Kristi Costabile, associate professor in psychology, and Stephanie Madon, professor in psychology, were recently awarded a $30,000 Increasing Open Inquiry on College Campuses Research Grant by Heterodox Academy for their project Harnessing the Power of Narrative to Improve Perspective-taking and Empathy.
This highly selective grant program funded five intervention studies for the coming academic year. All five studies seek to improve campus climate by increasing college students’ empathy and perspective-taking, intellectual humility, curiosity, or open-minded cognition, or decreasing their self-censorship. The interventions resulting from the funded projects will become part of a publicly available toolkit following the 2022 academic year.
Kristi Costabile and Stephanie Madon’s program of social cognition research suggests that narrative cognition reduces egocentric tendencies and encourages empathy for others. Their research project will test the efficacy of an online intervention in which perspective-taking and empathy skills are enhanced through daily storytelling of everyday experiences. The researchers propose that regular practice of telling stories will lead to the development of a narrative cognition mindset that, in turn, will result in less biased social judgments.
Congratulations to Kristi and Stephanie!
Harnessing the Power of Narrative to Improve Perspective-taking and Empathy is supported in full by Heterodox Academy. The Increasing Open Inquiry on College Campuses Grant is made possible in full through the support of the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in Harnessing the Power of Narratives do not necessarily reflect the views of Heterodox Academy and/or the John Templeton Foundation.