A Day in the Life: Perspective Taking and Empathy for Transgender Rights

• In Event: Increasing Inclusion, Reducing Prejudice

Abstract

Prior work suggests that putting oneself in the shoes of members of stigmatized groups can reduce out-group prejudices. Perspective-taking builds empathy for stigmatized groups and encourages people to consider the daily hardships the stigmatized must encounter. However, empathy is a highly regulated emotion, making it more difficult to use in a large-scale way. Not everyone in the population, for example, complies and adopts out-group perspectives, and others may actually further stigmatize out-group members; among those who do perspective-take, they may vary in the degree to which they do. We report results from a 2019 national online survey experiment encouraging people to imagine a day in their life if they were transgender. We randomize the degree of effort people need to perform in the perspective-taking exercise. We additionally randomize whether people view 30-second ads supportive of or opposed to transgender rights. While some engaged in perspective-taking, others refused and others expressed ideas that further stigmatized transgender people. Our results continue to suggest that there are emotional limits to empathy, so care must be taken to consider those limits when attempting to reduce out-group prejudices.

Authors

• Andrew R. Flores, American University

• Daniel C. Lewis, Siena College

• Donald P. Haider-Markel, University of Kansas

• Patrick R. Miller, University of Kansas

• Jami K. Taylor, University of Toledo