Perspective Taking

Developing Perspective Taking

Perspective taking is not a skill with which humans are born, but instead must develop over time. Young children, for instance, tend to be profoundly egocentric and do not distinguish between what they know and what others know, do not recognize [Page 1229]the difference between the way an object may appear to them and the way it really is, and do not provide enough contextual information in conversation to identify ambiguous referents. By roughly the age of 5, most children have developed the ability to distinguish between themselves and others, and they have developed the ability to reason about another person's thoughts, feelings, and other mental states as being distinct from their own. Perspective taking develops out of these two abilities. The psychological disorder of autism (and its less severe version, Asberger's Syndrome; proper spelling is Asperger, not Asperger's) represents a breakdown in the development of perspective taking.

Variability in Process and Content

The process by which people adopt another's perspective can include both reflexive (or automatic) and deliberate (or controlled) components. Because people perceive the world through their own senses and interpret it through their own brains, people tend to use their own perspective as a guide for understanding others' beliefs. Although adults have developed the ability to overcome egocen-trism when reasoning about others' thoughts to accommodate differences between themselves and others, it does not appear that they entirely outgrow their tendency to begin with an egocentric default. The most common bias observed when people reason about others' thoughts is therefore egocentric bias, whereby people overestimate the extent to which others' perceptions are similar to their own. In communication, for instance, people tend to overestimate the extent to which their intentions are clear to their conversation partner. Because a speaker's intentions are so clear to him or her, it may be difficult to recognize that a listener may easily misinterpret a playful tease, a subtle joke, or a constructive criticism. Such egocentric biases are a frequent cause of discord and conflict in relationships. For instance, those who are personally unsatisfied in a relationship tend to see more hostile intent in a partner's behavior than the partner actually intends. Overcoming one's own egocentric perspective and intuiting another's differing perspective therefore tends to require deliberate effort and attention, and anything that diminishes a person's ability or motivation to expend effortful thought should generally increase the magnitude of egocentric biases in judgment. Over time, effective perspective takers learn to overcome their own egocentric perspective more readily and consider another's perspective more naturally, but this process does not appear to ever become completely automated.

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