The Relationship of Empathy and Perspective-Taking to Social Decentering

Abstract

<p>Social decentering was coined as a term to encompass being other-oriented in the broadest sense. Piaget (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969) used the term decentering to describe the ability of children to see the physical world from another person’s perspective. For Higgins (1981), role-taking represents movement from egocentrism to decentration. Higgins describes decentration as “the ability to interrelate two or more mental elements in active memory” (p. 131) with that ability continuing to develop, thus increasing the number of mental elements that can be interrelated. Social decentering shares the same basic cognitive processes that are represented in these initial conceptualizations of decentering. However, rather than being limited to a visually oriented perspective as with Piaget, I’ve added the modifier “social” to emphasize an orientation centered on another person – of seeing and feeling the world as another person does. Social decentering is introduced as a new term to represent this other-oriented process because other terms like empathy, perspective-taking, and role-taking are used in a myriad of inconsistent ways or are restrictive in their treatment of other-orientation. However, much of the foundation for social decentering is by necessity drawn from the theory and research generated under the rubrics of empathy, perspective-taking, and role-taking.</p>