ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Department of Psychology.
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2018 Nov;147(11):1619-1640. doi: 10.1037/xge0000475.
Perspective taking-the ability to see things from someone else's point of view-can boost success in communication. A signaler might take perspective when designing an utterance that is informative from the receiver's point of view, or the receiver might take perspective when inferring the signaler's communicative intentions. Perspective taking is supposed to play a particularly vital role when people try to communicate in the absence of a conventional signaling system. However, the task demands in such cases are extremely different from those in typical experimental approaches to perspective taking. Thus, current evidence for perspective taking does not establish whether humans can take perspective in those cases where perspective taking is arguably most helpful. We describe experimental tests of perspective taking that are suitable for settling the matter. Our task focuses on the use of shared world knowledge rather than shared visual scenes, and it is suitable for both open-ended and contextually constrained responses. We show that people generally fail at perspective taking in a novel signaling task, but that perspective taking can be boosted by contextual constraint. In that case, however, it is context, rather than perspective taking or shared world knowledge, that explains communicative success. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).
换位思考——从他人的角度看问题的能力——可以提高沟通的成功率。发信人在设计从收信人角度来看信息丰富的话语时可能会换位思考，或者收信人在推断发信人的交际意图时也可能会换位思考。当人们试图在没有传统信号系统的情况下进行交流时，换位思考应该发挥特别重要的作用。然而，这种情况下的任务要求与典型的换位思考实验方法有很大的不同。因此，目前关于换位思考的证据并不能确定人类是否可以在那些被认为最有帮助的情况下进行换位思考。我们描述了适合解决这一问题的换位思考实验测试。我们的任务侧重于使用共享的世界知识，而不是共享的视觉场景，并且它适用于开放式和上下文受限的响应。我们表明，人们在一个新的信号传递任务中普遍无法进行换位思考，但通过上下文限制可以提高换位思考的能力。然而，在这种情况下，解释交际成功的是上下文，而不是换位思考或共享的世界知识。
