Recontextualized Knowledge

Rhetoric – Situation – Science Communication

Olaf Kramer, Markus Gottschling, Olaf Kramer, Markus Gottschling

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110676341
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Retorica

Recontextualized Knowledge aims to analyze the communicative situations involved in the popularization of scientific knowledge: their settings, audiences, and the adaptive process of recontextualization in science communication. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this publication brings together essays from rhetoric, linguistics, and psychology as well as political and education sciences to serve as an in-depth exploration of today's communicative situations in science communication.

Part I: Science Communication and the Public Sphere

Where Perspective Taking Can and Cannot Take Us

Sara D. Hodges

Sara Lieber

Kathryn R. Denning

1 Introduction

To rhetoricians, the idea of perspective taking is built right into the field. What is rhetoric, if it is not considering how one’s communication will be perceived by one’s audience? This consideration is critical at the societal level when thinking about mass messaging, including communication about substantial topics like science and governance. At the other end of the scale, social psychologists (along with rhetoricians) have studied perspective taking all the way down to the highly personalized process of one person taking another specific person’s perspective.

This kind of interpersonal perspective taking is intuitively, anecdotally, and often empirically associated with caring motives and prosocial outcomes: perspective taking is a step taken in the direction of greater understanding (for a review, see Hodges et al. 2011). Perspective taking has also been described as a way of “expanding the self” (e.g., see Galinsky et al. 2005) by including other people (and their perspectives) in the self-concept (Galinsky/Moskowitz 2000). Those other people then benefit from the generally self-favoring views and treatment granted to the self (Aron et al. 1991; Batson et al. 2003; Myers/Hodges 2012; Sassenrath et al. 2016; although see Galinsky/Ku 2004). Another path between perspective taking and prosocial behavior runs via perspective taking’s arousal of empathic concern and compassion for others, which in turn triggers altruism in the form of helping (e.g., Batson 1987; Batson et al. 2007; Coke et al. 1978). There is some evidence that both paths also change perspective takers, e.g., by changing their attitudes towards certain groups (Batson et al. 2003; Batson et al. 1997), even when those targets are members of outgroups that are traditionally negatively stereotyped or otherwise maligned (Batson et al. 2002), or by changing perspective takers’ conceptions of themselves (Goldstein/Cialdini 2007). Perspective taking has also been linked to other positive social outcomes such as better negotiation outcomes (e.g., Galinsky et al. 2008) and better close relationships (Verhofstadt et al. 2008).

However, perspective taking is no magical solution for improving human behavior. Despite a substantial body of research showing perspective taking as a means to more harmonious social interactions, perspective taking does not always lead to greater understanding and prosocial outcomes (Hodges et al. 2018; Ku et al. 2015; Sassenrath et al. 2016). Isolated studies demonstrating circumstances under which perspective taking has done no good – or even did harm – have accumulated. To understand these examples better, in this chapter we will first outline the processes and mechanisms that underlie perspective taking. Then, to understand why perspective taking may sometimes “backfire,” – i.e., lead to more strife and greater distance between people, we will examine how altering aspects of perspective-taking contexts and players can inhibit, circumvent, or reverse the positive outcomes traditionally associated with perspective taking.

We will finish the chapter by examining a specific real-life context to further illustrate the puzzle of when perspective taking helps and when it does not – by considering the current political polarization in the United States – in terms of political parties and the implications of that polarization for perceptions of science. In such a highly polarized state, we need perspective taking’s prosocial influence more than ever, but we present evidence that it is exactly under these circumstances that perspective taking can become less effective. As dismaying as this polarization is from a societal point of view, it provides a potential petri dish as the breeding ground for ineffectual or even damaging perspective taking.

2 Basic Beginnings of Perspective Taking

Inherent in perspective taking is first an acknowledgement that there is another perspective to be taken, and then an attempt to take it. Cognition is remarkably egocentric – the default perspective we take is our own. Even among the most sapient beings (humans), an awareness that our perception of the world is at least one degree removed from the actual world requires taking an additional, optional, and generally effortful step. It is in some ways remarkable that we should actually be aware of or consider that there is any perspective other than our own.

Awareness that our own perspective is the default can be understood when considering our visual perspective: where our eyes sit in our heads and where our heads are aimed determines our perspective. However, with a slight adaptation, many of the same tenets of visual perspective apply when thinking about the more metaphorical “conceptual” perspective that is made up of our cultural assumptions, personal experiences, and beliefs. When talking about taking others’ perspectives, we often use visual metaphors (e.g., viewpoint; seeing things from another perspective), both when describing actual visual perspective taking (thinking about what another person literally sees at a particular moment with their eyes) and conceptual perspective taking (thinking about a person’s mental contents in a particular situation or setting). Using visual metaphors for conceptual perspective taking is hard to avoid and almost impossible to resist, which is not surprising, given that the word “perspective” itself stems from the Latin verb “to look.”

