The Perspective Gap

If overcoming the responsibility bias gives us a clearer understanding of others’ contributions, what is it that allows us to offer suppert to colleagues in collaborations, where emothions can run high and people often take criticism personally? Sharing credit is only one piece of successful group work. Meyer’s related abilities to console felloow writers when their work was being cut, and to create a psychologically safe environment, are a hallmark of another important step that givers take in collaboration seeing beyond the perspective gap. In an experiemtn led by Northwestern Univ. psychologist Loran Nordgren, people predicted how painful it would be to sit in a freezing room for five hours. They made their predictions under two different conditions: warm and cold. When the warm group estimated how much pain they would experience in the freezing room, they had an arm in a bucket of warm water. The cold group also made their judgements with an arm in a bucket, but it was filled with ice water. Which group wouuld expect to feel the most pain in the freezing room? As you probably guessed, it was the cold group. People anticipated that the freezing room would be 14% more painful when they had their arm in a bucket of ice water than a bucket of warm water. After literally feeling the cold for a minute, they knew several hours would be aweful. But there was a third group of people who experienced cold under different circumstances. They stuck an arm in a bucket of ice water, but then took the arm out and filled out a separate questionnaire. After ten minutes had passed, they estimated how painful the freezing room would be.
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