Perspective Taking and Information Use during Social Inference

University Of California-Davis, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

Fundamental to a smoothly functioning society is the ability for individuals to interact effectively with others, even those who have different viewpoints from their own. To that end, perspective taking -- the capacity to reason about the mental states of other people -- is essential for effective communication and meaningful social interaction. But lacking direct access into others' minds, people often use intuitive strategies to make inferences about others' thoughts, feelings, and preferences. Two such strategies are using one's own mental states (often called projection) and using cultural expectancies about what particular social groups are generally like (often called stereotyping). The proposed research will investigate (1) how people's active perspective-taking efforts affect their use of projection and stereotyping during social inference, (2) whether and how their use of these strategies differs depending on whose mental states they are inferring (e.g., similar vs. dissimilar others), and (3) multiple downstream behavioral implications of using these different strategies (e.g., decisions about whether to approach vs. avoid individuals from particular groups). By illuminating how people think about the mental states of others who vary on the fundamental interpersonal dimensions of similarity and familiarity (e.g., political rivals, romantic partners, teammates, adversaries in a negotiation, members of racial outgroups), this work promises not only to advance theory development in psychology and cognitive science but also to inform researchers, practitioners, and others interested in how people infer mental states in political, business, educational, and other applied interpersonal contexts. Past research indicates that when people make social inferences, their default tendencies are to use projection more than stereotyping when making inferences about others who are similar to them, whereas this pattern reverses for targets who are dissimilar. However, most of this previous research on active perspective-taking efforts examined inferences about unknown others or others perceived as different from the self. Little is known about how perspective taking affects these inference processes when the targets are well-known others or others perceived as similar to the self. Andrew Todd (University of Iowa) proposes a series of experiments testing predictions derived from the flexible self-application hypothesis, the novel hypothesis that perspective taking triggers flexible use of social information for making inferences, allowing for an understanding of both self-other similarities and differences. One series of experiments will focus on how perspective taking affects projection and stereotyping when making inferences about others who are either similar to or different from the self, for instance, members of a social in-group versus out-group. These experiments will also test whether this differential strategy use predicts corresponding changes in behavior toward these individuals and other members of their social groups. A second set of experiments will focus on how perspective taking affects projection during social inference with others who vary in terms of their similarity and their familiarity, such as friends versus strangers. By better understanding social inference processes, this research can ultimately help reduce the behavioral gulfs between individuals who differ.