Perspective-Taking Designer Agent Skill

Design structured perspective-taking activities with anti-projection guardrails.

Context cost
4.5k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
1 file · 18.2 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
not declarednone named by its author
Last change
—v1.0
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Design structured perspective-taking activities with anti-projection guardrails. Develops genuine understanding of complexity across history, social sciences, and literature — not performed empathy.

What this skill changes about the agent has not been set out here as a list. Its SKILL.md, shown below, says it in the author’s own words.

anti-projectiondiscussiondocumentationempathyhistorical-thinkinginquiryperspective-takingsocial-perspective

The skill itself

A skill is instructions the model reads, so you can see what you are getting: below is the start of its SKILL.md. The front matter loads with every session, the body loads when the skill triggers, and the whole file comes with the install.

SKILL.md18.2 kB · preview
--- # AGENT SKILLS STANDARD FIELDS (v2) name: perspective-taking-designer disable-model-invocation: false user-invocable: true effort: medium # EXISTING FIELDS skill_id: "questioning-discussion/perspective-taking-designer" skill_name: "Perspective-Taking Designer" domain: "questioning-discussion" version: "1.0" evidence_strength: "moderate" evidence_sources: - "Gehlbach (2004, 2012) — Social perspective-taking in educational settings" - "Gehlbach & Brinkworth (2012) — The social perspective taking process" - "Batson (2009) — These things called empathy: eight related but distinct phenomena" - "Galinsky, Ku & Wang (2005) — Perspective-taking and self-other merging" - "Selman (1980) — The growth of interpersonal understanding (developmental stages of perspective-taking)" - "Endacott & Brooks (2013) — Historical empathy in the social studies classroom" input_schema: required: - field: "subject_context" type: "string" - field: "learning_goal" type: "string" optional: - field: "age_range" type: "string" - field: "sensitivity_notes" type: "string" - field: "prior_knowledge" type: "string" output_schema: type: "object" fields: - field: "activity_sequence" type: "object" - field: "anti_projection_guardrails" type: "array" - field: "assessment_criteria" type: "array" - field: "safety_check" type: "object" - field: "developmental_calibration" type: "string" chains_well_with: - "dialogic-teaching-move-generator" - "discussion-protocol-selector" - "ladder-of-inference-reflection" - "mental-model-mapper" - "socratic-questioning-sequence-generator" teacher_time: "5-10 minutes" tags: ["perspective-taking", "empathy", "historical-thinking", "social-perspective", "anti-projection", "discussion", "inquiry"] ---
69# Perspective-Taking Designer
70
71## What This Skill Does
72
73Helps teachers design learning activities that develop genuine perspective-taking — the ability to understand how other people think, feel, and experience situations from within their own context and constraints. It is useful across many domains: history (understanding actors with different worldviews), social sciences (stakeholder analysis), literature (character motivation), conflict resolution, design thinking, and systems work.
74
75The central challenge this skill addresses: genuine perspective-taking requires intellectual humility and tolerance of ambiguity. It is not imagining what we would feel in someone else's situation — that is projection. It is investigating how someone actually understood their situation given their context, knowledge, values, and constraints. These are very different cognitive activities, and the difference matters for both epistemic quality and ethical safety.
76
77Assessment should focus on quality of reasoning (what evidence did students use? did they acknowledge complexity? did they express appropriate uncertainty?) not on emotional performance (how much empathy did students display?).
78
79## Evidence Foundation
80
81Gehlbach's research on social perspective-taking in educational settings distinguishes it as a learnable process, not a fixed trait. His work with Brinkworth identifies the components: noticing that perspectives differ, deciding to consider another's perspective, imagining theirs, and checking the inference. Batson's taxonomy of eight related-but-distinct empathy phenomena is critical context: imagining what another feels (affect-matching) is different from imagining what they think (cognitive perspective-taking), and both are different from personal distress at another's situation. Galinsky and colleagues show that perspective-taking can improve cooperation but also risks self-other merging — importing one's own values into another's perspective. Selman's developmental stages establish that younger students can recognise others have different views; adolescents can hold multiple perspectives simultaneously and recognise that perspectives are shaped by position, power, and experience. Endacott and Brooks provide the historical empathy framework that distinguishes contextualisation (genuine historical thinking) from affective empathy (emotional identification), arguing that the former is educationally sound and the latter is epistemically problematic in historical contexts.
82
83## Input Schema
84
85Required:
86- **Subject context:** The subject area and specific topic. Include the year level and describe the historical moment, stakeholder situation, or text being examined.
87- **Learning goal:** What perspective-taking should accomplish in this context. This shapes what counts as success.
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md2,414 words
Files1
Licencenot declared
Why you can read it

Nothing in a skill executes. The client loads the text and the model follows it, so a skill can be audited the way a runbook is — by reading it.

