Social Decentering

Mark Redmond

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783110515800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Social decentering theory was developed in response to the confusion created by the use of the term empathy and to a lesser extent, perspective-taking, to reflect a wide and varied set of human cognitive processes and behaviors. Theory of Social Decentering: A Theory of Other-Orientation Encompassing Empathy and Perspective-Taking, presents an innovative approach to the social cognitive process by which humans take into consideration the thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and dispositions of other people. The multidimensional theory and measure of social decentering represents a unifying theory that identifies and incorporates key elements imbedded in other-oriented terms.

The first chapters present the theory and development of a measure of social decentering in a complete and detailed manner examining the important role that social decentering plays in human communication.

The remaining chapters of the book examine the role that social decentering, empathy, and perspective-taking play in the development and management of interpersonal relationships, in marital relationships, in teams and group interactions, and in the workplace.

The final chapter examines the negative consequences to individuals, decisions, and relationships potentially created by engaging in social decentering.

The appendices include copies of the measure of social decentering and the measure of relationship-specific social decentering.

The book is of interest for graduates in communication studies, psychology, and sociology, and valuable for communication and social psychology scholars interested in empathy or perspective taking.

1Theory of Social Decentering Part 1: Activation, Input, and Analysis

A husband and wife are sitting down for dinner together. The husband is thinking about whether he should tell his wife about the clerk who flirted with him earlier in the day when he went to the store. He decides not to share the story because he believes it will make his wife feel jealous and insecure. At work, the boss snapped at several of the employees about their shoddy work and lack of professionalism before returning to her office and slamming the door. One employee who knows the boss well attributes this behavior to the boss’s recent conflicts with higher management and pressure to improve productivity. A teacher has a student who is struggling in his course. The student is exasperated because she is unable to understand the material adequately enough to do well on the tests and assignments. Though the instructor doesn’t know the student well, his own experience as an undergraduate in a course that exasperated him provides a basis for understanding some of the student’s feelings. In each of the three scenarios, a person is able to consider the situation at hand from another person’s perspective. This ability to consider another person’s perspective, to be other-centered (an effort that enhances our ability to effectively communicate, to manage relationships, and to achieve personal goals), is the focus of the social decentering theory.

1.1Defining Social Decentering

Social decentering was coined as a term to encompass being other-oriented in the broadest sense. Piaget (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969) used the term decentering to describe the ability of children to see the physical world from another person’s perspective. For Higgins (1981), role-taking represents movement from egocentrism to decentration. Higgins describes decentration as “the ability to interrelate two or more mental elements in active memory” (p. 131) with that ability continuing to develop, thus increasing the number of mental elements that can be interrelated. Social decentering shares the same basic cognitive processes that are represented in these initial conceptualizations of decentering. However, rather than being limited to a visually oriented perspective as with Piaget, I’ve added the modifier “social” to emphasize an orientation centered on another person – of seeing and feeling the world as another person does. Social decentering is introduced as a new term to represent this other-oriented process because other terms like empathy, perspective-taking, and role-taking are used in a myriad of inconsistent ways or are restrictive in their treatment of other-orientation. However, much of the foundation for social decentering is by necessity drawn from the theory and research generated under the rubrics of empathy, perspective-taking, and role-taking.

Social decentering is a multidimensional social cognitive process that involves taking into account another person’s feelings, thoughts, perspectives, and other dispositions in a given situation (Redmond, 1995). Social decentering is considering or experiencing the world as if you are the other person – becoming an ephemeral other. Before presenting a model of social decentering, examining each of the elements in the definition of social decentering provides a clearer understanding of the meaning and boundaries of the concept.

1.1.1Social Decentering as Multidimensional

A conceptual chaos surrounds the definitions of empathy, perspective-taking, and role-taking (see reviews by Cuff, Brown, Taylor, & Howat, 2016; Hojat, 2016; or the debate between Zaki, 2017 and Bloom, 2017). One significant problem relates to treating being other-centered as a unidimensional concept, for example, focusing only on the cognitive aspect or the affective aspect rather than on both. Gehlbach (2004) recognized this problem when he developed a multidimensional alternative to perspective-taking that he labeled “social perspective-taking.” In a similar vein, social decentering is conceptualized as a multidimensional process, with four distinct stages: activation, input (information retrieval, seeking, or creation), analysis (information processing), and response (output). The input consists of two dimensions: observed and recalled experience-based information, and imagination-based information. The analysis stage has three options: use of information and analysis based on the self, use of information and analysis based on the specific-other person, and use of information and analysis based on generalized others (similar to implicit personality theory). Two internal responses occur in the next stage: a cognitive response (understanding and analysis) and an affective response (sympathy, empathy, or other emotions). Each of the stages and their constituent parts are discussed in detail later in this chapter.

