Blame Through My Eyes: How First-Person Perspective Shapes Social Attention and Attribution in Harmful Interactions

Background Deficits in social cognition, such as reduced attention to faces and a tendency toward rigid, hostile attributions, can undermine the development of intimate relationships. Prior eye-tracking research using a third-person perspective revealed that, compared to community adults, incarcerated violent offenders oriented less to faces and showed a stronger correlation between perceived intentionality and assigned blame (Intentionality/Blame isomorphism), a metric of attributional inflexibility. The present study investigated how adopting an immersive first-person victim perspective affects both I/B isomorphism and facial attention. Methods A total of 184 adults participated in our study, including 119 community members (60 female, 59 male) and 65 incarcerated violent offenders (32 female, 33 male). Each person completed an eye-tracking task in which they imagined themselves as the recipients of harm. Independent-samples t-tests were used to compare group differences in I/B isomorphism and face dwell time, and Pearson's correlations were used to examine the relationships between variables. Results Contrary to findings from third-person studies, incarcerated violent offenders exhibited significantly lower I/B isomorphism than community adults under a first-person perspective. Furthermore, no significant differences in face dwell time were observed between these two groups. Conclusions These results suggest that adopting a victim's perspective may disrupt rigid attributional patterns and normalize attention to social cues. This highlights the potential of targeted perspective-taking interventions to enhance cognitive flexibility and foster skills essential for building intimacy.