Perceiving Others’ Feelings: The Importance of Personality and Social Structure

Gary D. Sherman, Jennifer Lerner, Jonathan Renshon, Christine Ma-Kellams and Samantha Joel

Scholarly Articles from Harvard Kennedy School of Government

Abstract: Recent research has explored the relationship between social hierarchy and empathic accuracy— the ability to accurately infer others’ mental states. In the current research, we tested the hypothesis that, regardless of one’s personal level of status and power, simply believing that social inequality is natural and morally acceptable (e.g., endorsement of social dominance orientation, or SDO), would be negatively associated with empathic accuracy. In a sample of managers, a group for whom empathic accuracy is a valuable skill, empathic accuracy was lower for those who possessed structural power and also for those who endorsed social dominance, regardless of their structural power. Moreover, men were less empathically accurate than women, a relationship statistically mediated by men’s higher SDO and greater structural power. These findings suggest that for empathic abilities, it matters just as much what you think about social hierarchies as it does where you stand within them.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in Social Psychological and Personality Science

Downloads: (external link)
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3472161 ... -Others-Feelings.pdf (application/pdf)
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3472161 ... -Others-Feelings.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hrv:hksfac:34721613

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Scholarly Articles from Harvard Kennedy School of Government Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Office for Scholarly Communication ().