The Influence of Perspective-Taking on Preference for and Emotional Responses to Office Environments

Perspective-taking is a theoretical framework that has been used to understand how the perception of different phenomena is shaped according to the point of view from which it is evaluated. Theoretically, perspective-taking encompasses both the cognitions and emotions that take place during situations where one person attempts to take the perspective of another. This has been largely used to study issues of social cooperation (e.g. Batson, Early and Salvarani, 1997; Galinsky et al., 2005) and, more recently, other areas such as pro-environmental behaviours (Berenguer, 2007). This study explored the effects that mood and perspective-taking have on the emotional reactions (pleasure, arousal and dominance and freely generated emotion words) and preference for office environments, and whether it is possible to predict preference from the emotional reactions people have to the offices. This study simulates the particular instance of presentation of final design by professionals to non-trained audiences, within an architecture and built environment context. By manipulating the perspectives that participants took during the evaluation of stimuli this study replicated the common place stated preference experimental situation (a self perspective people take) but also explored the particular case that professionals in the field of architecture and built environment disciplines do when they design: taking the perspective of a general other (a detached perspective) or taking the perspective of the client (the perspective of other).The results of the study found that taking a perspective is a mixture of drawing on self experiences and considering what others may say about it, the extent to which self and other references are used depends on the perspective taken, but it was clear that other and detached perspectives did lead to a reduction of self-knowledge references but also that these perspectives were significantly more difficult to take than a self perspective. Overall, the perspective-taking results revealed that there was an inter-personal perception bias as participants in the self condition gave lower pleasure, dominance and preference scores to the environments than those in the detached and other conditions, in colloquial words: it is "only 'OK' for me but it should be 'good' for you". Results are discussed in light of existing knowledge and some recommendations are made for future research and practitioners in architecture and built environment disciplines