Title

Teaching social perspective taking: How educators might learn from the Army

Authors

Hunter Gehlbach, The Johns Hopkins UniversityFollow
Lissa V. Young, United States Military AcademyFollow

Files

Contributing USMA Research Unit(s)

Behavioral Sciences and Leadership

Publication Date

5-2012

Publisher

Routledge Publishing

Document Type

Article

Description

Frequently and accurately discerning others’ thoughts and feelings is associated with multiple valued educational outcomes across an array of settings. Despite its foundational role in social interactions, it is unclear whether individuals can be taught to improve their social perspective taking capacities. This experiment assesses whether a curriculum taught to US Army personnel (N = 116) improved their social perspective taking prior to deployment. Results showed that participants improved their social perspective taking in three ways: through more accurately detecting biases in others, by generating more initial hypotheses to explain others’ behaviours, and by adapting their hypotheses in the face of new evidence. The curriculum did not affect participants’ perspective taking accuracy on a video measure. We discuss these findings with respect to their implications for other learning environments.

Publisher City

London

Keywords

social perspective taking; social cognition; interpersonal understanding; bias; person perception

Volume

32

Recommended Citation

Gehlbach, H., Young, L. Roan, L., (2012) Teaching social perspective taking: How educators might learn from the Army, Educational Psychology, 32(3), 295-309.