Although perspective taking is a challenging and somewhat amazing skill, humans start to show signs of perspective taking at a very young age. Two-yearolds can understand that something is occluding another person’s vision – e.g., “Daddy can’t see the puppy because there is a chair in his line of sight” (see Flavell et al. 1978; Moll/Tomasello 2006). Early acquisition of visual perspective-taking skills is perhaps not surprising, given that attending to other people’s line of gaze plays a key role in children’s learning of language (Brooks/Meltzoff 2015): young children need to know what Mom and Dad are looking at to figure out what the words their parents utter refer to. By kindergarten, at age 4 or 5, most children can “construct” what someone else with a different vantage point sees – e.g., “I can see that the other kid is Daniel, but Mama doesn’t know it, because she can only see the back of his head” (see Flavell et al. 1981).

Around 3 years of age, children enter a “magical” age, when they are said to start acquiring a “theory of mind.” This theory, in short, is an understanding that the contents of other people’s minds guide other people’s perceptions and behavior, and the contents of other people’s minds may differ from one’s own, resulting in sometimes predictable differences in beliefs and desires (Wellman 1990). So, a 4-year-old can start to wrap her head around the idea that “Mama thinks we are having chicken for dinner because that’s what Papa told her this morning, but really we’re having pizza because it’s Mama’s birthday!” This developmental milestone can contribute to new heights of deviousness, too (Talwar/Lee 2008), such as, “If I put my brother’s shoes next to the muddy footprints that I made on the carpet, everyone will think he tracked in the mud, not me.”

3 Seeing and Believing

The fact that evidence of visual perspective taking emerges earlier in children than evidence of conceptual perspective taking has been used to suggest that visual perspective taking is a skill upon which conceptual perspective is built (see Hamilton et al. 2009). Although this ordering could in part be an artifact introduced by the fact that current measures of conceptual perspective taking require verbal skills that young children haven’t yet acquired, visual perspective taking does seem intuitively simpler in some ways than conceptual perspective taking. What people visually “see” seems more rooted in the physical properties of the objects – that is, there is an external referent they can attend to in order to gain information about what another person can see. If, for example, someone is facing us as we stand across from them, then it seems highly likely that their left arm will appear on the right side for us. Consistent with this, the most predictable and determined cases of visual perspective taking may be when someone else’s visual perspective is altered from our own by 180 degrees – e.g., something exactly defined as opposite to our own. Indeed, there is some suggestion that the cognitive process used in perspective taking may be somewhat different in this case than when the angle is different (Cavallo et al. 2017; Erle/Topolinski 2017; see also Surtees et al. 2013).

In contrast, when it comes to conceptual perspective taking, what the other person could be “seeing” is less determined by physical cues in the “real world” like light and angles and may largely be the product of integrating a wide possible range of mental constructs stored or even created in the head of the perspective taker (e.g., Hodges et al. 2018; Lewis et al. 2012). If in the last election, someone voted conservative and we voted liberal, then guessing that their views on gay marriage will be (politically) “on the right” of ours is perhaps a good place to start, but is far from certain. They may be to the political right in terms of fiscal issues, but maybe not on social ones. Or, they may be generally more socially conservative, but because of their sexual orientation, they may be pro-gay marriage and hold other pro-gay views that even exceed the average liberal.

These examples highlight another potentially important difference between visual and conceptual perspective taking: when taking visual perspectives, we can acknowledge that things “look different from here” but there is a sense that there is some objective reality out there: “the dress really is black and blue, even if it looks gold and white to you” (e.g., see discussion and research about the appearance of the online viral phenomenon of “the dress” by Chetverikov/Ivanchei 2016; and by Wallisch 2017). However, when it comes to conceptual perspective taking – for example, trying to see how an interaction could have looked like flirting to a co-worker, or to understand how much a homebuyer values hardwood floors, there is likely no “objective reality” about an external referent to consult. And although there is fascinating research on how non-visual variables can impact what people literally visually see (e.g., Proffitt et al. 1995) or remember seeing (e.g., Loftus/Palmer 1974), it would seem that individual “perspectives” on social matters have the potential to be shaped by – and constructed from – a wider range of variables than individual visual perspectives.

4 Anchors and Effort

At minimum, visual perspective taking provides a useful analogy for conceptual perspective taking, and possibly more (Erle/Topolinski 2015). Erle/Topolinski (2017) have identified several shared characteristics of visual and conceptual perspective taking. Both forms of perspective taking involve recognizing that a target person has the capability of inner mental states and that the target’s mental states can differ from those of the perceiver. Both forms also create some experience of “self-other overlap” of the perceiver with the target of perspective taking. Research into both visual and conceptual perspective taking has also demonstrated a strong egocentric bias: people automatically adopt their own perspective as a default, and even when they are attempting to take another perspective, suppressing the self’s perspective is hard to do (e.g., Epley et al. 2004; Samson et al. 2010; Todd et al. 2017; Todd et al. 2015). ...