Consequences of Perspective Taking: Some Uncharted Avenues

The presence of conspecifics may affect one’s cognitive processing in a variety of ways. Most effects fall beyond simple social facilitation: we are not only faster in performing a task when we do it with others, but also take into consideration their internal mental states, what they see, know or believe. While there may be clear benefits of taking the perspective of another agent for behavioral predictions, serving social coordination, or defeating competitors, it seems that we generate assumptions about others’ mental states even if the situation does not require it. Current debates target how spontaneous these processes are, and whether they are best described with higher- or lower-level mechanisms. Despite the intensity of the debate, however, we have scarce knowledge regarding the nature of these processes and the influence they exert over our first-person interpretations and inferential commitments. Here we propose that another agent’s presence triggers not only considering and sustaining multiple perspectives on the world, but may also influence the level of description that will be prioritized. To illustrate this point, we analyze examples involving linguistic quantification. Specifically, we discuss whether the perspective of others may (i) foster a more fine-grained retention of episodic information when assessing quantified abstractions, which do not presuppose the consideration of these details, and (ii) lead young learners to widen their semantic commitments when interpreting ambiguous statements.