title: Reading between the minds: the use of stereotypes in empathic accuracy.
abstract: An ideal empathizer may attend to another person's behavior in order to understand that person, but it is also possible that accurately understanding other people involves top-down strategies. We hypothesized that perceivers draw on stereotypes to infer other people's thoughts and that stereotype use increases perceivers' accuracy. In this study, perceivers (N = 161) inferred the thoughts of multiple targets. Inferences consistent with stereotypes for the targets' group (new mothers) more accurately captured targets' thoughts, particularly when actual thought content was also stereotypic. We also decomposed variance in empathic accuracy into thought, target, and perceiver variance. Although past research has frequently focused on variance between perceivers or targets (which assumes individual differences in the ability to understand other people or be understood, respectively), the current study showed that the most substantial variance was found within targets because of differences among thoughts.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene 97403, USA. klewis3@uoregon.edu
authors.forename: Karyn L
authors.initials: KL
authors.lastname: Lewis
authors.forename: Sara D
authors.initials: SD
authors.lastname: Hodges
authors.forename: Sean M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Laurent
authors.forename: Sanjay
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Srivastava
authors.forename: Gina
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Biancarosa
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D004645:Empathy; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012938:Social Perception; D013240:Stereotyping; D056345:Theory of Mind; D055815:Young Adult