How We Understand Others: A Theory of How Social Perspective Taking Unfolds

Abstract

Social perspective taking—the process through which perceivers discern the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of a target—is foundational for navigating social interactions, building relationships, maintaining mental health, promoting well-being, and a wide array of other desired outcomes. Despite its importance, little is known about how discrete social perspective taking attempts unfold. We propose a theory that the social perspective taking process consists of up to four distinguishable phases: perception of the target, motivation to engage in social perspective taking, strategy selection, and evaluation of the attempt. Scholars have emphasized two proximal outcomes of this process—social perspective taking effort and accuracy. We review the literature in support of these phases, noting the relative maturity of each area of research. In doing so, we hope this theory provides a framework for contextualizing how existing studies relate to one another across different subfields of psychology, facilitates testable predictions, prioritizes future investigations, and guides applied research designed to improve real-world social perspective taking.

Perspective-Taking and Perspective-Sharing in Pediatric Education: Exploring Connections Between Strategies of Medical Students and Patients’ Caregivers

“…Future research can build on our findings to provide further insight into the outcomes of adopting combinations of perspective-taking strategies, such as patient satisfaction or perspective accuracy. After all, enacting perspective-taking strategies does not automatically mean being accurate in taking perspective [ 19 ]. Valuable work has already been done on outcomes of individual perspective-taking strategies [ 17 22 25 46 ].…”

“…In this study, we conceptualize perspective-taking as the process through which a perceiver, in this study students, discerns the thoughts, feelings and motivations of a perspective-sharer, in this study patients [ 19 ]. Studies in social psychology show that multiple strategies can be adopted to understand another’s perspective [ 20 21 22 23 24 ].…”

The effectiveness of a brief video-based intervention in reducing gender bias in Korea

“…Subsequently, they watched an expert video followed by attention and manipulation check questions for the expert video. It is significant that the perspective-taker should be consciously aware of the person they are trying to understand ( Gehlbach and Mu, 2022 ), thus, the narrative video was shown prior to the expert video to present a specific target (e.g., the main actor of the narrative) to the participants. The participants in the treatment group later completed the gender bias and cultural orientation questionnaires.…”

“…Future studies can further explore effective gender-biased interventions through numerous ways. First, the current study presented intervention videos in a fixed order to successfully initiate perspective taking ( Gehlbach and Mu, 2022 ). Thus, all the participants in the treatment group watched the narrative video first, followed by the expert video.…”

Association between interpretation flexibility and emotional health in an anxious sample: The challenge of measuring flexible adoption of multiple perspectives

“…In the present context, adopting multiple perspectives refers to seeing a given ambiguous situation as having multiple potential causes and possible outcomes and recognizing that different situations play out in different ways; a particular form of perspective taking. Interpreting ambiguous situations in multiple ways may thus be related to other constructs such as hypothetical thinking (Evans et al, 2003) and social perspective taking (Gehlbach & Mu, 2023). We note that the present focus is related to, but distinct from, other important facets of interpretation flexibility, such as the updating of initially negative interpretations within an unfolding situation in response to new information (e.g., as assessed by the emotional Bias Against Disconfirmatory Evidence task (Everaert et al, 2018), or the specific ability to shift from negative to positive causal inferences for negative events (Perlman & Mor, 2022).…”