Selman

• What is the scenario proposed by Selman?

  • Selman told a story to children about a girl, Holly, who could rescue a friend’s cat by climbing a tree.
  • Climbing trees was banned by her father and she had promised her father that she wouldn’t.
  • Selman then asked the children if Holly should be reprimanded and punished by her father if she climbed the tree.
• Social cognition

  Mental cognitive processes that relate to the social world, such as understanding other people's intentions, perspectives and emotions
• Selman's theory can be criticized for not including a role for understanding others' emotions or feeling empathy when taking the perspective of others
• Selman's stages of perspective taking

  • Egocentric (3-6 years)
  • Social informational role taking (6-8 years)
  • Self-reflective role taking (8-10 years)
  • Mutual third-party role taking (10-12 years)
  • Social and conventional system societal role taking (12-adulthood)
• Selman's theory can be criticized for not including a role for understanding others' emotions or feeling empathy when taking the perspective of others
• There is a lack of clarity over the precise role of perspective-taking


  Whether it is important for the development of prosocial or antisocial behaviour
• Buijzen and Valkenburg (2008) suggested that perspective-taking abilities became more advanced with age

  Reduced the number of infant-parent conflicts when in supermarkets
• Gasser and Keller (2009) found that bullies suffered from no perspective-taking impairments


  This is not what we would expect if such an ability is required for the development of cooperative social cognition
• Perspective-taking may have little theoretical value in explaining the development of advanced and mature social cognition
• Perspective-taking is a one-sided approach to explaining social cognition, through an over-riding emphasis on cognition
• Other factors equally as important in the development of social cognition

  • Theory of mind (as suggested by Baron-Cohen et al)
  • The role of mirror neurons (as suggested by Ramachandran et al)
• Reducing social cognition to perspective-taking only is not a holistic approach
• An improved understanding of perspective-taking

  May have useful practical applications in terms of understanding those with autistic spectrum disorders, such as ADHD
• Marton et al (2009) found that in a sample of 50 ADHD children aged between 8 and 12 years, these children scored significantly worse on perspective-taking tasks in terms of understanding the situation and weighing up the consequences of each character's actions, compared to a control group of neurotypical children
• Through pinpointing the exact impairments experienced by children on the autistic spectrum, more efficient treatments can be developed
• Theory of Mind (TOM)


  The ability to understand/identify what other people are thinking and feeling, through a 'mind-reading'-like process