Department of Psychology, University of Würzburg.
Department of Psychology, University of Cologne.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2017 May;112(5):683-695. doi: 10.1037/pspa0000081. Epub 2017 Mar 2.
Psychological perspective-taking is a powerful social cognition that helps us to understand other people. It creates feelings of closeness and sympathy, motivates us to help others, and is important for positive social relationships. In contrast to the impressive knowledge about its consequences, relatively little is known about how exactly people achieve them. The present paper addresses this question from a grounded cognition perspective, drawing on recent findings on the embodiment of visuospatial perspective-taking. Visuospatial perspective-taking involves a mental transformation of one's body schema into the physical location of another person. We argue that when people psychologically "put themselves in another person's shoes," this simulation of physical proximity happens, too, and is one source of perceived closeness. In five experiments (total N = 1067), participants completed a visuospatial perspective-taking task. During half of the trials, angular disparity between the target person and the participant was high and participants had to adopt the target's visual perspective (which involves an embodied simulation). During the remaining trials, angular disparity was low and participants could solve the task egocentrically. Taking another's perspective led participants to adopt the thoughts of the target person more strongly (Experiments 1-3) and increased the perceived similarity of that person to the self (Experiment 4) and participants' liking of that person (Experiment 5). These effects were independent of task difficulty (Experiment 2), and only present during trials where an embodied transformation happened (i.e., at high angular disparities; Experiment 3). Implications for psychological and visuospatial perspective-taking research and related phenomena are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record
心理视角-taking 是一种强大的社会认知能力，帮助我们理解他人。它能产生亲近感和同情心，激励我们帮助他人，对积极的社会关系很重要。与关于其后果的令人印象深刻的知识相比，人们对其确切实现方式知之甚少。本文从扎根认知的角度探讨了这个问题，借鉴了最近关于视空间视角-taking 体现的发现。视空间视角-taking 涉及到将自己的身体图式转换为另一个人的物理位置的心理转换。我们认为，当人们在心理上“设身处地为他人着想”时，这种身体上的接近感也会发生，这是感知到亲近感的一个来源。在五个实验（总 N=1067）中，参与者完成了一个视空间视角-taking 任务。在一半的试验中，目标人与参与者之间的角度差异较大，参与者必须采用目标人的视觉视角（这涉及到身体模拟）。在其余的试验中，角度差异较小，参与者可以以自我为中心解决任务。采用他人的视角会使参与者更强烈地采用目标人的思维（实验 1-3），并增加目标人与自我之间的感知相似性（实验 4）和参与者对目标人的喜爱（实验 5）。这些影响独立于任务难度（实验 2），仅在发生身体转换的试验中存在（即角度差异较大时；实验 3）。讨论了对心理和视空间视角-taking 研究及相关现象的影响。（PsycINFO 数据库记录）
