Automatic Perspective Taking And Its Function In Social Interaction

Perspective taking refers to the ability of observing the world through the eyes of others.It is one of the foundations of human’s social cognition,and plays an important role in social interaction.Perspective taking has been demonstrated as a rapid and automatic cognitive process;however,the related experiments were usually conducted in a laboratory situation that was isolated from social interaction.Taking the function of perspective into consideration,different information of other’s perspective would be perceived when facing different situations,thus the occurance and result of perspective taking should vary accordingly.That is,perspective taking is a process which depends on the environment and situation;however previous research neglected its connection to the context.The current research puts perspective taking in the context of social interections,investigates how perspective taking functions in different social situations.Through four experiments,the author expolred how social background impact perspective taking and perspective taking’s functions in social interaction.In cooperation or competetion situations,two participants were asked to fulfill their recognition tasks(e.g.,color-reporting task or mental-rotation task)to letters presented on a tablet PC laying on a table simultaneously.Because of their different point of view,the same letter appear with different difficulty of reading,and one of the participant could decide which letter should be recognized respectively by two participants.If the choicer take the other one’s perspective,then they could increase or decrease the other one’s task difficulty by leaving the letter that face to(thus easy to read)or back to(thus hard to read)the other participant.Besides,a field experiment was also conducted to test the findings of the current research with high ecological validity.The experiments majorly obtained the following results:(1)In the cooperation situtation,participants took their partner’s perspective automatically,and achieved better performance by decreasing the partner’s task difficulty.(2)In the competetion situation,although perspective taking also occured,but it did not affect participants’ stratege of competition.(3)In the field experiment,human would take other’s perspective and adjust their behavior accordingly when helping.In summary,perspective taking is a process that occurs not only automatically,but also adaptively.It helps us form the representation of others’ perspective rapidly,and cooperate with each other more effectively.