Perspective-Taking

= Introduction to perspective-taking

From: An Integral Map of Perspective-Taking. Clint Fuhs

The full text of this paper can be downloaded at: http://old.experienceintegral.org/uploads/media/Fuhs_Perspective-taking-Appendix.pdf

Abstract

By combining past insights into the nature of perspective-taking with an innovative application of leading-edge concepts in Integral Theory, this article offers the most comprehensive description of the territory of perspective-taking. It traces perspectival development through four levels of increasing complexity, shows how different types of perspective-taking enact phenomena in each of the quadrants, and utilizes the integral math notation to detail over 1,700 perspectival expressions emerging as individuals develop through the teal altitude.

Excerpts

Introduction:

"The capacity for perspective-taking enables humans to understand and experience reality as it is seen and felt by others. By deploying attention through the eyes of another, we can achieve insight into the contours of vast realms of experience beyond our own. Several decades of study implicate this fundamental mechanism of relation as a central facilitative faculty in the cross-domain development of humans. From cognitive to interpersonal and affective to self-sense, development in many domains progresses in accordance with an individual’s ability to take perspectives.

This cross-domain prevalence suggests a more fundamental role for perspective-taking in the unfolding of human development. The subject-object dynamic shifting at the core of perspectivetaking is recapitulated in the subject–object transformations that occur between macrodevelopmental stage shifts. This recapitulating form is how development primarily occurs: the subject of one level becomes the object of the subject of the next more-encompassing level. The phylogenetic emergence of new waves of development happens similarly: each new level transcends the previous level by adding novel capacities while including the capacities of earlier levels. If perspective-taking indeed holds a key role in development, a comprehensive map describing its core structure could prove beneficial to a deeper understanding of the central dynamics at play across development in all domains. While the investigation of perspective-taking has primarily occurred in relation to particular skill domains, an integral map of perspectival unfolding that covers the individual and collective aspects of both the perceptual and conceptual arenas, has yet to be constructed.

The aim of this article is to propose such a map, and then use it to describe the extent of the actual territory of perspective-taking available to humans as they develop. The prospect of constructing this map rests squarely on the All-Levels and All-Quadrants components of Ken Wilber’s Integral Approach, and also builds upon previous work describing perspectival development.

Range of perspective-taking definitions

A brief exploration of the several definitions and types of perspective-taking illustrates the need for a integrated map. Before elucidating the core foundational element upon which this map is built, an integration of the partial truths of past approaches delineates the context in which the map rests. It also defines the range that an integrated definition of perspective-taking must take into account.

A loose categorization of the range perspective-taking definitions yields three general groupings:

(1) Those which equate perspective-taking with role-taking,

(2) those which relegate perspective-taking to the realm of objects and points-of-view, and

(3) those which place perspective-taking in the realm of making assumptions or inferences about another person’s attitudes, thoughts, and feelings.

In addition to suggesting what perspective-taking is, they also indicate what domain perspective-taking attempts to enact: (1) perceptual, (2) conceptual, and (3) interpersonal. Together, the three definitions and three types comprise the first foundational element of an integral perspective-taking map.

The first definition concerns role-taking, an essential social-interpersonal skill, which forms the basis of the first type of perspective-taking. While investigating the connection between role-taking and moral judgments, Robert Selman, in reference to John Flavell’s pioneering work on the development of role-taking in children, equates perspective-taking with role-taking, which he defines as “…the ability to understand the interaction between the self and another as seen through the other’s eyes.”

Writing on the same topic in a paper proposing four levels of role-taking he expands the definition slightly to read: “…the ability to view the word (including the self) from another’s perspective.”

A few years later, in describing interpersonal cognition, he gives role-taking a more nuanced description: “…the ability to understand self and others as subjects, to react to others as like the self, and to react to the self’s behavior from the other’s point of view.”3 The expansion of Selman’s definitions towards more inclusive and nuanced articulations points out a key aspect of an integrated definition of perspective-taking.

