The Perspective Gap
If overcoming the responsibility bias gives us a clearer understanding of others’ contributions, what is
it that allows us to offer support to colleagues in collaborations, where emotions can run high and
people often take criticism personally? Sharing credit is only one piece of successful group work.
Meyer’s related abilities to console fellow writers when their work was being cut, and to create a
psychologically safe environment, are a hallmark of another important step that givers take in
collaboration: seeing beyond the perspective gap.
In an experiment led by Northwestern University psychologist Loran Nordgren, people predicted
how painful it would be to sit in a freezing room for five hours. They made their predictions under
two different conditions: warm and cold. When the warm group estimated how much pain they would
experience in the freezing room, they had an arm in a bucket of warm water. The cold group also
made their judgments with an arm in a bucket, but it was filled with ice water. Which group would
expect to feel the most pain in the freezing room?
As you probably guessed, it was the cold group. People anticipated that the freezing room would
be 14 percent more painful when they had their arm in a bucket of ice water than a bucket of warm
water. After literally feeling the cold for a minute, they knew several hours would be awful. But there
was a third group of people who experienced cold under different circumstances. They stuck an arm
in a bucket of ice water, but then took the arm out and filled out a separate questionnaire. After ten
minutes had passed, they estimated how painful the freezing room would be.
Their predictions should have resembled the cold group’s, having felt the freezing temperature
just ten minutes earlier, but they didn’t. They were identical to the warm group. Even though they had
felt the cold ten minutes earlier, once they weren’t cold anymore, they could no longer imagine it.
This is a perspective gap: when we’re not experiencing a psychologically or physically intense state,
we dramatically underestimate how much it will affect us. For instance, evidence shows that
physicians consistently think their patients are feeling less pain than they actually are. Without being
in a state of pain themselves, physicians can’t fully realize what it’s like to be in that state.
In a San Francisco hospital, a respected oncologist was concerned about a patient. “He’s not as
mentally clear as he was yesterday.” The patient was old, and he had advanced metastatic cancer. The
oncologist decided to order a spinal tap to see what was wrong, in the hopes of prolonging the
patient’s life. “Maybe he has an infection—meningitis, a brain abscess—something treatable.”
The neurologist on call, Robert Burton, had his doubts. The patient’s prognosis was grim, and the
spinal tap would be extremely painful. But the oncologist was not ready to throw in the towel. When
Burton entered the room with the spinal tap tray, the patient’s family protested. “Please, no more,”
they said together. The patient—too frail to speak from a terminal illness—nodded, declining the
spinal tap. Burton paged the oncologist and explained the family’s wishes to avoid the spinal tap, but
the oncologist was not ready to give up. Finally, the patient’s wife grabbed Burton’s arm, begging him
for support in refusing the oncologist’s plan to do the spinal tap. “It’s not what we want,” the wife
pleaded. The oncologist was still determined to save the patient. He explained why the spinal tap was
essential, and eventually, the family and patient gave in.
Burton performed the spinal tap, which was challenging to carry out and quite painful for the
patient. The patient developed a pounding headache, fell into a coma and died three days later due to