Cross-Situational Projection
SELF AND SOCIAL JUDGEMENT, M. Alicke, J. Krueger, D. Dunning, eds., pp. 43-64, Psychology Press, 2005
22 Pages Posted: 19 Feb 2010
Date Written: 2005
Abstract
I go eyeball to eyeball with some other creature - and I yearn to know the essential quality of its markedly diff erent vitality… Give me one minute - just one minute - inside the skin of this creature… and then I will know what natural historians have sought through the ages… Instead, we can only peer in from the outside, look our subject straight in the face, and wonder, ever wonder. - Stephen Jay Gould, 1998, p. 377
Although Gould lamented naturalists’ inability to gain an insiders perspective of sloths and shrews, this fundamental barrier is not unique to interspecies perspective taking. Humans face a similar barrier when they try to understand what it feels like to be another human. We cannot step inside the skin of another human. Just as naturalists facing sloths and shrews, we can only peer in at other humans from the outside, look each other in the face, and wonder. Is problem of Other Minds is something of a hassle in everyday life. Most of our behavior is social, so many of our actions require at least a guess at other people’s hearts and minds. It is not surprising, then, that many areas of social psychology are deeply concerned with perspective taking activity and ability. Impression formation, causal attribution, group dynamics, romantic relations, stereotypes and prejudice, negotiation and conflict resolution all relate in one way or another to people’s attempts to predict and understand the psychological states of other people.
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