The Influence Of Perspective Taking On Stereotyping:The Perspective Of Self- Stereotype Dual Model

An overgeneralized belief of group members, or stereotype, may facilitate our classification of individuals, and spare us the otherwise substantial cognitive burden. Meanwhile, it may also lead to some undesirable consequences, such as misperception, social injustice and group conflict. Therefore, how to reduce stereotyping of others has always been of great interest to social psychologists. Recently, a considerable amount of research has addressed this issue by investigating the role of perspective taking. In these studies, the perspective taking was defined as the process of individuals imagining or inferring other's attitude or perspective "from another's vantage point or imagining oneself in another's shoes", or a cognitive capacity to view the world in another's position. A large body of research has shown that perspective taking could effectively reduce stereotyping and negative evaluations of outgroup members. A proposed underlying mechanism of these effects is self-other overlap. People engaged in taking the perspective of one target person will have to use the self as an analogy to infer and simulate the person's thinking and feelings. This process would lead people to perceive the target as more "self-like", and then decrease their stereotyping of the target. Meanwhile, people may also feel themselves to be more "other-like", or perceive the self as possessing characteristics of the target person, which may increase the behavioral similarity between themselves and the target.However, there are different views, believing that the benefits of perspective taking is not without its boundary conditions, and suggesting that in certain circumstances perspective taking may actually increase stereotyping, and exacerbate intergroup relations. A study by Skorinko and Sinclair (2013) showed that taking perspective of ambiguously stereotypic targets could decrease the extent to which one engages in stereotyping, but taking perspective of a stereotype-consistent target would increase stereotyping. Because in the process of perspective taking, clearly stereotype-consistent targets would make their group stereotype highly salient. Against this backdrop, perspective takers were more apt to use the stereotype to estimate the thoughts and feelings of the others.Without direct access to another person's mental processes, people would try to perceive other's mind using simulation and theory-driven strategy. Simulation here refers to the people's use of the self to simulate the minds of the others, a process whereby people turned themselves into informational sources. In addition, theoretically driven, individuals tended to use the pre-existing categorical knowledge of the targets to infer their mental states. Self and stereotype, therefore, are the two basic templates on which people relied to construe the mental state of the others.Although both inferential tools based on these two templates were efficient means for saving cognitive efforts, they seem to be mutually exclusive alternatives. Ames (2004) found that the use of self-projection, or the simulation of other's mind based on that of the self, is negatively correlated with stereotyping. People's choice of strategies to infer other's mental processes is situational contingent. When the target is similar with the self, people often use the self-projection. When the target is not similar, people would not use egocentric simulations, but opt instead to seek categorical information. Epley and Waytz (2010) pointed out that when stereotypic information about the target is highly accessible, a person would not use self-relevant information to infer the target, but would turn to stereotypic and categorical information. Therefore, when taking the perspective of another person, the perspective taker could use the self-relevant information and stereotype as resources. Under certain situation, they could choose a particular kind of information, or might rely heavily on one of them, and these difference in informational usage cause perspective taking sometimes reduce one' stereotyping of targets, but in other times may boost the stereotyping.Study1 showed that self knowledge influence the impact of perspective taking on stereotyping. In the present study, we hypothesized and found that the effect of perspective taking on stereotyping depends on the perspective taker's self-focues attention. After taking the perspective of the migrant worker, people with low self-focus used more stereotypic traits in describing the migrant worker, whereas those high in self-focus used significantly less.Study2 showed that perspective taking heightens the stereotyping in certain situations. In the present study, we hypothesized and found that the effect of perspective taking on stereotyping depends on the perspective taker's need for cognitive closure (NFC). After taking the perspective of the elderly, people with high NFC used more stereotypic traits in describing the elderly, whereas those low in NFC used significantly less. People with high NFC had higher level of stereotype accessibility, as compared with people with low NFC.Study 3 aimed to investigate the moderating role of the target of perspective taking in the influence of perspective taking on stereotyping. After taking the perspective of the stereotypic target, people used more stereotypic traits in describing the target, whereas those taking the perspective of a conter-stereotypic target used significantly less.