SELMAN’S LEVELS OF PERSPECTIVE TAKING: Cognition and Development

SELMAN’S LEVELS OF PERSPECTIVE TAKING (DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL COGNITION)

Social Cognition refers to the mental processes we use when engaged in social interaction.

Perspective-taking is our ability to appreciate a situation from another person’s point of view. In a social context, this means understanding what others are thinking and feeling.

Selman (1971) looked at changes (that occur with age) in the response of children when they take the role of a different person in a social situation. 30 boys and 30 girls (aged 4,5 and 6) took part and it involved them being ask how each person felt in various scenarios. Several distinct levels of perspective-taking were identified, that correlated with age- which suggests that perspective-talking develops in a clear developmental sequence. This lead to the development of 5-stages of social cognitive development.

Stage 0 (3-6 years)	Socially egocentric	The child cannot reliably distinguish between their emotions and the emotions of others. They can generally identify emotional states in others but do not understand what social behaviour might have caused them.
Stage 1 (6-8 years)	Social Information Role-taking	The child can now tell the difference between their own point of view and that of others, but they can usually focus on only one of these perspectives.
Stage 2 (8-10 years)	Self-reflective Role-taking	At this stage, the child can put themselves in the position of another person and fully appreciate their perspective. The can, however, only take on board one point of view at a time.
Stage 3 (10-12 years)	Mutual Role-taking	Children are now able to look at a situation from their own and another person’s point of view at the same time.
Stage 4 (12 years+)	Social and conventional system Role-taking	They become able to see that sometimes understanding others’ viewpoints is not enough to allow people to reach agreement. This is why social conventions are needed to keep order.

Selman believed that development through these stages is based on both maturity and experience.

EVALUATION OF SELMAN’S WORK ON PERSPECTIVE-TAKING:

Strength:
P: Selman found a significant positive correlation between age and perspective-taking, which was further supported by longitudinal studies.
E: Gurucharri and Selman (1982) studied children as they grew up and it was found that in all these children, perspective-taking developed with age.
E: This shows that perspective-taking abilities do improve with age, providing support for Selman’s ideas.

Strength:
P: Selman’s research has important applications in understanding atypical development
E: Children with ADHD, and those on the autistic spectrum, have problems with perspective-taking; Selman’s perspective-taking tasks have been used to compare these children to control groups.
E: Shows that Selman’s work has been very useful in helping us understand and identify atypical development.

Weakness:
P: Mixed evidence for the importance of perspective-taking
E: For example, Gasser and Keller (2009) found that bullies displayed no difficulties in perspective taking
E: This is a problem as it suggests that perspective-taking might not be an important factor in the development of social behaviour

Weakness:
P: There are cultural differences
E: Wu and Keysar (2007) showed that young adult Chinese participants did significantly better in the perspective-taking tasks than a group of matched Americans.
E: This shows that there’s more to the development of perspective-taking than just cognitive maturity, because differences must also be due to different cultural inputs.