Portrait of a PhD student: Siba Ghrear and social perspective taking

My research investigates the development of social perspective taking in childhood. Particularly, I examine how children begin to make sense of other individuals’ thoughts and beliefs, and how this ability changes across the lifespan. I am also curious about the different factors that either contribute to social perspective taking or interfere with it. For example, I am currently examining the effect of the ‘curse of knowledge’ on social perspective taking. The curse of knowledge is a tendency to overestimate the apparentness of one’s own knowledge when reasoning about less informed perspectives. For example, individuals who know about an outcome of an event are likely to overestimate the likelihood that other people would predict that outcome. This bias causes false impressions of what others may know and limits our ability to understand one another. I examine the developmental trajectory of the curse of knowledge’s effect on social reasoning. I also examine how the curse of knowledge affects children’s social reasoning cross-culturally, and how it relates to social wellbeing. In the near future, I also aim to explore different techniques that can facilitate our ability to overcome this bias when reasoning about other perspectives, and ultimately improve our social perspective-taking capacity.