It is becoming increasingly difficult for people to make it through the day without some reminder of their weight. Newspaper articles, magazine tabloids, and popular television programs like Biggest Loser serve as a vehicle to spread the message that there is an obesity epidemic. Further, some of these sources, like the Biggest Loser, give people front row seats to the battle against obesity as they observe heavyweight individuals struggle – and often succeed, if only for a short while – to change their lifestyles and lose significant amounts of weight. A popular mantra reinforced by television shows like the Biggest Loser is that you can control your lifestyle, and subsequently, your weight, with the right amount of tenacity, commitment, and discipline. Those who successfully navigate this path are often applauded and encouraged to share their journey, both triumphs and struggles, with others.
The hope is that those fighting their own weight or even those helping others fight their weight can use these individuals as positive role models to persevere with their own struggles. But what happens if people adopt the perspective of these role models who are struggling with their weight? One possibility is that adopting the perspective of those who are navigating weight loss will convince the perspective-takers that successful weight loss is in reach. Another possibility is that adopting the perspective of someone trying to lose weight could make the perspective-taker understand that successful weight loss is a struggle. This understanding may decrease negative thoughts or stereotypes about overweight people. Indeed, past research has shown that taking the perspective of an out-group can reduce negative stereotypes and prejudice towards that group (Shih, Wang, Bucher, Stotzer, 2009; Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000).
However, perspective taking with someone trying to control his or her weight may have a somewhat different effect, because exercising self-control can have negative effects on people’s subsequent efforts to control expressions of prejudice (Govorun & Payne, 2006; Park, Glaser, & Knowles, 2008), and taking the perspective of someone engaged in such efforts may have similar effects on people’s own abilities to control prejudice and discrimination. Perspective taking is defined as the “social cognitive process whereby people interpret, and contend with, a world of other’s intentions, desires, feelings, and beliefs” (Martinez, Stuewig, & Tangney, 2014). Perspective taking is a skill that is central to successfully negotiating the social world, has long been viewed as a fundamental basis for proper social functioning (Mead, 1934), and is a critical component of cognitive and moral reasoning (Piaget, 1932; Kohlberg, 1976).
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Some also argue that perspective taking is a social strategy that helps people satisfy the fundamental human desire for creating and maintaining social relationships (Galinsky, Ku, & Wang, 2005). One important consequence of perspective taking is that it may increase the already strong tendency people have to unconsciously and automatically adopt the actions, goals, and thoughts of another person. For example, research indicates that people imitate the nonverbal behavior of other people (e.g., foot shaking or face rubbing) without being aware that they have done so (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). Other studies demonstrate that people presented with the goals of an actor on some task (e.g., being helpful) act themselves in a manner that is consistent with these same goals on a subsequent and unrelated task, for example helping behavior in a novel context (Dik & Aarts, 2007; Aarts, Gollwitzer, & Hassin, 2004).
This suggests that behaviors or goals that are salient in the social environment can sometimes become activated within the self. Perspective taking should increase the likelihood of this activation because it involves a deliberate effort to experience what the other person is experiencing. In other words, perspective-takers may mentally simulate the other person’s experience (Ruby & Decety, 2001). Simulation occurs when either witnessing or imagining the thoughts or actions of another person evokes largely the same mental representations of those thoughts or actions had they been actually performed by the perceiver (Gallese, Keysers, & Rizzolatti, 2004). During the act of perspective taking, a perceiver attempts to place himself or herself “in the shoes” of the actor, thereby imagining or simulating the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the actor (Ruby & Decety, 2001). Research on the effects of perspective taking generally uncovers positive outcomes.
For instance, it has been shown to increase the effectiveness of negotiation outcomes (Trotschel et al., 2011; Galinsky, Maddux, Gilin, & White, 2008), provide an advantage in certain competitive interactions (Gilin, Maddux, Carpenter, & Galinsky, 2013), and can even lead people to view a criminal defendant as less culpable of a crime in a mock trial (Skorinko et al., 2014). Perspective taking also has generally shown positive outcomes in the area of stigma, stereotyping, and intergroup interactions.
Perspective taking with members of stigmatized or stereotyped groups has been shown to attenuate automatic expressions of race bias and improve interracial interactions (Todd, Bodenhausen, Richeson, & Galinsky, 2011), undermine stereotype maintenance processes (Todd, Galinsky, & Bodenhausen, 2012), increase the likelihood of out-group helping (Mashuri, Zaduqisti, & Supriyono, 2012; Batson, Chang, Orr, & Rowland, 2002), promote effective communication and social interaction (Bazerman & Neale, 1982; Falk & Johnson, 1977), increase willingness to interact with stereotyped out-group members (Wang, Kenneth, Ku, & Galinsky, 2014), minimize the use of stereotypes in judgments of others (Ku, Wang, & Galinsky, 2010), make the existence of intergroup discrimination more salient and lead people to adopt more positive attitudes toward social policies designed to attenuate intergroup inequalities (Todd, Bodenhausin, & Galinsky, 2012), reduce psychological reactance to a perpetrator (Steindl & Jones, 2012), and promote more favorable intergroup attitudes and increase empathy arousal for an out-group (Vescio, Sechrist, & Paolucci, 2003).
