Exploring Actual and Presumed Links between Accurately Inferring Contents of Other People's Minds and Prosocial Outcomes.

The term "empathic accuracy" has been applied to people's ability to infer the contents of other people's minds-that is, other people's varying feelings and/or thoughts over the course of a social interaction. However, despite the ease of intuitively linking this skill to competence in helping professions such as counseling, the "empathic" prefix in its name may have contributed to overestimating its association with prosocial traits and behaviors. Accuracy in reading others' thoughts and feelings, like many other skills, can be used toward prosocial-but also malevolent or morally neutral-ends. Prosocial intentions can direct attention towards other people's thoughts and feelings, which may, in turn, increase accuracy in inferring those thoughts and feelings, but attention to others' thoughts and feelings does not necessarily heighten prosocial intentions, let alone outcomes.

Cues trigger depiction schemas for robots, as they do for human identities.

Clark and Fischer's three levels of depiction of social robots can be conceptualized as cognitive schemas. When interacting with social robots, humans shift between schemas similarly to how they shift between identity category schemas when interacting with other humans. Perception of mind, context cues, and individual differences underlie perceptions of which level of depiction is most situationally relevant.

The link between perspective-taking and prosociality - Not as universal as you might think.

The path from perspective-taking to prosocial behavior is not as straightforward or robust as it is often assumed to be. In some contexts, imagining the viewpoint of other person leads the perspective taker to thoughts about how that person might have negative thoughts or intentions toward them. It can also prompt other kinds of counter-productive egocentric projection. In this review, we consider how prosocial processes potentially stimulated by perspective-taking can be derailed in such contexts. We also identify methodological limitations in current (social-) psychological evidence for a causal link between perspective-taking and prosocial outcomes. Increased appreciation of factors moderating the path from perspective-taking to prosocial behavior can enhance the explanatory power of perspective-taking as social cognitive process.

When Polarization Triggers Out-Group "Counter-Projection" Across the Political Divide.

Although projecting one's own characteristics onto another person is pervasive, "counter-projection," or seeing the opposite of oneself in others is also sometimes found, with implications for intergroup conflict. After a focused review of previous studies finding counter-projection (often unexpectedly), we map conditions for counter-projection to an individual out-group member. Counter-projection requires identified antagonistic groups, is moderated by in-group identity, and is moderated by which information is assessed in the target person. Using political groups defined by support for former U.S. President Trump, across our Initial Experiment (N = 725) and Confirmatory Experiment (N = 618), we found counter-projection to individual political out-group targets for moral beliefs, personality traits, and everyday likes (e.g., preference for dogs vs. cats). Counter-projection was increased by in-group identification and overlapped considerably with "oppositional" out-group stereotypes, but we also found counter-projection independent of out-group stereotypes (degree of overlap with stereotyping depended on the information being projected).

No need to take what you already have: perspective taking's effect on empathic concern for low-need targets.

Recent studies have (quite persuasively) challenged a previous body of work suggesting that taking the perspective of targets described as experiencing highly distressing plights would increase empathic concern for those targets. In the current study, we test whether perspective-taking might still increase empathic concern for targets in less negative predicaments. College participants (N = 303) were given either perspective-taking instructions, or no instructions, before reading posts from targets describing negative, but not terrible, experiences. Consistent with recent results challenging the effects of perspective taking, even for these low-need targets, perspective-taking instructions had no effect on empathic concern (nor on other empathic emotions). However, participants in the perspective-taking condition were more likely to reach out to the targets by writing them a note in response to the negative experience. Results are discussed in terms of perspective-taking instructions having little effect on what perspective takers feel but possibly some effect on what they do.

It Is Hard to Read Minds without Words: Cues to Use to Achieve Empathic Accuracy.

When faced with the task of trying to "read" a stranger's thoughts, what cues can perceivers use? We explore two predictors of empathic accuracy (the ability to accurately infer another person's thoughts): use of stereotypes about the target's group, and use of the target's own words. A sample of 326 White American undergraduate students were asked to infer the dynamic thoughts of Middle Eastern male targets, using Ickes' (Ickes et al. 1990) empathic accuracy paradigm. We predicted use of stereotypes would reduce empathic accuracy because the stereotypes would be negative and inaccurate. However, more stereotypical inferences about the target's thoughts actually predicted greater empathic accuracy, a pattern in line with past work on the role of stereotypes in empathic accuracy (Lewis et al. 2012), perhaps because the stereotypes of Middle Easterners (collected from a sample of 60 participants drawn from the same population) were less negative than expected. In addition, perceivers who inferred that the targets were thinking thoughts that more closely matched what the target was saying out loud were more empathically accurate. Despite the fact that words can be used intentionally to obscure what a target is thinking, they appear to be a useful cue to empathic accuracy, even in tricky contexts that cross cultural lines.

Perspective taking: motivation and impediment to shared reality.

Taking another person's perspective requires acknowledging that there is another viewpoint, which can challenge the concept of shared reality. At the same time, taking someone else's perspective can also preserve shared reality, by helping to explain how aspects of the world may be perceived differently by two different individuals. Thus, establishing or maintaining shared reality may be a primary motivator for perspective taking in everyday life. However, depending on the content (e.g., self-perceptions, assumptions about other people, cherished beliefs) used in constructing another perspective and comparing it with one's own, perspective taking may in some cases instead highlight differences between how people view the world, thus hindering a sense of shared reality.

Superfluous neuroscience information makes explanations of psychological phenomena more appealing.

