perspectivetaking

Whether leaders taking the perspective of rivals or allies, student subjects taking the perspective of leaders in lab studies, or citizens taking their own perspective in hypothetical scenarios, most modern IR scholarship draws implicitly on perspective-taking. Unfortunately, several decades of psychological research suggests that individuals vary tremendously in their ability to see the world through others’ eyes. We provide a conceptual framework for understanding perspective-taking in IR, focusing on the nature of the “target” (first or third-person) and individuals’ inability to adjust from their initial anchor: their own beliefs. Across three experimental studies, we find evidence that perspective-taking exacerbates pre-existing attitudes towards the use of force, making hawks more hawkish and doves more dovish. Perspective-taking thus makes people more like themselves, which raises the prospect that participants are less like themselves in studies that do not take perspectivetaking into account.