Considering perspectives of others can benefit us all

Coming out of the pandemic, students will have spent substantially more time on screens than usual — a predictor of poorer mental health and increased stress, making their teacher-student relationships more challenging. Meanwhile, teachers who are coming off of historically stressful school years will now face heightened expectations for student achievement, while still managing their own pandemic stressors. That means children will need more relational support from their teachers, who may have less energy to provide such support.

Fortunately, new understandings about a fundamental building block of relationships have emerged. Social perspective taking — how we figure out the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of others — allows us to calibrate our interactions and navigate our social worlds.

Strategies to facilitate accurate perspective taking can be surprisingly simple: A group of Princeton and Stanford psychologists asked participants to merely “consider the opposite” when making social judgments. This mental trick improved their accuracy and reduced attitude polarization.

Across a host of experiments, Adam Galinsky, a social psychologist and professor at Columbia Business School, and his colleagues have shown that a different strategy — imagining in detail “a day in the life” of a stereotyped group — can diminish prejudice.

In addition to these strategies, we now know various ways to reduce certain biases that infect our thinking. For instance, naive realism — our tendency to assume that we see the one correct, objective reality and that those who hold a different point of view are too lazy, irrational or biased to think properly — can be diminished by mere awareness of this bias.

Finally, we may not even have to improve our people-reading accuracy for relational benefits to ensue. The mere act of someone else trying to take our perspective can increase our liking of them and the likelihood that we try to help them.

Skeptics — very reasonably — might worry these laboratory studies tell us little about what happens in the real world. Perhaps these strategic, bias reductionand motivation- approaches fail to impact real-life interactions.

Yet, our lab group’s recently published study shows multiple relational benefits of social perspective taking across an array of classrooms. First, our teachers selected students they found particularly vexing and perhaps even a bit frustrating. We next walked them through a multi-step process, allowing the teachers to generate strategies, reduce any biases and redouble their motivation to see the world through the eyes of their chosen student.

Thanks to this training, teachers in the treatment group reported putting more effort into their perspective taking and seeing improved relationships with these students. In turn, students of these teachers independently reported having more positive teacher-student relationships. Perhaps most intriguing, about three months later, these students demonstrated greater academic competencies as compared to students whose teachers had not engaged in this social-perspective-taking exercise.

Our study shows that social perspective taking is teachable and there is much we can do to combat the social strain on our relationships. Whether we are teachers by profession or informally (as parents, sports coaches or mentors around the office), we can model taking the perspective of others.

As we develop pet theories about others we can consider the opposite, or at least an alternative, theory. Holding two possibilities in mind simultaneously helps prevent jumping to conclusions.

Paraphrasing what we think we hear others saying is a long-standing strategy to help others feel heard. With a minor adaptation it can help others appreciate the effort we’re putting into taking their perspective — for example prefacing such paraphrasing with, “I want to make sure I’m clear on how this looks from your point of view. I think you are saying ... . ”

Recently, researchers have reached a sobering conclusion about the potency of our need for social connections: With weak relationships, we will die sooner. Neither excessive drinking, nor failing to exercise, nor obesity are as harmful. At a time when societal levels of perspective taking — at least on key political issues — have sunk to Hatfield-McCoy levels, maybe teachers can help us chart a better path forward. Enacting some simple improvements to how we take others’ perspectives might provide all of us with exactly the social booster shot we all need this fall.