Testing a New Perspective-taking Procedure in the Context of Attitudes and Emotional Reactions Towards Ethnic Minorities

There is empirical evidence pointing to how children's ability to take perspective can be improved by training deictic distinctions (Weil, in press), and to its beneficial effects among children within the Autistic Spectrum Disorder (Rehfeldt, 2007). But there are few studies where deictic framing procedures have been used for non-clinical purposes. Previous research out of the behavioral analytical tradition indicates that perspective-taking instructions can induce empathy towards ethnic minorities (Vescio et al., 2003), which suggests that deictic relations might play an important role in the context of human objectification and their counterparts of empathy and compassion. In the present study we will examine the impact of deictic framing in the reduction of stigmatized attitudes towards ethnic minorities and we will discuss some of the underpinnings of developing such a training procedure for normally developed adults.