Perspective-taking and meaning-making among public policy professionals experiencing an immersive poverty narrative

Policymakers make consequential decisions about poverty interventions yet often attribute people’s financial hardship to individual failings rather than structural barriers, creating persistent empathy gaps. This qualitative field study examines how public policy professionals engage in perspective-taking and meaning-making when experiencing an immersive poverty narrative. First, nine iterative participatory design activities with lived-experience experts, financial specialists, and citizen groups produced a virtual reality poverty-related simulation guiding users through impossible trade-offs, bureaucratic complexity, and immediate social consequences. Next, five focus groups with Dutch public policy professionals ( N = 47) were conducted, in which participants experienced the simulation before engaging in discussion, with follow-up surveys five weeks later ( n = 15). Thematic analysis revealed that experiencing constraints within the narrative enabled perspective transformation through two processes. An accumulation of pressures depleted the analytical processing capacity that professionals typically use to maintain interpretive distance from client experiences. When educated professionals could not navigate welfare forms despite their competence, explanations based on individual responsibility lost credibility and participants shifted to structural explanations through experiencing systemic barriers. Simultaneously, limited access to professional problem-solving tools exposed how expertise functions as an interpretive barrier to understanding client realities. These findings extend narrative transportation theory by demonstrating that emotional engagement alone proves insufficient for attribution change in expert populations having analytical frameworks that enable cognitive distancing. Additionally, the findings contribute to transformative learning theory by showing how the strategic limitation of individuals’ expertise makes their professional assumptions visible for critical examination. The initial participatory design process demonstrates how collaborative narrative construction addresses ethical concerns while maintaining psychological authenticity.