Exchanging social positions: enhancing perspective taking within a cooperative problem solving task

Gillespie, Alex ORCID: 0000-0002-0162-1269 and Richardson, Beth (2011) Exchanging social positions: enhancing perspective taking within a cooperative problem solving task. European Journal of Social Psychology, 41 (5). pp. 608-616. ISSN 0046-2772

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Abstract

When people occupy different social positions within a cooperative task they experience discrepant role and situation demands and thus have divergent perspectives. The reported research predicts that exchanging social positions within a cooperative task can overcome divergences of perspective. This prediction was tested in two experiments using the Communication Conflict Situation. The first experiment (n = 88) found that position exchange increased the ability of dyads to solve a communication conflict arising through discrepant perspectives. The second experiment (n = 120) found that the effect of position exchange exceeds that of purely cognitive perspective taking, thus suggesting that it cannot be reduced to a purely cognitive process. Exchanging social positions is a newly identified and powerful social mechanism through which perspective taking, within a cooperative task, can be enhanced.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/%28...
Additional Information:	© 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Divisions:	Psychological and Behavioural Science
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Date Deposited:	13 Oct 2011 15:36
Last Modified:	27 Sep 2025 20:00
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/38862

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