In a related vein, Inzlicht, Gutsell, and Legault (2012) found that mimicking the actions of an out-group member reduces prejudice against that out-group. However, a relatively small but growing body of evidence suggests that perspective taking might not always lead to favorable outcomes like those mentioned above. For example, Skorinko & Sinclair (2013) found that perspective taking with a clearly stereotype-consistent out-group member leads to more stereotyping of the out-group than does perspective taking with a stereotype-ambiguous out-group member. Tarrant, Calitri, and Weston (2012) found that following perspective taking with an out-group member, those strongly identified with their in-group used a greater number of negative traits to describe that out-group member and subsequently judged that person less favorably than those not strongly identified with their in-group.
Researchers have also found that after perspective taking, people with high need for cognitive closure use more stereotypic traits when describing a member from an out-group than those low in need for cognitive closure (Sun, Zuo, Wu, & Wen & 2016). Perspective-takers also are more likely than non-perspective-takers to adopt the negative stereotypical traits and behaviors of the person he or she is perspective-taking with (Galinsky, Wang, & Ku, 2008). Surprisingly, perspective-taking with an out-group member can even lead lower prejudiced individuals to treat an out-group member less favorably than an in-group member during real face-to-face interactions (Vorauer, Martens, & Sasaki, 2009). One study in particular that builds directly on contemporary research exploring the negative consequences of perspective taking examined the influence of perspective taking on self-control (Ackerman, Goldstein, Shapiro, & Bargh, 2009).
Self-control refers to the inhibition of some dominant behavior for the purpose of achieving a desirable long-term outcome (Muraven & Baumeister, 2000). For example, a person on a diet may exert self-control, or regulate his or her behavior with respect to unhealthy food, with the purpose of achieving a more desirable physique in the future. This self-regulation of behavior is thought to draw on a finite, but renewable, resource (Baumeister, Vohs, & Tice, 2007; Muraven & Baumeister, 2000). Thus, self-regulating behavior in one setting (e.g., not eating a cupcake at a birthday party) makes one less likely to successfully self-regulate behavior in some subsequent setting (e.g., trying not to eat that bag of potato chips when you get home from the birthday party). This phenomenon is known as ego depletion (see also Finkel et al., 2006; Fitzsimons, Shah, Chartrand, & Bargh, 2005).
Ackerman, Goldstein, Shapiro, and Bargh (2009) examined whether perspective taking can lead to vicarious ego depletion in which adopting the perspective of someone else experiencing a state of depletion leads to depletion of the perspective-taker’s own self-regulatory capacity. They asked participants to read a story about a hungry waiter or waitress (matched to the sex of the participant) who worked at a high-quality restaurant but could not eat the food during his or her shift because it was against restaurant policy and would result in termination from the job. This story was written in first-person diary format and went into precise detail about how delicious the food looked and smelled, and how difficult it was for the waiter or waitress to resist eating the food.
Before reading this story, participants were randomly assigned to receive instructions that directed them to either simply read the story (control condition), or take the perspective of the person in the story (perspective taking condition) by being asked to “imagine yourself in his or her shoes, and concentrate on trying to imagine what the person was thinking and how he or she was feeling” (instructions adapted from Goldstein & Cialdini, 2007). Results from this study revealed that participants who took the perspective of the person in the story experienced a reduction in self-regulation as evidenced by their willingness to spend significantly more money in a financial decision task than those asked to simply read the story.
The researchers argue that perspective taking in this situation produced vicarious ego depletion. That is, taking the perspective of someone who was using his or her self-regulatory resources (i.e., resisting the urge to eat delicious food on the job) depleted also the self-regulatory resources of the perspective-taker (i.e., his or her ability to control simulated spending behavior while tempted by desirable and expensive objects). In a second study, the researchers examined the effect of perceived effort on self-regulation by manipulating whether the waiter or waitress in the first-person story was actually tempted to eat the food. Participants in this study were asked to read either the same first-person story described above (effortful condition) or a new story in which the waiter or waitress did not have the urge to eat because the waiter or waitress was full and the food was not appetizing (not effortful condition).
Results from this second study indicated that vicarious ego-depletion occurred in the condition in which participants took the perspective of the hungry waiter or waitress. Specifically, participants in this condition showed reduced self-regulatory capacity as indexed by performance on a lexical generation task relative to those who took the perspective of the waiter or waitress who did not need to exert effort to avoid eating because the waiter or waitress was not hungry and the food was not appetizing.
Interestingly, participants who merely read about someone using effort to regulate eating actually had enhanced self-regulatory capacity relative to those who read about someone who did not need to exert effort Taken together, these studies suggest that taking the perspective of someone using effort to refrain from some behavior can vicariously deplete the self-regulatory resources of the perspective-taker (Ackerman et al., 2009). This alone is an interesting finding, and adds to the growing body of evidence highlighting the downfalls of perspective taking. However, important issues stemming from research on perspective taking still remain. Perhaps chief among them is whether the vicarious ego-depleting consequences of perspective taking can be observed in other important and relevant self-regulatory contexts, such as the self-regulation of expressions of prejudice and discrimination against heavy people.
