Connecting social and spatial cognition: the role of the body in perspective-taking

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thorsten Michael Erle
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 397465598

This project unites the disparate research areas of vuso-spatial and social perspective-taking. It identifies points of contact between the two areas and integrates knowledge from both fields in an innovative way. Social psychologists have investigated social perspective-taking, that is, the ability to imagine how another person is thinking or feeling. It has been shown that instructions to engage in social perspective-taking induce many positive interpersonal outcomes, such as increased prosocial motivation and behavior, more positive attitudes, and feelings of similarity towards another person. But it is still unclear which psychological mechanisms cause these outcomes. Cognitive psychologists mainly have investigated visuo-spatial perspective-taking, that is, the ability to imagine how the world looks for another person. It has been shown that this is an embodied process. 'Embodied' in the sense of the embodied cognition theory means that the body is an important basis for the simulation of higher mental processes. When engaging in visuo-spatial perspective-taking, we simulate a mental rotation of our body schema into the position of another person. While this mechanism of embodied self-transformation has been thoroughly established in previous spatial cognition research, the question whether the embodied transformation has any meaningful social-cognitive or affective consequences has not been investigated yet.The present grant proposal connects these two research areas using an embodied cognition framework: it is predicted that the embodied transformation of the self into the position of another person is a shared causal mechanism of all kinds of perspective-taking that also creates the well-known effects of social perspective-taking. The physical closeness that is being simulated during the embodied transformation is the modal grounding of the psychological closeness that is frequently reported following instructions to engage in social perspective-taking. Specifically, it will be investigated whether an induction of visuo-spatial perspective-taking (and hence physical closeness) causally affects outcomes usually associated with social perspective-taking. Furthermore, it will be investigated whether inductions of psychological distance affect the embodied self-transformation mechanism, that is, whether we have a harder time to adopt the visuo-spatial perspective of, for instance, an unsympathetic person. Finally, it will be tested whether populations that classically exhibit deficits in social perspective-taking (e.g., depressed people or narcissists) also show deficits in visuo-spatial perspective-taking, and whether social perspective-taking and empathy can be improved by a training in visuo-spatial perspective-taking.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Netherlands
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Sascha Topolinski
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Carina Remmers, Ph.D.