Effect of perspective taking on the cognitive representation of persons: A merging of self and other.

摘要: Two experiments examined the possibility that perspective taking leads observers to create cognitive representations of others that substantially overlap with the observers' own self-representations. In Experiment 1 observers receiving role-taking instructions were more likely to ascribe traits to a novel target that they (observers) had earlier indicated were self-descriptive. This pattern was most pronounced, however, for positively valenced traits. In Experiment 2 some participants received role-taking instructions but were also given a …