Pespective Taking Beats Empathy and Control

Source:'Psychology: Inside a deal," The Economist, May 1, 2008.

"It pays to get inside your opponents' heads rather than their hearts"

Adam Galinsky and his colleagues have experimentally compared perspective-taking and empathy with control in terms of effectiveness in negotiations.

• Perspective-taking is the cognitive power to consider the world from someone else's viewpoint; students playing the role of negotiators were told to try to imagine what the other person was thinking.
  
• Empathy is the power to connect with them emotionally; students were told to try to imagine what the other person was feeling.
  
• Control; students were told simply to concentrate on their own role.

In the experiments, the perspective-taking students more often brought the simulated negotiations to a successful conclusion.

It occurs to me that a mixed strategy might be even better, with each negotiator trying to understand what the other was thinking and feeling, as well as his own role.

I have previously posted on the social construction of knowledge, and emphasized that that social construction is mediated by the rules of the institution in which it takes place. Thus the process by which religious knowledge is constructed is different than those by which legislative, bureaucratic, scientific, juridical, or other forms of knowledge are constructed.

if one accepts that knowledge is constructed, then it seems to me that the negotiation process might be a useful metaphor for the process of knowledge construction. Perspective taking and empathy might help in coming to an agreement on that which is to be taken as true.

On the other hand, success in negotiation is measured I would suppose by mutual satisfaction of the parties with the outcome. Surely the success of the social construction of knowledge should be held to an epistemological standard. Indeed, I would be quite unhappy with a jury that came out of its deliberations satisfied with their verdict, even though that verdict convicted an innocent person.