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 pre-registered, 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 ( Educational Relevance and Implications Statement: Effective mentoring relationships are fundamental for promoting the success of doctoral students in science, yet not all mentoring relationships are high quality. This study assessed the effectiveness of a brief perspective-getting intervention (where students are given the perspective of what it is like to be a research mentor) that aimed to protect science doctoral students from blaming themselves for negative interactions with faculty mentors and maintain their research self-efficacy. Results showed that on average across all students, the intervention did not affect students' self-blame for negative interactions or their research self-efficacy. However, the intervention did help students with less satisfying mentoring relationships maintain their self-efficacy. Thus, perspective-getting shows some promise for protecting science doctoral students from harm that can be caused by negative interactions with faculty mentors.