The Cognitive Mechanism Of Taking Group’s Perspective

Since the surroundings seen by others during social interaction is usually different from what the self sees,it is important to understand the information from the perspective of others.A large number of studies had shown that since the early childhood,people already have the ability to taking other’s perspective,and the process of perspective taking is suggested to be atomatic.However,in previous studies,an isolated person was widely emphasized as the computed entity in visual perspective taking,and the groups are everywhere,hence people also need to engage in social interactions with groups.When interacting with different groups,it is also necessary to be able to perceive the problem from the group’s perspective.Neverthless,few studies have explored whether and how people taking group’s perspective from a group level.In view of the fact that either a group or an individual can be seen as a cognitive unit,and taking perspective from the individual’s level can be automatic,this study hypothesized that people can automatically take group’s perspective.Based on the adapted version of a visual perspective-taking task,this study explored whether people would automatically take group’s perspective from the group level,through five experiments.By modifying the classic visual perspective-taking task,Experiment 1increased the number of avatars to four avatars,and investigated whether people automatically take perspective from the group of four avatars.Since Experiment 1 only showed a crowd of people,the computed group’s perspective may have been simply a result of the sum of the individuals’ perspectives,without considering what the crowd saw at the level of a social group.In this case,Experiment 2 further manipulated group entitativity(i.e.,the degree of perceiving a crowd of persons as a unified social group),and tested whether the group entitativity modulates the computation of what the crowd sees,that is,whether automatically taking group’s perspective depends on the group’s entitativity.Specifically,Experiment 2a manipulated the group entitativity by replaying language labels.In order to further verify the generality of conclusion of Experiment 2a,Experiment 2b manipulated the group entitativity by presenting visual information,in which the movement synchronization of group members in the animation was manipulated.Since the overall group’s perspective must be based on some individuals’ perspectives,the role of group entitativity in computing group’s perspecitve in Experiment 2 may be explained by the processing of some individual perspectives rather than the processing of the overall group perspective.In order to rule out this alternative,Experiment 3 further investigated whether the group entitativity affects the computation of taking perspective of group members at the individual level.The main results are as follows:(1)People only automatically took group’s perspective when the computed entity consists of social individuals,and it cannot be explained by the physical orientation of head.(2)Group entitativity influenced the automatic computation of taking group’s perspective,and only when the group was perceived as an unified entity(i.e.,high group entitativity),people automatically take group’s perspective.(3)Taking group member’s perspective at the individual level was not modulated by the group entitativity.Hence,what we can conclude is that people can automatically take group’s perspective at the group level.This finding is not only helpful for understanding the processing mechanism about how people compute what the group sees,but also have an important role in understanding the relationship between individual’s mind and group’s mind.Further,this research adapted the classical visual perspective-taking task to a suitable task for exploring the questions about computing group’s perspective,and it can provide a possible method for furture studies on taking group’s perspective.