Does the presence of irrelevant neuroscience information make explanations of psychological phenomena more appealing? Do fMRI pictures further increase that allure? To help answer these questions, 385 college students in four experiments read brief descriptions of psychological phenomena, each one accompanied by an explanation of varying quality (good vs. circular) and followed by superfluous information of various types. Ancillary measures assessed participants' analytical thinking, beliefs on dualism and free will, and admiration for different sciences. In Experiment 1, superfluous neuroscience information increased the judged quality of the argument for both good and bad explanations, whereas accompanying fMRI pictures had no impact above and beyond the neuroscience text, suggesting a bias that is conceptual rather than pictorial. Superfluous neuroscience information was more alluring than social science information (Experiment 2) and more alluring than information from prestigious "hard sciences" (Experiments 3 and 4). Analytical thinking did not protect against the neuroscience bias, nor did a belief in dualism or free will. We conclude that the "allure of neuroscience" bias is conceptual, specific to neuroscience, and not easily accounted for by the prestige of the discipline. It may stem from the lay belief that the brain is the best explanans for mental phenomena.

From east to west: accessibility and bias in self-other comparative judgments.

People often weight information about the self more heavily than information about other people when making social comparative judgments. One possible explanation for this egocentrism is that information about the self is more accessible than information about others. We examine this egocentrism in samples from the United States and Taiwan. Study 1 finds egocentrism in comparisons of the self with the average other person in both cultures. Study 2 measured reaction times, demonstrating that (a) information about the self is more accessible than information about the average other and (b) as the accessibility of self-information increases, so does the influence of that information. Study 3 replicates Study 2, using comparisons with a specific other person. Egocentrism occurred in both cultures, suggesting that heavier weighting of self-information occurs across the traditional East-West cultural divide.

When trying hard isn't natural: women's belonging with and motivation for male-dominated STEM fields as a function of effort expenditure concerns.

Feeling like one exerts more effort than others may influence women's feelings of belonging with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and impede their motivation. In Study 1, women STEM graduate students perceived they exerted more effort than peers to succeed. For women, but not men, this effort expenditure perception predicted a decreased sense of belonging, which in turn decreased motivation. Study 2 tested whether the male-dominated status of a field triggers such effort expectations. We created a fictional "eco-psychology" graduate program, which when depicted as male-dominated resulted in women expecting to exert relatively more effort and decreased their interest in pursuing the field. Study 3 found emphasizing effort as expected (and normal) to achieve success elevated women's feelings of belonging and future motivation. Results suggest effort expenditure perceptions are an indicator women use to assess their fit in STEM. Implications for enhancing women's participation in STEM are discussed.

Reading between the minds: the use of stereotypes in empathic accuracy.

An ideal empathizer may attend to another person's behavior in order to understand that person, but it is also possible that accurately understanding other people involves top-down strategies. We hypothesized that perceivers draw on stereotypes to infer other people's thoughts and that stereotype use increases perceivers' accuracy. In this study, perceivers (N = 161) inferred the thoughts of multiple targets. Inferences consistent with stereotypes for the targets' group (new mothers) more accurately captured targets' thoughts, particularly when actual thought content was also stereotypic. We also decomposed variance in empathic accuracy into thought, target, and perceiver variance. Although past research has frequently focused on variance between perceivers or targets (which assumes individual differences in the ability to understand other people or be understood, respectively), the current study showed that the most substantial variance was found within targets because of differences among thoughts.

Parallel constraint satisfaction in memory-based decisions.

Three studies sought to investigate decision strategies in memory-based decisions and to test the predictions of the parallel constraint satisfaction (PCS) model for decision making (Glöckner & Betsch, 2008). Time pressure was manipulated and the model was compared against simple heuristics (take the best and equal weight) and a weighted additive strategy. From PCS we predicted that fast intuitive decision making is based on compensatory information integration and that decision time increases and confidence decreases with increasing inconsistency in the decision task. In line with these predictions we observed a predominant usage of compensatory strategies under all time-pressure conditions and even with decision times as short as 1.7 s. For a substantial number of participants, choices and decision times were best explained by PCS, but there was also evidence for use of simple heuristics. The time-pressure manipulation did not significantly affect decision strategies. Overall, the results highlight intuitive, automatic processes in decision making and support the idea that human information-processing capabilities are less severely bounded than often assumed.

Giving birth to empathy: the effects of similar experience on empathic accuracy, empathic concern, and perceived empathy.

This study examined how having had a similar experience to a target person's experience affected three facets of empathy: empathic concern, empathic accuracy, and perceived empathy. Women who had never been mothers, who were pregnant with their first child, or who had just given birth to their first child (20 in each group) served as perceivers, watching videotapes of new-mother targets (N = 20) and providing measures of emotional and cognitive empathy. When perceivers had experienced the same life events as the targets, they expressed greater empathic concern and reported greater understanding of targets. However, experience had a much smaller effect on empathic accuracy, limited to comparisons between new-mother and never-pregnant perceivers and only for accuracy at guessing stereotypic attitudes, not individual thoughts. Perceived empathy, in contrast, appeared to be influenced by targets' knowledge of whether perceivers had experienced similar events.

Empathy in frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

Using naturalistic stimuli, we assessed the ability to infer what other people are feeling in three groups of participants: healthy elderly adults, patients suffering from the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (FTD-b), and patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease (AD). After watching videotaped interviews of everyday people (nonactors) discussing an emotionally relevant event in their lives, participants answered questions regarding the interviewee's feelings. Both patient groups inferred emotions as accurately as the healthy elderly, provided the emotions were displayed unambiguously and consistently across the interview. However, when the displayed emotions became more variable and ambiguous, performance in both patient groups became impaired relative to healthy elderly participants. The similar profile across the two clinical groups despite their differences in social skills suggests that nonsocial cognitive processes affected in dementia may be an important factor in drawing inferences about other people's feelings.