Abstract

The aim of the study was to examine the cognitive mechanisms behind perspective taking by measuring the response times of respondents when answering questions from their own perspective and from various imagined perspectives of groups and individuals. The participants were 65 journalists from leading Latvian newspapers, representing two sides in a controversy about Latvian educational reform in 2004. The participants evaluated various aspects of the reform from 6 different perspectives (their own, in-group prototype and exemplar, out-group prototype and exemplar, and a neutral third-party perspective). The longest response times were for the judgments made from one’s own perspective, indicating more cognitive effort, while judgments from all the other perspectives were more stereotype-based, resulting in substantially shorter response times.