Losing Your Temper and Your Perspective: Anger Harms Perspective-Taking

Across five studies, we find that both incidental and integral anger harm perspective-taking. In Study 1, participants who felt incidental anger were less likely to take others’ perspectives than those who felt neutral emotion. In Study 2, we demonstrate that arousal mediates the relationship between anger and diminished perspective-taking. In Study 3, we show that anger harms perspective-taking compared to neutral emotion and sadness. In Study 4, we find that integral anger harms perspective-taking compared to neutral emotion. In Study 5, prompting individuals to correctly attribute their feelings of incidental anger moderates the relationship between anger and perspective-taking. Taken together, across different anger inductions and perspective taking measures, we identify a robust relationship between anger and diminished perspective-taking. Our findings have particularly important implications for conflict, which is often characterized by feelings of anger and exacerbated by poor perspective-taking.