Shared social groups or shared experiences? : The effect of shared knowledge on children’s perspective-taking

Abstract

Although the ability to consider others’ visual perspectives to interpret ambiguous communication emerges during childhood, people sometimes fail to attend to their partner’s perspective. Two studies investigated whether 4- to 6-year-olds show a “closeness–communication bias” in their consideration of a partner’s perspective in a communication task. Participants played a game that required them to take their partner’s visual perspective in order to interpret an ambiguous instruction. If children, like adults, perform worse when they overestimate the extent to which their perspective is aligned with that of a partner, then they should make more perspective-taking errors when interacting with a socially close partner compared with a more socially distant partner. In Study 1, social closeness was based on belonging to the same social group. In Study 2, social closeness was based on caregiving, a long-standing social relationship with a close kinship bond. Although social group membership did not affect children’s consideration of their partner’s perspective, children did make more perspective-taking errors when interacting with a close caregiver compared with a novel experimenter. These findings suggest that close personal relationships may be more likely to lead children to overestimate perspective alignment and hinder children’s perspective-taking than shared social group membership, and they highlight important questions about the mechanisms underlying the effects of partner characteristics in perspective-taking tasks.