Lifting the curse of knowing: How feedback improves perspective-taking

Abstract

People are likely to use their own knowledge as a frame of reference when they try to assess another person’s perspective. Due to this egocentric anchoring, people often overestimate the extent to which others share their point of view. This study investigated which type of feedback (if any) stimulates perceivers to make estimations of another person’s perspective that are less biased by egocentric knowledge. We allocated participants to one of three feedback conditions (no feedback, accuracy feedback, narrative feedback). Findings showed that participants who were given feedback adjusted their perspective-judgment more than those who did not receive feedback. They also showed less egocentric projection on future assessments. Participants adjusted their perspective within the same trial to the same degree for both feedback types. However, participants’ egocentric bias was only reduced when they received narrative feedback and not when they received accuracy feedback about their performance. Implications of these findings for theories of perspective-taking are discussed.

The Benefits and Obstacles to Perspective Getting

“…In these studies, predictors with privileged knowledge find it hard to inhibit this knowledge during perspective-taking, causing them to overestimate the similarity between their own and the target's perspective. Feedback that highlights this difference in perspectives, however, seems to decrease predictors' overestimation of similarities in perspectives (Damen et al, 2021). Hence, we predicted that explicitly telling perceivers that their own knowledge was privileged to them and, thus, not known to the target, would increase the need for getting the target's perspective.…”