Perspective-taking across cultures: shared biases in Taiwanese and British adults.

J Jessica Wang,Steven Frisson,Philip Tseng,Chi-Hung Juan,Ian A Apperly

doi:10.1098/rsos.190540

Abstract

The influential hypothesis by Markus & Kitayama (Markus, Kitayama 1991. Psychol. Rev. 98, 224) postulates that individuals from interdependent cultures place others above self in interpersonal contexts. This led to the prediction and finding that individuals from interdependent cultures are less egocentric than those from independent cultures (Wu, Barr, Gann, Keysar 2013. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 7, 1–7; Wu, Keysar. 2007 Psychol. Sci. 18, 600–606). However, variation in egocentrism can only provide indirect evidence for the Markus and Kitayama hypothesis. The current study sought direct evidence by giving British (independent) and Taiwanese (interdependent) participants two perspective-taking tasks on which an other-focused ‘altercentric’ processing bias might be observed. One task assessed the calculation of simple perspectives; the other assessed the use of others' perspectives in communication. Sixty-two Taiwanese and British adults were tested in their native languages at their home institutions of study. Results revealed similar degrees of both altercentric and egocentric interference between the two cultural groups. This is the first evidence that listeners account for a speaker's limited perspective at the cost of their own performance. Furthermore, the shared biases point towards similarities rather than differences in perspective-taking across cultures.

Highlights

Theory of mind (ToM) is the ability to represent others’ mental states and understand that they could differ from our own mental states
Since there were no available data to indicate the size of between-culture differences on the visual perspective-taking task, we sought the largest sample of Taiwanese participants in the available testing time, which substantially exceeded the requirements of the above power analysis and the original sample size of 20 participants from each culture employed by Wu and co-workers
Cross-cultural studies of perspective-taking have narrowly focused on the degrees to which individuals from independent versus interdependent cultures are egocentric [6,7]

Summary

Introduction

Theory of mind (ToM) is the ability to represent others’ mental states and understand that they could differ from our own mental states. 2 Curiously, when a communicative context demands integration of information about visual perspective with incoming utterances from a communicative partner, adults show high rates of egocentric errors by failing to use what they know about their partner’s perspective [3,4]. This points towards a dissociation between the calculation of others’ visual perspective and using the calculated information appropriately, alongside an egocentric bias to interpret utterances according to one’s own perspective. Most East Asian cultures emphasize attention to others, leading to construal of an interdependent self, which is inclusive of others. Western communicators who operate with a focus on themselves would be subject to interference from their own perspective when required to take others’ perspectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion