Perspective-Taking

Perspective-Taking is the cognitive-empathy subscale of Davis's (1983) Interpersonal Reactivity Index: the tendency to spontaneously adopt the psychological point of view of others in everyday life. The seven items administered here are the verbatim subscale as hosted in the public-domain IPIP catalog.

Responses are coded 1–5 on this platform versus the published 0–4 coding, so the reference mean in the norms section is shifted by exactly +7 with the standard deviation unchanged, as the norms note documents.

“I sometimes find it difficult to see things from the "other guy's" point of view.”

Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.

Item responses are summed within each scale (reverse-keyed items recoded first) and expressed as a population percentile against the cited reference sample, with a reliability-based confidence range where α is published.

Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113–126 — U.S. college student validation sample (N = 1,161; 579 male, 582 female), verbatim 7-item Perspective-Taking subscale. Published sex-stratified figures: males M = 16.78, SD = 4.72; females M = 17.96, SD = 4.85 (0–4 response coding, sum 0–28). This site administers the identical items and anchors coded 1–5 (sum 7–35), so the reference mean is shifted by exactly +7; an additive shift leaves the SD unchanged. The combined reference values are pooled exactly from the published sex-stratified figures (M = 24.37, SD = 4.82 on the 7–35 metric). The confidence range uses the standard error of measurement (SEM = SD·√(1−α)) from the published per-subscale standardized Cronbach’s α (Davis, 1980; males .71, females .75 — the lower bound is used for the widest, most conservative range).

Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113–126. Items hosted at ipip.ori.org.