Perspective Taking and Information Use during Social Inference

一个平稳运行的社会的基础是个人与他人有效互动的能力，即使是那些与自己观点不同的人。为此，采取观点的能力--对他人的精神状态进行推理的能力--对于有效的沟通和有意义的社会互动至关重要。但由于缺乏对他人思想的直接了解，人们经常使用直观的策略来推断他人的想法、感受和偏好。两种这样的策略是利用一个人自己的精神状态(通常被称为投射)和使用关于特定社会群体通常是什么样子的文化预期(通常被称为刻板印象)。这项拟议的研究将调查(1)人们积极的视角选择努力如何影响他们在社会推理过程中对投射和刻板印象的使用，(2)他们对这些策略的使用是否以及如何取决于他们正在推断谁的心理状态(例如，相似或不同的他人)，以及(3)使用这些不同策略的多重下游行为影响(例如，决定是否接近或避开特定群体中的个人)。通过阐明人们如何看待那些在基本人际关系方面存在相似性和熟悉性的人(如政治对手、情侣、队友、谈判中的对手、种族外派成员)的心理状态，这项工作不仅有望推动心理学和认知科学的理论发展，而且还能为研究人员、从业者和其他对人们如何在政治、商业、教育和其他应用的人际关系中推断心理状态感兴趣的人提供信息。过去的研究表明，当人们做出社交推断时，他们的默认倾向是在对与自己相似的人进行推断时更多地使用投射而不是刻板印象，而对于不同的目标，这种模式则相反。然而，之前这项关于积极采取观点的努力的研究大多考察了对不知名的他人或被认为与自我不同的他人的推论。当目标是众所周知的他人或其他被认为与自我相似的人时，关于采取观点如何影响这些推理过程的研究知之甚少。爱荷华大学的安德鲁·托德(Andrew Todd)提出了一系列实验，测试从灵活自我应用假说中得出的预测。灵活自我应用假说是一种新颖的假说，即采取视角会触发灵活使用社会信息进行推理，从而允许理解自我和他人的相似和不同之处。一系列实验将集中于在对与自己相似或不同的人进行推断时，视角选择如何影响投射和刻板印象，例如，社会内部群体成员与外部群体成员。这些实验还将测试这种不同的策略使用是否预测了针对这些个人及其社会群体其他成员的行为的相应变化。第二组实验将侧重于在与其他人的社交推理中，视角采择如何影响投射，这些人的相似性和熟悉度不同，比如朋友和陌生人。通过更好地了解社会推理过程，这项研究最终可以帮助缩小不同个体之间的行为鸿沟。

Fundamental to a smoothly functioning society is the ability for individuals to interact effectively with others, even those who have different viewpoints from their own. To that end, perspective taking -- the capacity to reason about the mental states of other people -- is essential for effective communication and meaningful social interaction. But lacking direct access into others' minds, people often use intuitive strategies to make inferences about others' thoughts, feelings, and preferences. Two such strategies are using one's own mental states (often called projection) and using cultural expectancies about what particular social groups are generally like (often called stereotyping). The proposed research will investigate (1) how people's active perspective-taking efforts affect their use of projection and stereotyping during social inference, (2) whether and how their use of these strategies differs depending on whose mental states they are inferring (e.g., similar vs. dissimilar others), and (3) multiple downstream behavioral implications of using these different strategies (e.g., decisions about whether to approach vs. avoid individuals from particular groups). By illuminating how people think about the mental states of others who vary on the fundamental interpersonal dimensions of similarity and familiarity (e.g., political rivals, romantic partners, teammates, adversaries in a negotiation, members of racial outgroups), this work promises not only to advance theory development in psychology and cognitive science but also to inform researchers, practitioners, and others interested in how people infer mental states in political, business, educational, and other applied interpersonal contexts.Past research indicates that when people make social inferences, their default tendencies are to use projection more than stereotyping when making inferences about others who are similar to them, whereas this pattern reverses for targets who are dissimilar. However, most of this previous research on active perspective-taking efforts examined inferences about unknown others or others perceived as different from the self. Little is known about how perspective taking affects these inference processes when the targets are well-known others or others perceived as similar to the self. Andrew Todd (University of Iowa) proposes a series of experiments testing predictions derived from the flexible self-application hypothesis, the novel hypothesis that perspective taking triggers flexible use of social information for making inferences, allowing for an understanding of both self-other similarities and differences. One series of experiments will focus on how perspective taking affects projection and stereotyping when making inferences about others who are either similar to or different from the self, for instance, members of a social in-group versus out-group. These experiments will also test whether this differential strategy use predicts corresponding changes in behavior toward these individuals and other members of their social groups. A second set of experiments will focus on how perspective taking affects projection during social inference with others who vary in terms of their similarity and their familiarity, such as friends versus strangers. By better understanding social inference processes, this research can ultimately help reduce the behavioral gulfs between individuals who differ.