Self-awareness, Perspective-taking, and Egocentrism

Abstract

The present experiment examined the effect of self-awareness on adult perspective-taking and egocentrism. After having indicated their own opinion on an ecology-related topic, university students estimated a fellow student’s opinion on the same matter. Participants did so either in front of a mirror or not, and either after having received a cue for the fellow student’s most probable opinion—his perspective—or not, resulting in a 2 (self-awareness: Low vs. high) × 2 (cue: Yes vs. no) between persons design. As expected, self-aware participants were more likely to correctly estimate the fellow student’s most probable opinion, reflecting perspective-taking, if a cue for his/her perspective was provided. Moreover, self-awareness also reduced participants’ false consensus beliefs (i.e., egocentrism)—when they had a cue for the fellow student’s perspective. The results conceptually replicate and extend previous findings on self-awareness, perspective-taking, and egocentrism.

Keywords:

• Self-awareness
• perspective-taking
• false consensus

Notes

1. For an easier understanding of the reported results, we have transformed effect sizes for 1 degree of freedom tests (r) to eta-square.

2. Given that participants’ own opinions differed between the conditions before the manipulation, we additionally tested if this variable was related to the consideration of the cue for the target person’s perspective. This was not the case, B = −.12, Wald statistic = .23, p = .62. Moreover, controlling for participants’ own opinion let the self-awareness × cue interaction intact (p = .04).

3. To test for potential gender effects, we ran also a 2 (self-awareness) × 2 (cue) ANCOVA with participants’ gender as covariate. The covariate itself had no significant effect (F < 1, p = .54) and the self-awareness main effect (p < .001) and the interaction (p = .005) remained significant.