Taking Another Person's Perspective Increases Self-Referential Neural Processing

The ability to adopt the perspective of another person has been identified as a critical component of social functioning that predicts level of empathic concern for other individuals (Davis, 1983) and level of category-based responding toward out-groups (Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000). One explanation for these effects holds that in taking another person’s perspective, one comes to treat that person as more ‘‘selflike’’; indeed, the extent to which perceivers describe another person as sharing their own personality attributes increases after they imagine an event from that person’s perspective (Davis, Conklin, Smith, & Luce, 1996). An alternative explanation, however, is that perspective taking might lead only to a shift in non-self-based social-cognitive processes deployed when considering the minds of others (Mitchell, Heatherton, & Macrae, 2002). How exactly does taking another person’s perspective lead to greater overlap between self and other? Recent neuroimaging findings suggest a novel way to test the proposal that perspective taking increases self-based processing of others. Studies have shown that a region of human ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC) is preferentially engaged by self-referential mentation, such as introspecting about one’s own personality characteristics (Kelley et al., 2002) or one’s attitudes and preferences (Mitchell, Macrae, & Banaji, 2006). Accordingly, to the extent that perspective taking does lead to greater overlap in the cognitive processes engaged by consideration of self and other, activity in vMPFC should differentiate less between self and a person whose perspective has recently been adopted than between self and a person considered from a more distal advantageous.