Can you think with perspective

Perspective taking involves the activation of an entire network of brain regions. When thinking about the mindset of another person, the brain shows activation in the dorsomedial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices responsible for inferring mental states and working memory and selective attention, respectively , as well as the tempoparietal junction social cognition and precuneus memory, integration, mental imagery.

This increases social bonds and reduces stereotypes. This increases social coordination and social bonds. Perspective taking can be a very difficult thing to do. Follow the steps below to test your perspective taking abilities. Step 1. What is it about? Who is it with? How do you feel about it? What steps do you want to take?

Take a few minutes to write down your answers to the previous questions. This can help you process your thoughts and emotions better. Step 2. How do you think they see the conflict? How do you think they feel about it? What were their intentions? Take a few minutes to write about the conflict from the other person s perspective.

Of course, these were judgments of strangers. Our next series of experiments asked people to predict the opinions and preferences of either a stranger they had just met or their romantic partner.

This included predicting whether the person liked particular activities, jokes, videos, or art, or whether they were likely to agree with certain opinions. Once again, participants who were asked to engage in perspective-taking did slightly worse than those given no specific instructions. Our research indicates that you gain understanding about someone only when you acquire new information from them.

Instead of perspective-taking, you need to do some perspective-getting. We tested this idea in a final experiment that included three types of conditions: control, perspective-taking, and perspective-getting.

We found that this perspective-getting significantly increased accuracy, as compared with those who engaged in perspective-taking and those in the control condition. If you want to know what another person thinks about an issue, perhaps the better strategy is simply asking them. This may seem obvious in the abstract, but it was not so obvious to our participants in this experiment. Participants who interviewed their partners did not believe they guessed more questions right than participants in our other conditions.

Accurately understanding other people requires getting perspective, not simply taking it. To understand the mind of another person, we need to rely on our ears more than our intuition. This positron emission tomography PET study investigated by means of a factorial design the interaction between the emotional and the perspective factors. Participants were asked to adopt either their own first person perspective or the third person perspective of their mothers in response to situations involving social emotions or to neutral situations.

The main effect of third-person versus first-person perspective resulted in hemodynamic increase in the medial part of the superior frontal gyrus, the left superior temporal sulcus, the left temporal pole, the posterior cingulate gyrus, and the right inferior parietal lobe.