Empathy neglect: reconciling the spotlight effect and the correspondence bias.

Full Abstract

When people commit an embarrassing blunder, they typically overestimate how harshly they will be judged by others. This tendency can seem to fly in the face of research on the correspondence bias, which has established that observers are, in fact, quite likely to draw harsh dispositional inferences about others. These seemingly inconsistent literatures are reconciled by showing that actors typically neglect to consider the extent to which observers will moderate their correspondent inferences when they can easily adopt an actor's perspective or imagine being in his or her shoes. These results help to explain why actors can overestimate the strength of observers' dispositional inferences even when, as the literature on the correspondence bias attests, observers are notoriously prone to drawing those very inferences.

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Author information

Author/s: Epley, Nicholas (N); Savitsky, Kenneth (K); Gilovich, Thomas (T);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA. epley(-atsign-)wjh.harvard.edu

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Clinical Trial; Journal Article; Randomized Controlled Trial; Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

Journal: Journal of personality and social psychology (J Pers Soc Psychol), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2002-Aug; vol 83 (issue 2) : pp 300-12

Dates: Created 2002/08/01; Completed 2003/02/04; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 12150229, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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