Empathizing with Criminal Intent: Taking Moral Transgressors\u27 Perspectives

While studies have documented that perspective taking can increase compassion across difference, other researchers have suggested perspective taking can backfire, or decrease empathic concern, when the target is perceived as malicious (Lucas, Galinsky, & Murnighan, 2016). The present research sought to assess whether backfiring occurred when people took the perspective of a police officer who had committed a shooting described in a second-hand account. Batson, Early, and Salvarani (1997a) distinguished between imagine-self perspective taking, which asks people to imagine what they would have experienced if they were in the target’s place, and imagine-other perspective taking, which asks people to imagine what the target was experiencing. It was hypothesized that imagine-self perspective taking would spark more efforts to distance the self from the empathic target and thus backfire more than imagine-other perspective taking. While, as predicted, people who imagined themselves in the officer’s position were significantly more personally distressed than those who imagined the police officer’s situation or remained objective, participants in both perspective taking conditions reported the same amounts of empathic concern as those in the objective condition