lapse in memory—making an 11 anniversary somewhat less likely. Although considerable attention has been devoted to the process by which people adopt another’s perspective as well as their accuracy in doing so (Davis, 1983; Epley, Keysar, Van Boven, & Gilovich, in press; Keysar, Barr, Balin, & Brauner, 2000), much less has been directed to the potential consequences of attempting to understand the thoughts of others. In this chapter we therefore focus on the organizational consequences of setting aside one’s own egocentric perspective by actively thinking about others’ thoughts, feelings, and internal motives. Such perspective taking may be achieved by Perspective Taking in Groups 6 imagining how one would feel in the other person’s position—what psychologists call “simulation” (Gallese & Goldman, 1998)—or by deducing another person’s thoughts or feelings by relying on abstract or intuitive theories of behavior—a process of inference similar to what is called the “theory theory” (Gopnik & Wellman, 1992) or “protocentrism” (Karniol, 2003; see also Batson, Early, & Salvarani, 1997 for the distinction between imagining how you would feel and imagining how another feels). Much—although not all—of the research we will address, however, involves the latter process of inference rather than the former process of simulation. We will first review some of the evidence consistent with egocentric biases in groups, especially research focused on the claiming of responsibility in groups. We will then examine perspective taking as a strategy for reducing egocentric biases and group conflict. In doing so, we will point out the good, the bad, and the potentially ugly consequences that can result from perspective taking in different group contexts. Finally, we will offer suggestions for maximizing the effectiveness of perspective taking and consider the ethical implications of attempts to reduce or eliminate the negative consequences of egocentrism. Although egocentric biases can produce conflict and misunderstanding, we will suggest that simply undoing these egocentric biases through perspective taking may—at times—do more