What is social cognition?
‘Social cognition’ is the role of thinking (cognition) in our behaviour with other our species (social)
i.e. thinking our thinking affects our social behaviour
Why is it important we learn about and understand social cognition?
It is important because there are various social signals that enable to learn about the world
What is Robert Selman believe?
Young children do not understand feelings and thoughts of others until they experience them on themselves
In order to understand others they must be able to take other perspective
The ability to take other people’s perspectives is vital for many social activities such as group problem-solving and persuading others
What is PT (Perspective Taking)
Skill that time to develop
Selman argues good perspective taking is essential for good social interaction but does not gurantee it
Selman devised scenarios of social situations to investigate children’s abilities to see the world from other people’s viewpoint
Outline perspective-taking research conducted by Selman (1971)
Aim
He wanted to investigate the changes occured with the ages of children’s responses to scenarios in which they were asked to take role of the different people in social situations
Outline perspective-taking research conducted by Selman (1971)
Procedure
- 30 boys and 30 girls took part in study
- 20 aged four , 20 aged five , 20 aged six years old
- All were individually given a task designed to measure role-taking ability
- This involed them asking how each person felt
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Outline perspective-taking research conducted by Selman (1971)
Procedure - Scenario
- Featured a child called Holly
- Who ptomised her father no longer climb a tree as kitten stuck in tree
- This helps to explain feelings
Outline perspective-taking research conducted by Selman (1971)
Findings
A number of distinict levels of role-taking were indentified
Found this connected with age
How did Selman devise this five-stage model?
- Collected qualitative data with children’s responses and classifying into different lvels
- Five-stage model - children move from egocentrism reasoning to understanding multiple viewpoints and perspectives
What is the five-stage model of Selman
- Socially egocentric (3-6)
- Social information - role taking (6-8)
- Self-reflective role taking (8-10)
- Mutual role taking (10-12) years
- Social and convential system role taking (12+ years)
When does socially egocentric stage occur?
Between 3-6 years
What happens in socially egocentric stage?
The child in this stage cannot reliably distinguish between their emotions and those of others
They can generally identify emotional state but don’t understand the social behaviour that caused them
What happens in social information - role taking stage?
The child can now tell the difference between their own point of view and that of others
can usually focus on only one perspectives
What happens in self-reflective role taking?
- At this stage, the child can put themselves in the position of another person and fully appreciate their persepctive
- They can however, board one point of view at a time
What happens during mutual self role -taking?
- Children are now able to look at situation from their own and other’s point of view at the same time
What happens during social and convential system role taking?
- Young people became able to see that sometimes understanding’s other viewpoint is not enough to allow people to reach an agreement
- Social conventions help this
Strength of Selman - strong research evidence
- Selman found positive correlations betwen age and ability to take different perspectives
- This is supported by longitudinal follow -up studies (Gurucharri and Selman 1982) confirm perspective taking develops with age
- Strength of levels idea generally particularity is supported by range of evidence
Limitation - only one aspect of social development considered
- Selman’s theory looks only at cognitive factors whereas children’s social development involves more than their developing cognitive abilities
- E.g internal factors (e.g empathy) and external factors (e.g family atmosphere) is more likely social development due to combination of these
- Argued to be considered the one element of perspective taking in isolation gives an oversimplified account of social development
Strength
One support for learning perspective taking is through experience
- Wu and Keysar found that young adult Chinese particpants did significantly better in perspective taking than matched Americans
- Indiciated the development of perspective-taking is influenced by socio-cultural inputs and not just maturity
- This supports Selman’s assumption that both maturity level and social enviro contribute to perspective taking development
A cristism of Selman’s theory is it lacks temporal validity
- The theory was initally developed in a time where communication was mainly face to face, potentially suggesting that perspective taking may been easier, due to body language , facial expressions and tone of boice
- We now live in a digital world where communication been modernised and mostly digital e.g email and text message
- Due to this development for perspective taking may not be valid , it is more difficult to take the perspective of another when body language anf facial expressions are absent
- This questions whether an indvidiual will progress through stages at age that Sleman suggested or development at a slower rate
Issue and Debate
Culture bias
- Selman is accused of culture bias
- As his research as no evidence of non-western perspectives
- Children may develop perspective taking differently in other cultures
- Therefore, it lacks some external validity as the findings cannot be generalised to wider populations
When does social information -role taking happen?
6-8 years
When does self-reflective role taking happen?
8-10 years
When does mutual role-taking happen?
10-12 years