What it costs in context

Skills are not billed by the call. They are paid for in context: every token the instructions occupy is a token your code, your diff and your conversation cannot use. Here is what this one takes and when it takes it.

≈810
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
3,740
on trigger
The instruction body, read only when the skill fires.
2.3%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 23% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

4.5k tokens, estimated from the bundle at four bytes to the token, held for the rest of the session once it triggers. Heavy. Teams tend to install this one per project rather than globally, and load it only when the job comes up.

Servers bill, skills cost

A server charges by the month. A skill charges once per session, in context, and then keeps charging it for as long as the session lives.

Before and after

The same question, put to the same model twice: once as it comes, and once with these instructions loaded.

No worked example has been published for this skill yet.

The procedure it runs

The procedure has not been set out here step by step. It is in the body of its SKILL.md: the start of it is shown above, and the whole file comes with the install.

Prose, not code

These steps are written for a model to follow, not executed by a runtime. It can still be told to skip one, and it will say so when it does.

Servers it uses

None. This skill calls no MCP servers at all.

Everything it needs is in the instructions, so it works in a project with nothing connected — the model reads the file and changes how it works with what it can already reach.

Its SKILL.md does not declare which tools it asks the agent for, so what it touches is whatever the instructions themselves ask for — read them before you install it.

What it asks for
Writes filesnot declared
Network accessnot declared

This SKILL.md carries no allowed-tools line, so neither is declared. A skill grants no permissions of its own — it can only ask for tools your client already has.

What it will not do

Every skill is narrow, and the useful ones say where they stop. These are the jobs this one is the wrong tool for.

What this skill is not for has not been published here. Nothing is implied by that: it is a section the author has not filled in.

What is in the bundle

1 file, 18.2 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md18.2 kB
What is not in it

No dependencies and nothing executable: a skill is text the agent reads, so the bundle is 1 file you can review in full before installing.

Install

Installing copies the bundle into your project. Nothing runs at install time — the files sit on disk until the model reads them.

# Perspective-Taking Designer · 4.5k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/perspective-taking-designer/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/perspective-taking-designer" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/perspective-taking-designer ] || { mv .claude/skills/perspective-taking-designer "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/perspective-taking-designer" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/perspective-taking-designer"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add garethmanning/perspective-taking-designer

Windows PowerShell says 'running scripts is disabled on this system'? Run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned once, or type npx.cmd instead of npx (codex.cmd, gemini.cmd, grok.cmd likewise). PowerShell 7 needs neither. Writes to .claude/skills/perspective-taking-designer/ in the current project. For every project instead, run mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/perspective-taking-designer/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/perspective-taking-designer" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/perspective-taking-designer ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/perspective-taking-designer "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/perspective-taking-designer" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/perspective-taking-designer" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/perspective-taking-designer/ only after the download succeeds, so files left there by another skill of the same name, or by an older release, do not mix in. A copy already there is moved aside, not deleted, and the line prints where.

Which clients pick it up on their own

A skill is a folder of text. Most of these read a skills folder and pick it up without being told; the rest take the same folder another way — an upload in the app, a parameter on an API call — and then choose it by its description just the same.

Claude Code.claude/skills/
Claude DesktopCustomize › Skills
ChatGPTSkills › Create › Upload
Cursor.cursor/skills/
VS Code.github/skills/
Codex CLI.agents/skills/
Gemini CLI.gemini/skills/
Grok Build.grok/skills/
Microsoft CopilotSkills › Upload a skill
PerplexityComputer › Skills › Upload a skill
DeepSeek Harness.dsh/skills/
Zed.agents/skills/
Devin Desktop.devin/skills/
Windsurf (legacy).windsurf/skills/
OpenAI Agents SDKInstructions or sandbox Skills
HTTP / APIa request parameter
This release
Version1.0
Publishedno release date on file
PriceFree
Referencegarethmanning/perspective-taking-designer

Versions

v1.0 is what is on the shelf; no release here carries a date. Instructions change more often than APIs do — a skill can be rewritten entirely without anything it depends on moving.

v1.0
  • No earlier releases have been published to the marketplace.
Pinning

The install command always fetches the release that is current the day you run it — v1.0 today — and cannot ask for an earlier one. The copy on your disk does not change until you run it again.

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