How to eliminate (and even reverse) egocentric bias in perspective taking

The ability to be objective about the perspectives of others is often compromised by interference from our own knowledge, beliefs and perceptions – an egocentric bias. However, recent research in visual perspective taking has found that this bias is eliminated immediately following a trial in which an alternative visual perspective is taken, suggesting egocentricity is flexible and can be eliminated under certain conditions. We examined such flexibility in relation to manual action. In contrast to other domains of perspective taking where egocentricity is usually problematic, egocentricity in manual action, even in the context of perspective taking, is usually useful, enabling accurate goal-directed movements based on real spatial relationships between the self and the environment (rather than on an imagined perspective). Eliminating egocentricity in manual action would thus make a particularly strong case for the flexibility of perspective taking. In four experiments, we assessed whether this ‘useful’ egocentric bias is compromised by practice on visual perspective taking tasks. Results showed that practice disambiguating stimuli from other perspectives makes manual actions consistent with second-person perspectives as easy as actions based on the first-person perspective for an equivalent time period afterwards.