Your shoes or mine? Examining perspective taking in social interaction

Social Perspective taking (SPT) is the aptitude to consider others' thoughts, feelings, intentions, and motivations in a particular situation. Our goal was to gain a deeper understanding of SPT by focusing on its dynamic and social nature. Qualitatively analyzing small group dialogues in an 8th-grade humanities classroom, we explore the interplay between the level of SPT acts and dialogical moves. Our findings indicate that SPT in a group dialogue context is a complex practice in which students engage with different perspectives and evaluate how their perspectives differ (or do not differ) compared to the perspectives of others. Specifically, higher levels of SPT acts stem from explaining one's own perspective and by inviting peers to put themselves in someone else's shoes. Accordingly, we offer a novel theoretical conceptualization of how perspective taking takes place in social interaction, describing it as a process of social anchoring and adjustment in which interlocutors develop and adjust their perspective by building on others' ideas and challenging them. Critically, this process transpires through a shift between the first-, second-, and third-person perspective, which include taking on the perspective of fictional characters and their actual peers.