Does taking someone else's perspective lead to deep insight about them?
“Actually, it leads you to behave stereotypically:
Nine studies demonstrated that perspective-takers are particularly likely to adopt a target’s positive and negative stereotypical traits and behaviors. Perspective-takers rated both positive and negative stereotypic traits of targets as more self-descriptive. As a result, taking the perspective of a professor led to improved performance on an analytic task, whereas taking the perspective of a cheerleader led to decreased performance, in line with the respective stereotypes of professors and cheerleaders. Similarly, perspective-takers of an elderly target competed less compared to perspective-takers of an African American target.”
So what does this mean for designers who uphold empathy as their greatest virtue? If anything, it’s a good case for thorough user research.
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