Seeing isn't believing? Mixed effects of a perspective-getting intervention to improve mentoring relationships for science doctoral students

Science doctoral students can experience negative interactions with faculty mentors and internalize these experiences, potentially leading to self-blame and undermining their research self-efficacy. Helping students perceive these interactions adaptively may protect their research self-efficacy and maintain functional mentoring relationships. We conducted a preregistered, longitudinal field experiment of a novel perspective-getting intervention combined with attribution retraining to help students avoid self-blame and preserve research self-efficacy. Science doctoral students ( n = 155) were randomly assigned to read about mentor perspectives on negative interactions (i.e., Perspective-getting Condition) or about mentoring with no mentor perspective (i.e., control condition). Contrary to our hypotheses, we found no main effects of the intervention on students’ self-blame or research self-efficacy. However, for students with lower preintervention mentorship relationship satisfaction, the intervention preserved research self-efficacy six months later. This study provides evidence that perspective-getting may be protective for students who are most in need of relationship intervention.