Selman’s levels of perspective-taking

• Selman looked at changes that occurred with age in children’s. responses to scenarios in which they were asked to take the role of different people in a social situation.
• 30 boys and 30 girls (20 four-year-olds, 20 five-year-olds and 20 six-year-olds) were individually given a task designed to measure perspective-taking ability. This involved asking them how each person felt in various scenarios.
• One scenario featured a child called Holly who has promised her father she will not climb trees, but who then comes across her friend whose kitten is stuck up a tree. The task was to describe and explain how each person would feel if Holly did or did not climb the tree to save the kitten.
• Selman’s stages of development:

  • stage 0 (3-6 years)
  • stage 1 (6-8 years)
  • stage 2 (8-10 years)
  • stage 3 (10-12 years)
  • stage 4 (12+)
• Stage 0 - Egocentric - a child in this stage cannot reliably distinguish between their own emotions and those of others. They can generally identify emotional states in others but do not understand what social behaviour might have caused them.
• Stage 1 - Social-informational - a child can now tell the difference between their own point of view and that of others, but they can usually focus on only one of these perspectives.
• Stage 2 - self-reflective - a child can put themselves in the position of another’s point of view and fully appreciate the other’s perspective. They can, however, only take on board one point of view at a time.
• Stage 3 - mutual - children are now able to look at a situation from their own and another’s point of view at the same time.
• Stage 4 - social and conventional system - young people become able to see that sometimes understanding others’ viewpoints is not enough to allow people to reach agreement. This is why social conventions are needed to keep order.
• Selman believed development through these stages is based on both maturity and experience.
• Later developments to Selman’s theory:

  1. interpersonal understanding
  2. interpersonal negotiation strategies
  3. awareness of personal meaning of relationships
• Interpersonal understanding = this is what Selman measured in his earlier perspective-taking research. If we can take different roles then we can understand social situations.
• Interpersonal negotiation strategies = as well as understanding what others think in social situations we also have to develop skills in how to respond to them. We therefore develop social skills such as asserting our position and managing conflict.
• Awareness of personal meaning of relationships = social development also requires the ability to reflect on social behaviour in the context of different relationships. Thus a violent gang-member may have an advanced social understanding and good social skills, but chooses a simple approach to conflict (violence) because of their role in the gang.
• There is evidence that perspective-taking becomes more advanced with age. Selman tested 60 children using scenarios like that involving Holly and the kitten. There were significant positive correlations between age and ability to take different perspectives.
• Longitudinal studies have supported these findings. Such longitudinal studies have followed children over a period of time and recorded improvements in their perspective-taking ability. Longitudinal studies have good validity because they control for individual differences whereas cross-sectional studies don’t. This means there is solid support for the basic idea that perspective- taking improves with age.
• There is also support for the important of perspective-taking in healthy social development. Buijzen and Valkenburg observed interactions between children and parents in toyshops and markets including those in which parents refused to buy things their child wanted. The researchers noted any coercive behaviour. The study found negative correlations between coercive behaviour and both age and perspective-taking ability. This suggests there is a relationship between perspective-taking abilities and healthy social behaviour.
• However, other lines of research have not supported the links between perspective-taking and social development. Gasser and Keller assessed perspective-taking in bullies, victims and non-participants. They found that bullies displayed no difficulties in perspective-taking. This suggests that perspective-taking may not be a key element in healthy social development.
• A limitation of Selman’s stages is the focus on cognitive factors alone. Perspective-taking is a cognitive ability. However there is far more to children’s social development than their increasing cognitive abilities. Selman’s approach fails to take into account the full range of other factors that impact on a child’s social development (e.g. internal factors like the development of empathy and external factors like parenting style). This means Selman’s approach is too narrow.