Conflict causes perspective blindness

When I asked the late psychologist Lee Ross about it, he told me that when he worked on conflict resolution in Northern Ireland and in talks between Israel and Palestine, where the stakes were very high, people rarely considered the other side’s perspective until asked to do so. In his experience both parties were only ever interested in communicating their own perspectives. Not once, he said, in forty years… (Location 934) #✂️

Research into perspective taking shows that people opposed to affirmative action, for example, often blame income disparity on a lack of willpower or strong work ethic instead of widespread prejudice or institutional racism. Yet, when experimenters asked those same people to look at a photo of a black man and write an essay about a day in his life, including as much vivid detail as possible about his thoughts and feelings, subjects reported a strong shift in attitudes concerning affirmative action. By empathizing, even… (Location 939) #✂️