Evaluation of a Novel Medical Perspective-Taking Intervention

Women are significantly more likely than men to have physicians dismiss their symptoms as psychosomatic (Zhang et al., 2021) or overdramatic (Schäfer et al., 2016). This often results in women receiving lower treatment quality. The magnitude of gender treatment disparities correlates with the strength of physicians’ gender stereotype endorsement (Lloyd et al., 2020), stressing the importance of finding bias-reduction interventions that are practical to implement within clinical settings. The present work examined the ability of a novel perspective-taking intervention to increase trust in and improve treatment quality. Affective and cognitive versions of the perspective-taking intervention were developed and tested to expand knowledge on the relative effects of these two pathways for inducing perspective-taking on consequential outcomes like trust in patient testimonies and treatment quality. Across two studies, there was no effect of the intervention condition on trust in patient symptom testimony or treatment quality, nor were there any interactions with patient gender. Examination of the control condition indicates that these null effects may be due to the control condition’s high trust and low gender bias limiting the intervention’s ability to cause meaningful changes. Additionally, while there were no differences between the affective or cognitive intervention conditions, continuous measures of affective and cognitive perspective-taking did exhibit distinct correlational patterns. While affective perspective-taking did not correlate with trust or treatment quality, cognitive perspective-taking positively correlated with both, providing preliminary evidence for cognitive perspective-taking’s beneficial effects on physician-patient interactions. Furthermore, by demonstrating that affective and cognitive perspective-taking have unique effects, this work contributes to our understanding of how to best induce perspective-taking to achieve positive change in interpersonal interactions.

Author dc:creator

• Louis Ingram (24399404)

• Psychology
• Social

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.25417/uic.32993837.v1

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:figshare.com:article/32993837