UC Santa Barbara

Previous research has demonstrated a sex difference favoring males in perspective taking ability (e.g. Eisenberg & Lennon, 1983; Fields & Shelton, 2006; Meneghetti, Pazzaglia, & De Beni, 2012). Factors that influence sex differences in perspective taking ability in favor of males have been under-explored, and no unified explanation of the extant sex differences in this ability exists currently. Task components (for example including a directional cue in an Spatial Orientation Test [SOT] array), social nature of the task (presence of a human figure in an array), or embodied nature of the task (ease of imaging self in task) may each shape perspective taking ability. Experiment 1 examined how perspective taking ability was influenced by both a social directional cue, and an abstract, non-human, directional cue. The social condition included a human avatar in the SOT array. The spatial condition included an arrow. Results indicated that females and males performed best in the social condition and no better in the spatial condition than the control condition, indicating that social task components are influential in this ability. Experiment 2 compared a replicated social condition to a different non-human directional cue (chair). Results showed that there was no significant difference between the avatar and the chair conditions for males and females. This suggests that the “social” effect found in Experiment 1 is nuanced, and that perspective taking ability may rather be influenced by ease of embodiment of the focal/central task object. This may indicate that prior evidence of sex differences in this ability have reflected task components rather than inherent ability.