A simple change in the way people communicate may help explain why some conversations produce connection while others leave people feeling misunderstood. New research by L.L. Hwangpo, L.R. Shepard, L. Nehring and colleagues, published in Communications Psychology, reports that communicating social perspective taking can create common ground and improve how people perceive one another. The findings point to a powerful but often overlooked feature of human interaction: understanding another person’s perspective may matter, but making that understanding visible may matter even more.
Social perspective taking is commonly described as the effort to infer another person’s thoughts, feelings, goals or experiences. It is closely related to empathy, but the concepts are not identical. Empathy often emphasizes sharing or responding to another person’s emotional state, whereas perspective taking involves constructing a mental model of how the other person sees a situation. That model may include what the person knows, what they value, what they fear and why they interpret events differently. The new study focuses on the communication of that process—how people express that they are actively considering another person’s point of view.
This distinction is technically important because perspective taking can remain entirely private. A person may carefully consider a partner’s concerns but fail to communicate that effort. To the partner, the internal act may therefore be invisible. The research suggests that when people explicitly communicate their perspective-taking process, they give others evidence that their experiences have been noticed and interpreted seriously. Such communication can help transform an uncertain interaction into one in which both individuals feel that they occupy a shared psychological space.
That shared space is known as common ground. In communication science, common ground refers to information, assumptions, beliefs or interpretations that participants recognize as mutually understood. It is not necessarily complete agreement. Two people can disagree about a political issue, a decision or the meaning of an event while still sharing common ground about what each person believes and why. By communicating perspective taking, people may reduce uncertainty about one another’s mental states and make the boundaries of agreement and disagreement easier to navigate.
The mechanism behind the effect may involve several layers of social cognition. First, explicit perspective-taking statements can act as signals of attention. They indicate that the speaker is not responding only to the surface content of a message but is also considering the social and emotional context behind it. Second, they may support mental-state accuracy by encouraging people to clarify whether their interpretation is correct. Third, they can reduce the need for defensive guessing. When individuals feel misread, they often spend conversational effort correcting assumptions rather than discussing the underlying issue. A clear acknowledgment of perspective may interrupt that cycle.
The study’s central contribution is its focus on communication as a bridge between private understanding and shared understanding. Social cognition is frequently studied as an internal process: researchers ask whether people can accurately infer what someone else thinks or feels. But relationships depend not only on what one person understands internally. They also depend on whether the other person can detect that understanding. In this sense, perspective taking becomes relationally effective when it is translated into language or other communicative behavior that the target can recognize.
The reported improvement in relational perceptions is especially relevant because people evaluate relationships through repeated moments of interpretation. They form impressions about whether another person is respectful, attentive, trustworthy and willing to understand them. A single conversation may not determine the future of a relationship, but small signals accumulate. Communicating perspective taking may therefore influence what psychologists call relational judgments—evaluations of the quality, warmth or responsiveness of an interaction. Even when a disagreement remains unresolved, feeling understood can change how the disagreement is remembered and how future conversations begin.
The findings also have immediate relevance to the online environments where misunderstandings spread rapidly. Text messages, comment sections and social platforms remove many cues that normally help people interpret intention, including tone of voice, facial expression and timing. In these settings, a short statement that acknowledges another person’s viewpoint may provide crucial context. Instead of responding only with a counterargument, a communicator might identify what the other person is concerned about and explain how that concern shapes their position. Such language does not guarantee agreement, but it can establish a recognizable foundation for dialogue before disagreement becomes personal.
The research may also help explain why certain messages become unusually shareable or emotionally powerful. Viral communication is often associated with novelty, outrage or surprise, yet messages that make people feel seen can travel widely for a different reason. They provide a compact model of how social understanding should work. A statement that accurately captures another person’s perspective can be perceived as validating, generous or intellectually honest, even by observers who do not share the underlying opinion. In an era of polarized discussion, the ability to communicate understanding without surrendering one’s own position may be one of the most valuable forms of social influence.
At the same time, perspective-taking language is not automatically beneficial. If it is inaccurate, exaggerated or used strategically without genuine attention, it can sound patronizing or manipulative. The value of the communication depends on whether the interpretation is sufficiently faithful to the other person’s experience and whether the speaker remains open to correction. The study’s broader implication is therefore not that people should perform understanding as a conversational technique, but that relationships improve when people make their attempts to understand observable, specific and revisable.
The work also raises questions for education, healthcare, management and conflict resolution. Teachers may strengthen classroom relationships by acknowledging how students are approaching a difficult task rather than responding only to the final answer. Clinicians may improve trust by showing that they understand the practical and emotional consequences of a patient’s situation. Managers may prevent unnecessary conflict by recognizing how a policy appears from an employee’s position before explaining the organizational rationale. In each case, the crucial step is not simply imagining another perspective, but communicating that perspective in a way the other person can evaluate.
More broadly, the findings place common ground at the center of a growing scientific conversation about communication and social connection. Human relationships are built through inferences about invisible mental states, and those inferences are vulnerable to error. Communicated perspective taking offers a way to make some of that invisible reasoning visible. By signaling attention, inviting correction and clarifying what has been understood, it may help people move from parallel conversations toward genuinely shared meaning. The message is strikingly practical: in many interactions, the difference between being misunderstood and being recognized may begin with saying not only what one thinks, but what one believes the other person is experiencing.
Subject of Research: Communicating social perspective taking, the formation of common ground, and relational perceptions.
Article Title: Communicating social perspective taking creates common ground and improves relational perceptions
Article References: Hwangpo, L.L., Shepard, L.R., Nehring, L. et al. “Communicating social perspective taking creates common ground and improves relational perceptions.” Communications Psychology (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-026-00520-w
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1038/s44271-026-00520-w
Keywords: social perspective taking, common ground, communication, social cognition, relationships, empathy, interpersonal perception, relational communication, psychology