1.1.2Social Decentering as Social Cognition

In as much as social cognition concerns itself with “the mental processes involved in perceiving, attending to, remembering, thinking about, and making sense of the people in our social world” (Moskowitz, 2005, p. 3), social decentering is a social cognitive process. Social decentering involves people thinking about and feeling the world from other people’s perspectives – processing what they perceive, remember, and imagine about other people. Then, as a social cognitive process, social decentering relies on person perception, impression formation, schemas, dispositional inferences, and stereotypes while being subject to biases, priming, processing errors, and inaccuracies. Social decentering also facilitates other social cognition processes, such as attribution, which involves generating explanations for another person’s behavior (Heider, 1958). Social decentering can be used to produce and evaluate possible explanations. But while attribution seeks to identify the reason or cause for an observed behavior (Moskowitz, 2005), social decentering can be used to anticipate behavior and reactions and to develop and adapt strategies to effectively achieve goals when interacting with others. And, unlike attribution which is conducted only from the attributor’s vantage point, social decentering focuses on trying to understand what has occurred or will occur from the perspective of the other person. One attribution phenomenon, fundamental attribution bias, actually represents an antithesis of social decentering. Because of fundamental attribution bias, individuals fail to consider the impact of circumstance when generating explanations for other people’s actions. In contrast, the social decenterer specifically takes into consideration the given situation.

Social decentering is also a social cognitive ability or skill. The process of taking into consideration another person’s dispositions involves conscious effort, and as such, making effort can be learned, developed, and improved. However, successful social decentering depends on other social cognitive abilities, such as person perception, attribution, decision-making, deduction, strategic planning, emotional intelligence, and general social information processing. Some people are better social decenterers than others, and this variation can be measured. As with any skill, social decentering changes over time and from situation to situation. The skill can begin to develop early in childhood, continue to develop throughout life, stagnate in development, or even deteriorate. Changes in social decentering affect a person’s self-concept, interpersonal relationships, and success in meeting social goals.

1.1.3Social Decentering as a Taking into Account

The taking into account part of social decentering involves the cognitive process of managing information and is a critical component of the overall theory and model of social decentering. In some instances, such taking into account occurs as a predictive process in which individuals’ anticipation of interactions leads them to analyze the person or people they expect to encounter. In developing and considering their interaction strategies, individuals might take into account the other people involved to enhance their selection of the most effective strategy. Then during interactions, individuals might take into account the behaviors of the other interactants when considering how to act and respond. Obviously, time is a critical factor in the amount of deliberation and processing that can occur. For example, a manager approaches a computer programmer and asks the programmer to work over the weekend, which the programmer would prefer not to do (any similarity to Office Space is purely accidental). The programmer has only a brief moment of time to take into account the manager while creating a reply to both save face and keep the weekend free.

While such taking into account generates understanding, usually an explanation of another person’s behavior (attribution), it also contributes to the general impression formation process by aiding in the establishment of constructs about a particular person. Unexpected behaviors can stimulate the search for an explanation of the behavior (this is elaborated on further in the chapter). Explanations can be generated by this process of taking into account, specifically about the person who has behaved unexpectedly. Causal attribution theory identifies three potential causes for a person’s behavior: the circumstance, the stimulus, and the person. Taking into account the person involves analyzing the person as the cause of the behavior. Traditionally, determination of cause is related to the consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness of information. However, the information is often insufficient to make a complete analysis of these three factors, and researchers blame errors in such processing to attributional biases or experimental shortcomings (Försterling, 2001). Social decentering offers another way that individuals can determine the cause of another person’s behavior – by taking into account the other person’s behavior from the other person’s perspective. In essence, is the behavior consistent with how one expects another person to behave based on what is known about that person? The halo and horn effects represent a broad, though biased, application of this process. Such analyses might lead to the conclusion that the behavior does not fit the existing schema resulting in an attribution of cause to circumstance or stimulus, which might explain why such attributions are found in research even without the covariance associated with consensus, consistency, or distinctiveness.

Taking into account can produce constructs that become part of a schema. In forming impressions of other people, individuals observe a person’s behavior, attribute a cause to the behavior, and then, if the cause is attributed to a person, they add that to the schema they develop of the other person. When observed behaviors result in new attributions about an individual, they become fodder for subsequent social decentering. In this way, social decentering has a reciprocal relationship with attribution, in that social decentering contributes to attributions and attributions contribute to social decentering.

1.1.4Social Decentering as a Focus on Dispositions Held by Others

A person’s feelings, thoughts, perspectives, and other dispositions are what get taken into account through social decentering. The phrase feelings, thoughts, perspectives, and other dispositions is used as shorthand for taking into account as much as possible about what constitutes the other person – becoming an ephemeral other. In essence, social decentering involves considering another person’s cognitive and affective dispositions. Feelings, thoughts, and perspectives represent three significant dispositions to which other-oriented processes are attuned. Recognition that considering another person’s feelings differs from considering another person’s thoughts has resulted in distinguishing affective empathy from cognitive empathy. Davis (2005) sees six aims of perspective-taking (in its broadest definition); determining the thoughts, emotions, perceptual points of view, motives, goals, and intentions of other people. Krauss and Fussell (1996) see perspective-taking as considering the other person’s background knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes; current interpretations of stimuli and events; plans, goals, and attitudes; social context; physical context, speech style, emotional state, and current state of message comprehension. They conclude that “virtually any aspect of a person might be thought of part of his/ her perspective, and something that at least potentially should be taken into consideration when formulating a message” (p. 674). Similarly, social decentering has a broad set of goals and draws upon the full breadth of information people might garner if they experience the world as another person does. Social decentering involves considering the other person’s feelings, thoughts, values, beliefs, background, experiences, knowledge, needs, motives, relationships, and more. At the extreme, social decenterers might temporarily become the other person. Popular media has reflected this extreme with shows about law enforcement profilers who take on a criminal’s persona to better understand and anticipate the criminal’s next move. In some ways, everyday people are also profilers. Just as professional profilers gather as much information as they can about their targets, everyday people gather as much information as they can about the people with whom they interact to enhance their social decentering.

1.1.5Social Decentering as Contextually Bound

Finally, social decentering occurs relative to a given situation; that is, individuals take into consideration the context surrounding the target of their decentering. We are generally motivated to engage in social decentering because something about a given situation triggers our need to consider the other. We become concerned with why a person has reacted to a given situation or stimulus or how that other person might react to an anticipated situation or stimulus. Why did our friend suddenly hang up on us? Why was our boss in such a good mood today? How will my spouse react if I end up being an hour late for dinner tonight? Answering these questions involves considering a particular person in a particular situation. Thus, social decentering means analyzing another person within a specific context rather than simply forming an impression in general. Participants in Gerace, Day, Casey, and Mohr’s (2013) study reported that their perspective-taking efforts involved consideration of personal information about the other and information about the situation or context. A manager might have an impression of an employee as hardworking and mild mannered. In considering whether to promote the employee to shift supervisor, the manager can use social decentering to apply that impression in considering how well the employee could handle the given situation – managing others.

The ability to consider a given situation further extends the complexity of social decentering, which requires awareness and knowledge of the qualities and nuances that make up a given situation. Individuals not only need a variety of social cognitive skills, they need to be aware of and sensitive to the interplay between the external circumstances and the internal states of other people. For example, if the manager promoted an employee to shift supervisor, but failed to consider the dynamics and relationships that existed among the other employees, the manager might be surprised when the employee fails to successfully manage the shift. Such a problem was part of the reason Fiedler (1968) developed a contingency model of leadership which recognized that just because a person is a good leader in one situation, does not automatically mean that the person will be successful in a different situation. Fiedler focused on identifying the elements that make up a given situation relative to particular leadership styles. In essence, his approach considers a person’s leadership qualities in a given situation.

The cognitive activity that occurs in attending to the context or situation, which has been labeled event schemas, scripts, event prototypes, and event stereotypes, produces generalizations about how people act in a given situation. These event generalizations provide another basis for both understanding and evaluating a person’s behavior in a given situation. For example, an individual might hold a set of expectations about how people act at funerals, which are applied in inferring what behaviors a friend displayed while recently attending a funeral. These event generalizations, like the behavioral scripts studied by Schank and Abelson (1977), provide a framework for analyzing another person’s behavior. Understanding the actions of the other person is likely to require greater effort if the script or expectations associated with a given situ...