AUTHOR=Skorinko Jeanine Lee McHugh , DiGiovanni Craig , Rondina Katherine , Tavares Amy , Spinney Jennifer , Kobeissi Mariam , Lacera Luisa Perez , Vega Daniel , Beatty Paul , John Melissa-Sue , Doyle Aidan 

TITLE=The effects of perspective taking primes on the social tuning of explicit and implicit views toward gender and race

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 14 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1014803

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1014803

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=Perspective taking can benefit interpersonal situations by helping communication and decreasing explicit and implicit biases.  However, perspective taking can also backfire and highlight differences and increase biases. The current research investigates whether perspective taking influences social tuning, or the alignment of one’s self-views, explicit attitudes, and/or implicit attitudes with those of an interaction partner.  Experiments 1-2 examine whether perspective taking with an ostensible interaction partner who endorses gender traditional (or non-traditional) views align their views with this partner.  Experiments 3-5 investigate whether perspective taking leads to social tuning for egalitarian racial attitudes, including when the partner’s expectations of the interaction are clear and when the participant learns their ostensible IAT score at the beginning of the session.  Across all experiments, perspective takers are more likely to social tune their self-views and explicit attitudes than non-perspective takers.  However, social tuning never occurs for implicit attitudes.  Neither affiliative motivation towards the interaction partner nor self-presentation influences the results.  Thus, while perspective taking leads to social tuning, it does not completely replicate past work as there was only social tuning for self-views and explicit attitudes, not implicit attitudes.