Taking the perspectives of many people: Humanization matters
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BRIEF REPORT
Taking the perspectives of many people: Humanization matters Tian Ye 1
&
Fumikazu Furumi 2 & Daniel Catarino da Silva 1 & Antonia Hamilton 1
Accepted: 15 November 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In a busy space, people encounter many other people with different viewpoints, but classic studies of perspective-taking examine only one agent at a time. This paper explores the issue of selectivity in visual perspective-taking (VPT) when different people are available to interact with. We consider the hypothesis that humanization impacts on VPT in four studies using virtual reality methods. Experiments 1 and 2 use the director task to show that for more humanized agents (an in-group member or a virtual human agent), participants were more likely to use VPT to achieve lower error rate. Experiments 3 and 4 used a two-agent social mental rotation task to show that participants are faster and more accurate to recognize items which are oriented towards a more humanized agent (an in-group member or a naturally moving agent). All results support the claim that humanization alters the propensity to engage in VPT in rich social contexts. Keywords Perspective-taking . In-group . Dehumanization . Social cognition . Motivation
Walking into a busy shop, the shopper might encounter a number of other figures, such as a shop worker, a friend, and a shop mannequin, who all have different visual perspectives on the scene. This paper examines how people engage in visual perspective-taking when encountering multiple different agents with different social characteristics. In particular, we aim to examine the tension between claims that we automatically consider the visual perspective of people we encounter (Samson, Apperly, Braithwaite, Andrews, & Bodley Scott, 2010) and the suggestion that not all people we encounter are fully humanized (Haslam, 2006), together with the real-world observation that we often meet more than one person at a time. Visual perspective-taking (VPT) is the process of determining whether another person can see an object and what the object looks like to that person (Flavell, 1977). Many cognitive studies over the past decade have suggested that at least some forms of VPT are automatic and occur without topdown control (Elekes, Varga, & Király, 2016, 2017; Freundlieb, Kovács, & Sebanz, 2016, 2018; Samson et al., * Antonia Hamilton [email protected] 1
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, UK
2
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and Graduate School of Human Development and Environment, Kobe University, Kobe, Japan
2010; Furlanetto, Becchio, Samson, & Apperly, 2015; Surtees, Apperly, & Samson, 2016; Surtees, Samson, & Apperly, 2016). Samson et al. (2010) found an ‘altercentric intrusion effect’ when participants were asked to report the number of discs on the walls and a human agent saw a different number of discs than they did. Recently, Ward and colleagues found that recognition of rotated letters was easier when the letters were oriented towards an
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