Equating perspective-taking with role-taking, while partially true, limits the former to only a portion of the developmental territory it truly describes. Additionally, it almost exclusively emphasizes the interpersonal type. Selman explains that in addition to applying to the impersonal domain, Piaget’sconcepts of egocentrism—present with preoperational thinking—and decentration—a characteristicof operational thinking—also enables perspective-taking in the interpersonal domain.

Interpersonalperspective-taking, or that which concerns the perspectives of at least two people, one subject and one object, implicitly elucidates two of the four primary domains utilized in the unified map.

First, is the collective domain, or that which concerns two or more individuals, and second, the individual domain, which, while not explicitly mentioned as a type of perspective-taking, is a requisite element for the construction of the interpersonal type. The next class of definitions offers another essential element to an integrated approach to perspective-taking.

Prior to the emergence of simple role-taking capacities, perspective-taking is deployed on a world of objects as seen from various points of view. In an exploration of object construction, Edith Ackerman, defines perspective-taking as the “…ability to experience and describe the presentation of an object or display from different vantage points.”5 In a similar object-oriented fashion, Harriet Salatas writing with Flavell, confines perspective-taking to the developmental capacity to realize that different subjects, in different positions, have different views of the same object.6 While again limiting perspective-taking to an undersized portion of its full territory, this class of definitions offers an important partial truth.

Perspective-taking, in addition to enacting the individual and collective domains, also reveals how different subjects view objective reality. Called perceptual or spatial perspective-taking, this second type enables inferences to be made about visual, auditory, tactile or other perceptual experience of both self and other.7 Lawrence Kurdek and Maris Rodgon follow Ackerman in describing perceptual perspective-taking as the ability to take another person’s perceptual viewpoint.8 Other objective phenomena can be added to this, such as behavior, physical characteristics, and sensory data, each of which are enacted via perspective-taking in the third domain of exterior reality.

Moving from the realm of the objective to that of the subjective, the final class of definitions attempts to gain insight into the inner experience of others. Richard Boland and Ramkrishnan Tenkasi’s exploration of perspective-taking in organizations rests yielded a definition featuring individual’s assumptions about the knowledge, beliefs and motives of others.9 Kurdek follows a similar thread, defining cognitive perspective-taking as the ability to infer the thoughts, attitudes, and intentions of another person.10 Again with a focus on the subjective experience of others, Robert Marvin sees perspective-taking as an inferential rather than perceptual process through which the needs, intentions, opinions, beliefs, emotions, and thinking of others are experienced.11 The shift from objective perception to subjective experience introduces conceptual perspective-taking, the third and final type.

Broadly defined by Marvin to include the less-tangible aspects of another’s internal experience, conceptual perspective-taking subsumes the various elements that appear in each of these definitions. These include: affective perspective-taking or the ability to assess the emotions, attitudes, and feelings of self and other; and cognitive-perspective-taking or the ability to assess the thought, beliefs, knowledge and intentions of self and others. Phenomena accessed via the conceptual type resides in the fourth and final domain of interior perspective-taking.

An integrated look at the types of perspective-taking delineated by these classifications yields two distinctions—interior/exterior and individual/collective— which overlap in a manner that constitutes the four domains of the All-Quadrants component of the Integral map.

These quadrant domains are the four dimensions of reality enacted via perspective-taking:

(1) interior-individual,

(2) exterior-individual,

(3) interior-collective, and

(4) exterior-collective.

Fueled by the spirit of unremitting integration, the significant contributions of past researchers are now combined with those resulting from empirical investigation into sequence of perspectival unfolding. Taken together, these two components provide the cornerstones of an integral map.

Levels of Perspective-Taking

Over the last three decades, the empirical investigations of several researchers have contributed to our understanding of the structural unfolding of perspective–taking ability. Despite variance in both methods and general understanding of the nature of perspective-taking, the proposed stage models are strikingly similar if compared at the level of core structure rather than surface-level descriptions.

