Abstract
Previous research has suggested that adults are sometimes egocentric, erroneously attributing their current beliefs, perspectives, and opinions to others. Interestingly, this egocentricity is sometimes stronger when perspective-taking than when working from functionally identical but non-perspectival rules. Much of our knowledge of egocentric bias comes from Level 1 perspective-taking (e.g., judging whether something is seen) and judgements made about narrated characters or avatars rather than truly social stimuli such as another person in the same room. We tested whether adults would be egocentric on a Level 2 perspective-taking task (judging how something appears), in which they were instructed to indicate on a continuous colour scale the colour of an object as seen through a filter. In our first experiment, we manipulated the participants’ knowledge of the object’s true colour. We also asked participants to judge either what the filtered colour looked like to themselves or to another person present in the room. We found participants’ judgements did not vary across conditions. In a second experiment, we instead manipulated how much participants knew about the object’s colour when it was filtered. We found that participants were biased towards the true colour of the object when making judgements about targets they could not see relative to targets they could, but that this bias disappeared when the instruction was to imagine what the object looked like to another person. We interpret these findings as indicative of reduced egocentricity when considering other people’s experiences of events relative to considering functionally identical but abstract rules.
Highlights
At a theoretical level we are aware that other people can have different perspectives to our own, we often ascribe our own perspectives to others even when these particular ascriptions are unwarranted. We sometimes find it hard to ignore what we can see when trying to understand what someone with a more limited visual perspective might be referring to (Apperly et al, 2010; Keysar et al, 2003; Samuel, Roehr-Brackin, et al, 2019); we sometimes imagine that our preferences and opinions are shared by more people than is objectively the case (e.g., Ross et al, 1977); and when we learn something new, we have trouble recalling our earlier ignorance and fail to appreciate that others might not know presently what we did not know previously (e.g., Bernstein et al, 2004; Hinds, 1999)
Given that reasoning about other people around us is the most naturalistic case, we investigated the social egocentricity hypothesis with a task in which participants were instructed to perform the task by judging how an object appeared either to themselves or to another person in the room
The analysis found no main effect of Knowledge, F(1, 36) = 0.892, mean square of the error (MSE) = 44.216, p = .351, ηp2 = .024, or Condition, F(1, 36) = 0.331, MSE = 264.668, p = .569, ηp2 = .009, and no interaction, F(1, 36) = 0.106, MSE = 4.708, p = .746, ηp2 =
Summary
At a theoretical level we are aware that other people can have different perspectives to our own, we often ascribe our own perspectives to others even when these particular ascriptions are unwarranted. We sometimes find it hard to ignore what we can see when trying to understand what someone with a more limited visual perspective might be referring to (Apperly et al, 2010; Keysar et al, 2003; Samuel, Roehr-Brackin, et al, 2019); we sometimes imagine that our preferences and opinions are shared by more people than is objectively the case (e.g., Ross et al, 1977); and when we learn something new, we have trouble recalling our earlier ignorance and fail to appreciate that others might not know presently what we did not know previously (e.g., Bernstein et al., 2004; Hinds, 1999) This “egocentric bias,” sometimes referred to as the “curse of knowledge,” could have farreaching implications for our ability to be objective about the world around us (Risen & Critcher, 2011), and for our attitudes towards and interactions with others (Birch & Bloom, 2004). Support for reduced egocentricity when reasoning socially would be consistent in spirit with research that posits specialised mechanisms or processes for theory of mind and social reasoning (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Sugiyama et al, 2002), as well as with the fluidity with which we organise our language online to reflect shared and privileged knowledge between communication partners (Clark & Brennan, 1991)
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