Not good news for our current political climate. A recent study appearing in the December 2006 issue of Psychological Science reports that people with power are often unable to take other people’s perspective.
Study Gives Us A New Perspective On The Powerful
To study the link between power and perspective taking, Galinsky and colleagues used a unique method in which the participants were told to draw the letter E on their forehead. If the subject wrote the E in a self-oriented direction, backwards to others, this indicated a lack of perspective taking. On the other hand, when the E was written legible to others, this indicated that the person had thought about how others might perceive the letter.
How can you use this information? Perhaps a perceived reduction in someone’s power can help someone take yours or another’s perspective. A simple language pattern should do the trick.