Perspectives Questionnaire: Measuring propensities to take viewpoints of agent or recipient

This article introduces the Perspectives Questionnaire (PQ), a self-rated measure of propensities to take agent and recipient perspectives in social cognition. Each social interaction involves two separate perspectives – that of an agent (a person who performs an action) and that of a recipient (a person at whom the action is directed and who experiences its effects). Studies with six samples (N = 2037) showed that PQ has a stable, two-factorial structure in two languages (English and Polish) and consists of the agent and recipient subscales. Present studies show both convergent and discriminant validity of PQ. The agent perspective is positively related to agentic orientation and values, the promotion focus and acting for self-interest, as well as with personality traits conducive to action, like conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness to experience. The recipient perspective is related to communal orientation and values and it correlates with personality traits conducive to experiencing, like neuroticism, empathic concern and distress. A Polish national sample data showed that high scores in the agent scale are accompanied by higher life achievements both objective (income, prestige, education) and subjective (life-satisfaction, feelings of success, self-esteem, feelings of control).