Perspective taking in children and adults: Equivalent egocentrism but differential correction
Section snippets
Participants
Children (13 males and 20 females, mean age=6.2 years, median age=5.0 years, range=4–12 years)
Results
We predicted that adults would behave less egocentrically than children—making fewer egocentric reaching errors—but that this difference would emerge only in later stages of information processing. We predicted that adults and children would not differ in their speed to initially interpret an instruction egocentrically, but would differ in their subsequent speed to adjust or correct that interpretation.
Discussion
When communicating with others, Piaget argued, it is as if children are “only talking to themselves” (1959, pp. 38). Most adults are better conversationalists because they can recognize that their own perceptions may differ from another's, and can tailor their interactions accordingly. Results from the current study suggest, however, that adults and children may differ less in their egocentric tendencies than it might initially appear. Both adults and children quickly and automatically
Acknowledgements
This research was partially funded by NSF Grant SES-0241544 and facilitated by a Peter Wall Visiting Junior Scholar appointment awarded to Epley, and partially funded by PHS Grant R01 MH49685-06A1 awarded to Keysar. We would like to thank Celeste Beck for assistance conducting the experiment, Jerri Robinson and the staff at the Boston Children's Museum for generously providing their facilities for data collection, Michael Spivey for helpful suggestions on this research, and Thomas Gilovich,
References (52)
The control of eye fixation by the meaning of spoken language. A new methodology for the real-time investigation of speech perception, memory, and language processing
Cognitive Psychology
(1974)- et al.
Social interaction and the development of definite descriptions
Cognition
(1982) - et al.
“I knew it would happen”—remembered probabilities of once-future things
Organizational Behavior and Human Performance
(1975) - et al.
The future is now: Temporal correction in affective forecasting
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
(2002) The illusory transparency of intention: Linguistic perspective taking in text
Cognitive Psychology
(1994)- et al.
Limits on theory of mind use in adults
Cognition
(2003) - et al.
The false consensus effect: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
(1977) - et al.
Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception
Cognition
(1983) - et al.
Effects of situation familiarity and incentives on use of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic for probability assessment
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
(1989) Egocentric standards of conduct evaluation
Basic and Applied Social Psychology
(1993)
Need for cognition and the correspondence bias
Social Cognition
Sex differences in jealousy: Evolutionary mechanism or artifact of measurement?
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Ambiguity and self-evaluation: The role of idiosyncratic trait definitions in self-serving assessments of ability
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Egocentrism in adolescence
Child Development
Empathy neglect: Reconciling the spotlight effect and correspondence bias
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
The development of children's knowledge about the appearance-reality distinction
American Psychologist
Perspectives on perspective taking
Thinking lightly about others: Automatic components of the social inference process
Inferential correction
The momentary realist
Psychological Science
The correspondence bias
Psychological Bulletin
The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one's own actions and appearance
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
The illusion of transparency: Biased assessments of others' ability to read our emotional states
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Why the child's theory of mind really is a theory
Mind and Language
Cited by (367)
Perspective taking reduces the correspondence bias: A systematically replication of Hooper et al. (2015)
2024, Journal of Contextual Behavioral ScienceWhen brokers don't broker: Mitigating referral aversion in third-party help exchange
2024, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision ProcessesFive-year-olds’ sensitivity to knowledge discrepancies about object identity during online language comprehension
2023, Journal of Experimental Child PsychologyIncreased interference from conflicting perspectives and gender differences: A longitudinal study during adolescence
2023, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology