The Self in Social Inference

The ability to intuit what other people are thinking and feeling with some degree of accuracy is essential for effective communication and social coordination, making it important to understand both the factors that give rise to and the consequences that follow from perspective taking. In this talk, I’ll provide an overview of a program of research that examines the role of the self as an informational base in reasoning about other people’s mental states. I’ll describe some work that identifies a perceiver-based factor—incidental experiences of anxiety—that can shape people’s reliance on their own visuospatial perspective and self-knowledge when making inferences about what others see and know. I’ll also describe some work that explores how people’s active efforts to consider others' perspectives affect the extent to which they use their own likes and dislikes to guide their inferences about others’ preferences.

Room: 
5101
Event Type: 
Colloquium
Location: 
Tolman Hall
Date: 
Wednesday, October 4, 2017
Time: 
12:10:00
Event Sponsor: 
Personality and Social Research, Institute of
Event Speakers: 
Andrew Todd