Seeing what other people see: accessible cultural mindset affects perspective-taking

Abstract

People can think about themselves as both separate and distinct from others (an individualistic mindset) and as connected and related to others (a collectivistic mindset) though societies differ in the frequency that each mindset is cued in everyday life. We predicted that an activated collectivistic mindset bolsters perspective-taking compared to an activated individualistic mindset for tasks requiring 2- and 3-dimensional mental rotation. We tested our prediction in four studies (n = 910) with German participants. We used an autobiographical recall task (Studies 1 and 2) and a pronoun-circling task (Studies 3 and 4). The recall task was to look at a photograph of children playing alone and think about a time one had worked alone (individualistic mindset) or to look at a photograph of children playing together and think about a time that one worked together with others (collectivistic mindset). The pronoun-circling task entailed reading a different narrative paragraph before each dependent measure and circling the first person singular (individualistic mindset) or plural (collectivistic mindset) pronouns in the text. Brief cultural mindset priming was sufficient to change perspective-taking (performance on a 3-buildings variant of the classic 3-mountains task). Our results support our prediction that accessible collectivistic mindset improves momentary ability to perspective-take—see things from another’s perspective. Effects are small but consistent and specific. Self-reported social sensitivity, self-reported perspective-taking skill, and empathy are not affected across studies. Neither, consistently, is performance on an “R” mental-rotation task.