Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Two experiments examined whether an explicit attention toanother’s perspective fosters perspective-taking. The firstexperiment attempted to replicate Todd et al.’s (2010) findingsthat a mind-set focusing on self-other differences incitesrespondents to adopt another person’s perspective in asubsequent task. Results showed that perceivers focusing onself-other differences were just as likely to describe an object’slocation from their egocentric perspective as perceiversfocusing on self-other similarities. The second experimentintensified perceivers’ awareness of self-other differences byallocating them to one of the perspective-settings (none, self-focus, other-focus). Participants in the perspective-settingsreceived explicit instructions to regard their own (self-focus)or another person’s (other-focus) viewpoint during theperspective-taking task. Findings revealed that other-focusedrespondents were more likely to adopt another person’sperspective than self-focused respondents. Compared to thebaseline, however, an explicit self- or other-focus did not fosterperspective-taking. Our findings indicate the robustness ofrespondents’ egocentric bias.