Social Decentering

When the three methods produce competing perspectives, decenterers are faced with a dilemma as to which analysis to accept. The three methods can actually interfere with each other and diminish the quality of all the methods. For example, role-taking research with children suggests that children must learn to control the impact of the highly accessible and salient information on self when considering another person’s perspective (Higgins, 1981). A tendency to be egocentric in applying the use of self method of social decentering can undermine the use of the other two methods. Dunning and Hayes (1996) found participants to be egocentric in their social judgments about others, most frequently using themselves as the source of comparison, followed ...