Better living through perspective taking

Abstract

People behave better - more acceptably, more admirably, more prosocially - after perspective taking. First, perspective taking has been consistently found to increase compassionate emotions (commonly called empathy, but the precise label in this case is empathic concern) toward the person whose perspective has been taken. Second, perspective taking leads people to view and treat other people more like the self, viewing them as possessing more traits in common with the self, and symbolically having merged, at least partially, with the self in terms of cognitive representations and descriptions of personality and explanations of behavior. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.