Abstract
This paper examines a cognitive mechanism that drives perspective-taking and egocentrism in interpersonal communication. Using a conceptual referential communication task, in which participants describe a range of abstract geometric shapes, Experiment 1 shows that perspective-taking and egocentric communication are frequent communication strategies. Experiment 2 tests a selection heuristic account of perspective-taking and egocentric communication. It uses participants’ shape description ratings to predict their communication strategy. Participants’ communication strategy was predicted by how informative they perceived the different shape descriptions to be. When participants’ personal shape description was perceived to be more informative than their addressee’s shape description, there was a strong bias to communicate egocentrically. By contrast, when their addressee’s shape description was perceived to be more informative, there was a strong bias to take their addressee’s perspective. When the shape descriptions were perceived to be equally informative, there was a moderate bias to communicate egocentrically. This simple, but powerful, selection heuristic may be critical to the cumulative cultural evolution of human communication systems, and cumulative cultural evolution more generally.
Highlights
Interpersonal communication is a joint activity, the goal of which is to coordinate meaning across interlocutors
Note that audience-design in Experiment 1 is much less frequent compared to the spatial referential communication task [16], and egocentric communication is a frequent response (Perspective Retention plus Perspective Modification = 37.96% of trials, excluding Same Perspective trials; see Fig 2)
Perspective-taking and egocentric communication are frequent in our conceptual referential communication task (Experiment 1)
Summary
Interpersonal communication is a joint activity, the goal of which is to coordinate meaning across interlocutors. How this is achieved is contentious [1,2]. Classic theories emphasize the role of mentalizing [3,4,5]; for communication to work, speakers build and maintain a model of their addressee that is used to inform message design [3]. For minimalist, or egocentric, accounts mentalizing plays a peripheral role; interlocutors use low-level cues (e.g., linguistic priming), available to them during interaction, to ensure effective communication [2,6,7]. How frequently do speakers adopt their partner’s perspective, or retain their own egocentric
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