Egocentrism versus protocentrism: The status of self in social prediction.

Abstract

In this article, the author discusses the limitations of the egocentric view of self in which self serves as an automatic filter, inhibiting access to alternative representations of others' thoughts and feelings. The author then outlines a protocentric model, the self-as-distinct (SAD) model, in which generic representations of prototypic others serve as the default; representations of self, specific others, or categories encode only distinctiveness from generic knowledge about prototypic others. Thus, self-knowledge is distributed both in generic representations in which self and prototypic others are undifferentiated and in a self-representation that encodes distinctiveness. The self-representation does not serve to make predictions about others because it encodes how self differs from the generic representation of others. Predictions that are the same about self and others are protocentric, based on generic knowledge that serves as the default. The SAD model parsimoniously accounts for many inconsistent findings across various domains in social cognition.Answering questions about other people's covert psychological processes, their likely thoughts and feelings, seems difficult for at least two reasons. First, people do not have direct access to other people's ongoing or likely future psychological experiences. Second, there is no one-to-one correspondence between events and other people's reactions to these events; people do not always react the same way to a given event, and the same psychological reaction can be elicited in many different ways. Despite these apparently insurmountable challenges, adults, and even young children, have little trouble answering questions about other people's likely future reactions and psychological experiences. In contrast to the apparent ease with which lay people make such predictions about others, theoreticians and researchers have invested much effort to resolve the question of how such predictions are made. The major issue of contention and the focus of this article is the status of self in making predictions about other people's thoughts and feelings.One approach to the question of how people make predictions about other people's psychological experiences holds that individuals develop a theory of mind (Flavell,

Social Projection to Ingroups and Outgroups: A Review and Meta-Analysis

“…When there is ample social knowledge, as is often the case in real groups, there may be less need for self-anchoring. People might even model their own responses, in part, after these perceived social norms, and especially so when they make group judgments first (Karniol, 2003). To examine this possibility, we regressed the ingroup effects on the context variable (real vs. laboratory), the order of the judgments (self first vs. last), and the interaction between the two.…”

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

“…First, adults may be less egocentric than children because they are less likely to use their own perspective when assessing anotherÕs interpretation, and instead rely on an entirely different psychological process for perspective taking. Over time, adults may acquire domain specific theories or prototypes about how other minds work that are applied when adopting anotherÕs perspective in much the same way that a person applies a formula when solving math problems (Gopnik & Wellman, 1992;Karniol, 2003). With repeated experience, adults come to learn that their perceptions may differ from others in specific ways.…”

Predicting Framed Decisions: Simulation or Theory?

“…As an additional variable, we manipulated the familiarity (unknown vs. well-known) of the target person, since familiarity plays a role for the choice of prediction strategies (Bazinger & Kühberger, 2013;Karniol, 2003;Nickerson, 1999). If there is little knowledge available about the target person (as it is usually the case with a stranger), there are no other options but to use general theory or simulation, as the basis for a prediction.…”