Brown Bag: Managing our motivation to misunderstand others: Principles and practical strategies (8/20/24)

Catch up with the recording and slides from RPPL’s August 2024 Brown Bag on social perspective-taking, where participants were invited into a conversation on how new social perspective-taking strategies might be applied to working with teachers, school leaders, and other personal contexts.

By Hunter Gehlbach, Professor and Faculty Lead of the PhD program at the Johns Hopkins School of Education

Our social connections—meeting new people, interacting with them, and forming relationships—depend critically on our capacity to understand others. Yet, multiple biases plague our attempts to read strangers, peers, and loved ones, alike. Because these biases serve important psychological functions, overcoming them represents a formidable challenge. Recent research on social perspective taking suggests several principles through which we might improve our approach to understanding others.