selman's levels of perspective taking

• social cognition

  • describes the mental processes we use when engaging in social interaction
  • as we make decisions on how to behave based on our understanding of a social situation
• perspective taking

  • our ability to appreciate a social situation from other people's POV
  • this includes understanding their thoughts and feelings
• Selman (1971)

  • looked at 30 girls and 30 boys (20 aged 4, 5 and 6)
  • were given scenario where a child called Holly promised her dad she won't climb trees anymore but her friend's kitten was stuck up a tree
  • the task was to describe how each person in the situation would feel if holly did or didn't climb the tree
• proposed 5 stages based on the children's reasoning (0-2)

  • stage 0: (3-6) socially egocentric - can't distinguish between own emotions and others
  • stage 1: (6-8) social information role taking - can distinguish between own emotions and others bit only focus on one POV
  • stage 2: (8-10) self reflective role taking - can put themselves in POV of others and fully appreciate own POV
• proposed 5 stages based on children's reasoning (3-4)

  • stage 3: (10-12) mutual role taking - can see own/others POV at same time, can consider 2 POVs simultaneously
  • stage 4: (12+) social and conventional system role taking - can see sometimes understanding other POV isn't enough to allow people to reach an agreement
• Selman strengths

  • research support - VALKENBURG suggested perspective taking abilities became more advanced with age and so reduced the number of infant parent conflicts in supermarkets
• selman limitations

  • lack of clarity over precise role of perspective taking: Keller found bullies suffered from no perspective taking impairments
  • one sided approach to explaining social cognition as there's more factors which are equally as important such as ToM and role of mirror neurons
• piaget vs selman

  • PIAGET: believed in domain general cog dev so believed physical and social perspective taking would occur hand in hand
  • SELMAN: development of social perspective taking is a separate process. this is a domain specific approach to explaining cog dev