When perspective-taking fails to inhibit customer aggression toward service employees

The current research proposed boundary conditions for the inhibiting effect of perspective-taking on customer aggression toward service employees. In Study 1, we recruited participants (N = 241) from Prolific and conducted an online survey. The results showed that the inhibiting role of perspective-taking appeared among people with low perceived economic mobility (PEM) but disappeared among those with high PEM. In Study 2, we recruited people (N = 241) from MTurk and tested whether self-other referent priming influences the aforementioned effect by conducting an online experiment randomly assigning participants to either a self- or other-referent priming condition. The results revealed that perspective-taking inhibited customer aggression more among people with low (vs. high) PEM in the self-referent priming condition, but in the other-referent priming condition, the inhibiting effect appeared more among people with high (vs. low) PEM. The current research provides practical implications to help service firms to inhibit customer aggression.