So much of what we see about weight control makes salient the struggle it entails, and it is currently unclear whether taking the perspective of someone struggling to regulate his or her behavior around weight control can lead people to experience disruptions in their own self-regulation, and subsequently, whether this disruption attenuates the ability to control expressions of prejudice and discrimination. The extent to which self-regulatory resources are implicated in expressions of prejudice and discrimination should depend on whether self-regulation is needed to control those expressions in the first place. A number of modern dual-process theories argue that two qualitatively distinct cognitive processes operate when making social evaluations (for example, Payne, 2008; Deutsch & Strack, 2006; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). Controlled, or explicit, evaluations involve deliberate and reflective processes.
This type of attitude or evaluation is primarily initiated intentionally and operates within conscious awareness (Moors & De Houwer, 2006; Gawronski & Creighton, 2013). In contrast, automatic, or implicit, evaluations are activated automatically and unconsciously when a person encounters a relevant stimulus. Importantly, implicit attitudes can be immediately activated regardless of whether the perceiver believes those attitudes are accurate, whereas explicit attitudes involve an intentional and deliberate declaration of accuracy that develops over time (Ranganath & Nosek, 2008; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). In her seminal work on automatic and controlled processes in prejudice and stereotyping, Devine (1989) demonstrated that automatic stereotype activation is equally strong and unavoidable for people endorsing both high and low levels of explicit prejudice, and that both high and low-prejudiced individuals produce prejudice-like responses (i.e., stereotype-congruent evaluations of ambiguous behavior) when they are unable to correct their initial automatic attitudes.
However, in a follow-up study, Devine (1989) showed that automatic processes could be inhibited or corrected to align with existing goals when controlled processes were intact. Taken together, Devine (1989) argues that encountering a member of a stigmatized group automatically activates negative implicit attitudes in everyone, but whether those negative implicit attitudes find expression in consciously regulated thought depends on the recruitment of higher-order cognitive processes (i.e., executive control functioning) needed to inhibit the automatic responses. Further, these studies suggest that automatic processes are implicated first in social evaluations, and controlled processes can later be recruited if corrections for the initial automatic evaluations are warranted (e.g., corrections for personal values or social norms). The successful utilization of these controlled corrections, which are effortful and deliberate, should depend on a sufficient amount of self-regulatory resources.
To this end, strong negative implicit (i.e., automatic) attitudes about weight, coupled with self-regulatory depletion, should increase expressions of prejudice and discrimination because of the inability to successfully correct for the social norm or one’s own personal beliefs (i.e., explicit attitude) that it is not appropriate to endorse negative attitudes about, or mistreat overweight individuals. The end result, therefore, should be the expression of the initial (automatic) implicit attitude without the controlled correction for the personal goal or situation. Indeed, research reveals that negative implicit attitudes are more likely to influence behavior, such as discrimination, when self-regulatory capacity is depleted versus intact (Govorun & Payne, 2006). Another factor that should influence the expression of prejudice and discrimination when self-regulatory resources are depleted is one’s motivation to control prejudice.
Plant and Devine (1998) were the first to categorize two distinct motivations to respond without prejudice towards a stigmatized or stereotyped group. They concluded that the dilemma experienced by some people concerns appearing prejudiced to themselves or appearing prejudiced to others. Accordingly, their Motivation to Respond without Prejudice Scale (Plant & Devine, 1998) measures the extent to which controlling expressions of prejudice are internally or externally motivated. An internal motivation to control prejudice refers to one’s personally endorsed and deeply internalized goal to act without prejudice, whereas an external motivation to control prejudice centers primarily around extrinsic concerns about appearing prejudiced to other people and the social sanctions for expressing prejudice (Plant & Devine, 1998).
In other words, people who are internally motivated to control prejudice believe it is inherently wrong to express prejudice towards a specific group, whereas people who are externally motivated to control prejudice largely lack this inherent belief, and work instead to control their prejudice in order to avoid social sanctions or receive social approval. The ability to successfully monitor and inhibit prejudice and discrimination when the motivation to control one’s prejudice is internally driven should not be as difficult (compared to when it is externally driven) when self-regulatory resources are depleted, since this motivation is central to and internalized in the self. However, the ability to inhibit expressions of prejudice and discrimination in a state of depletion when one’s motivation to control prejudice is externally motivated should be difficult since this motivation is not internalized and relies largely on more effortful inhibitions for the situation.
This should mean that when the resources needed for that effortful inhibition are depleted (e.g., by way of vicariously effortful perspective taking), prejudice and discrimination should ensue. Indeed, research demonstrates that the relationship between resource depletion and discrimination depends on one’s motivation to control prejudice, such that those with low internal motivation to control prejudice (and high external motivation to control prejudice) are more likely to discriminate against an out-group member when self-regulatory resources are depleted versus not depleted (Park, Glaser, & Knowles, 2008).
