What did Selman do?
- egocentrism is an example of physical perspective-taking
- there is also social perspective-taking
- Piaget believed in that physical and social perspective-taking would occur together
- however, Selman proposed that the development of social perspective-taking is a separate process to physical perspective taking
What is social cognition?
-it describes the mental processes we use to make decisions on how to behave based on our understanding of a social situation
Which research was conducted into perspective-taking?
-Selman looked at the 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
What was Selman’s procedure?
- 30 boys and 30 girls took part in the study, 20 aged 4, 20 aged 5 and 20 aged 6 years
- all of the children were individually given a task designed to measure role-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 no longer climb trees, but when other 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 rescue the kitten
What were Selman’s findings?
- a number of distinct levels of role-taking were identified
- Selman found that the level of role-taking correlated with age, suggesting a clear developmental sequence
What are the later developments to Selman’s research?
- Schultz, Selman and La Russo have identified three other aspects to social development
- interpersonal understanding
- interpersonal negotiation strategies
- awareness of personal meaning of relationships
What is interpersonal understanding?
-if we can take different roles then this shows we can understand social situations
What are the 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 skill such as asserting our position and managing conflict
What is awareness of personal meaning of relationships?
- as well as understanding social situations and how to manage them, social development also requires the ability to reflect on social behaviour in the context of life history and the full range of relationships
- thus violent gang-member may have and advanced social understanding and good social skills, but choose a simple approach to conflict because of their role in the gang
What are the evaluation points of Selman’s theory?
+longitudinal studies show that perspective-taking gets better with age which shows reliability and validity
-observation of parent child interaction in toy shops found a correlation with coercive behaviours and perspective taking however bullies had no problem with perspective talking still used antisocial rather than prosocial behaviours
+applications in understanding ADHD and autism have problems with perspective taking tasks compared to a control group
-cultural differences in perspective taking show that Chinese participants were better at perspective taking than Americans
How does the fact that evidence that perspective-taking get better with age support Sermons theory?
- Selman showed there were significant positive correlations between age and perspective taking
- longitudinal follow-up studies have shown that perspective-taking develops with age in each child
- this shows that Selmans research was not simply the result of individual differences in social-cognitive ability
How is the fact that there is mixed evidence for the importance of perspective-taking a weakness of Selman’s theory?
- evidence is much mixed as to just how important the cognitive ability to take alternative perspectives is in understanding children’s social development
- in an observation of child-parent interaction in toyshops and supermarkets psychologists found a negative correlation between age, perspective-taking and coercive behaviour like trying to force parents to buy them things which suggests that perspective-taking is important in developing prosocial behaviour like alternatives to coercion
- however, Grasser and Keller found that bullies displayed no difficulties In perspective-taking
How do applications in understanding atypical development support Selman’s theory?
- research has shown that children with ADHD and those on the autism spectrum have problems with perspective-taking
- in one study Matron et al compared 50 8-12 year old children with a diagnosis of ADHD with a control group on performance of perspective-taking tasks like those used by Selman
- those with ADHD did worse on understanding the scenarios, identifying the feelings of each person involved and evaluating the consequences of different actions
- this is a strength of Selman’s work because it shows it is helpful in understanding atypical development
What is stage 0 (3-6 years)?
- socially egocentric: the 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
What is stage 1 (6-8 years)?
- social information role-taking: the child can now tell the difference 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
What is stage 2 (8-10 years)?
- Self-reflective role-taking: at this stage the child can put themselves in the position of another person and fully appreciate their perspective
- they can, however only take on board one point of view at a time
What is stage 3 (10-12 years)?
-Mutual role-taking: Children are now able to look at a situation fro their own and another’s point of view at the same time
What is stage 4 (12+ years)?
-Social and conventional system role-taking: young people became able to see that sometimes understanding others’ viewpoints is not enough to allow people to reach agreement which is why social conventions are needed to keep order
What is physical perspective taking?
-physically understanding what someone else can see
What is social perspective taking?
- this cognitive ability underlies much of our normal social interaction
- which is more about understanding what someone else is feeling or thinking like social cognition
how are cultural differences in perspective taking a weakness of Selman?
- Selman’s methods have allowed us to compare different groups of people on their perspective taking ability
- in one study, for example Wu et al found that young adult Chinese participants did significantly better in perspective taking than matched Americans
- this shows that there is more to the development of perspective taking than just cognitive maturity because the differences must be due to different cultural inputs
