Inferring Perspective Versus Getting Perspective: Underestimating the Value of Being in Another Person’s Shoes

Abstract

People use at least two strategies to solve the challenge of understanding another person's mind: inferring that person's perspective by reading his or her behavior (theorization) and getting that person's perspective by experiencing his or her situation (simulation). The five experiments reported here demonstrate a strong tendency for people to underestimate the value of simulation. Predictors estimated a stranger's emotional reactions toward 50 pictures. They could either infer the stranger's perspective by reading his or her facial expressions or simulate the stranger's perspective by watching the pictures he or she viewed. Predictors were substantially more accurate when they got perspective through simulation, but overestimated the accuracy they had achieved by inferring perspective. Predictors' miscalibrated confidence stemmed from overestimating the information revealed through facial expressions and underestimating the similarity in people's reactions to a given situation. People seem to underappreciate a useful strategy for understanding the minds of others, even after they gain firsthand experience with both strategies.

What stops revenge taking? Effects of observed emotional reactions on revenge seeking

“…We were interested how participants will adjust the intensity of punishment in the next trial depending on the opponent reaction they have viewed in the previous trial. It should be noted that people often have difficulties to infer the feeling states of other people from observed facial displays (Zhou, Majka, & Epley, 2017), that means, they could misinterpret the opponents' expressions. Therefore, we also conducted experiments in which anger and pain displays were combined with explicit indicators of anger feelings and/or suffering.…”

The Curse of Knowledge in Visual Data Communication

“…This bias, studied in business decision making, political strategizing and marketing, is the irrational belief that an outcome was more predictable after it becomes known [43]. People seem unable to recreate the novel and uncertain feelings from their own mind prior to the revelation of the outcome [5,11,52].…”

“…Future research could investigate other consequences of the curse and evaluate different methods to discover the manifestation of the curse of knowledge. While these question veers more closely toward the psychology literature (see [15,52] on discussions of strategy differences in inferring and simulating the perspectives of others), understanding the underlying difference could lead to prescriptions for mitigating the bias.…”

Comparing self- and hetero-metacognition in the absence of verbal communication

“…However, people's ability to read others people's confidence has so far received 70 little attention. This stands in contrast with substantial research dedicated to the theory of 71 mind ability to read others' emotions (e.g., Zhou, Majka & Epley, 2017). Of course, in many 72 situations it is just a matter of verbal communication: subject A says to subject B how 73 uncertain she is about such or such event.…”