Perspective taking in children and adults: Equivalent egocentrism but differential correction

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Abstract

Children generally behave more egocentrically than adults when assessing another's perspective. We argue that this difference does not, however, indicate that adults process information less egocentrically than children, but rather that adults are better able to subsequently correct an initial egocentric interpretation. An experiment tracking participants' eye movements during a referential communication task indicated that children and adults were equally quick to interpret a spoken instruction egocentrically but differed in the speed with which they corrected that interpretation and looked at the intended (i.e., non-egocentric) object. The existing differences in egocentrism between children and adults therefore seems less a product of where people start in their perspective taking process than where they stop, with lingering egocentric biases among adults produced by insufficient correction of an automatic moment of egocentrism. We suggest that this pattern of similarity in automatic, but not controlled, processes may explain between-group differences in a variety of dual-process judgments.

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,

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