As a result, the empirical foundations provided by this work must be included in a integral map of perspective-taking. What follows is a brief description of the stage models of four researchers: Selman and Byrne, investigating role-taking in the context of moral dilemmas; Flavell, exploring taking in a social problem solving and communication context; Melvin Feffer and Vivian Gourevitch, utilizing a projective story-telling approach; and Susanne Cook-Greuter, postulating levels of perspective-taking as a product of ego development.14 The comparison of their respective levels is aided by grouping them into four conceptual rather than empirical stages.

Stage 0

At the earliest stage of perspective-taking, children are living an entirely egocentric existence that prevents them from taking a perspective beyond their own. Selman and Byrne, referring to this stage as egocentric role-taking, found children unable to distinguish between their true or correct perspective and the personal interpretation by self or other of social action. Flavell’s research uncovers a similar initial stage in which children are unable to recognize that another person has choice, which they offer without justification. Susanne Cook-Greuter recognizes two stages of ego development—symbiotic and impulsive—which could fall in this Stage 0 grouping. At symbiotic stages, children are unaware of themselves as separate entities, and at the impulsive level, they are limited to a first-person perspective, which provides insight into their own experience but not another person’s experience.17 Feffer and Gourevitch did not describe a stage falling into this grouping.

Stage 1

The next stage of perspective-taking emerges early in development and with it comes the ability to recognize that others have perspectives different from one’s own. The subjective role-taking stage discovered by Selman and Byrne features the ability to understand that others have subjectivity and that they have different interpretations or experiences of a social situation because they have access to different information. Flavell discovered children recognize that others have cognitions about themselves and other external objects.19 Feffer and Gourevitch’s first level, called simple refocusing, features an ability to retell a story from another person’s perspective with a concomitant inability to coordinate between these perspectives, thereby affecting accuracy.20 Cook-Greuter’s self-protective (also called opportunist) stage features an advancement of the first-person perspective to include the awareness that another person has a perspective but not an understanding of the content of that perspective.

Stage 2

The next level of perspectival emergence refines the previous level by adding a reciprocity or coordination of perspectives that are at the same level of complexity. Called self-reflective role-taking by Selman and Byrne, this level expands awareness of another person’s perspective by adding the ability to recognize that others think and feel differently because they are themselves subjects who have perspectives on the self. This carries with it the ability to reflect on the self from the perspective of another person. Flavell’s research also indicated that children at this stage may change their behavior because they realize their own thoughts and motivations may be the objects of another’s perspective-taking. The consistent elaboration stage, described by Feffer and Gourevitch, shows similar pattern of sequential coordination between the perspectives of self and other.24 Cook-Greuter describes the next two stages—rule-oriented and conformist—as featuring a similar reciprocal awareness of second-person perspectives. Whereas the self-protective stage limits the comparisons to simple, external appearances, conformist expands them to include perspectives of interior phenomena.

Stage 3

At stage 3, the last empirically recognized level of perspective-taking, a simultaneous, rather than sequential, coordination of perspectives emerges.

Selman and Byrne describe their mutual role-taking stage as bringing on line two important abilities:

(1) the understanding of the self’s view of other and the other’s view of self simultaneously, and

(2) the emerging ability to differentiate the view of self and other from that of a generalized other or third person.

Flavell describes this stage as an infinite regress where the self understands that another understands that the self knows their strategy. While worded differently than Selman’s description, the simultaneity of perspective coordination is the same. Level 3, called change of perspective by Feffer and Gourevitch, also recognizes the simultaneous coordination of perspectives in interpersonal perception. Cook Greuter’s next stage, called self-aware or expert, is characterized in a manner similar to Selman’s level 3 insofar as she reports the emergence of a third-person perspective. However, she describes it differently, qualifying the capacity as the act of looking at self and other as an object from a generalized third-person point of view.

Levels Beyond Stage 3

Deviating from the work of other researchers, the integral map of perspective-taking follows Cook- Greuter’s lead in postulating levels beyond the third-person perspective.

Common to both is the movement away from empirically-derived levels into the realm of the conceptual. While Cook-Greuter’s stages of ego development are based on a substantial body of empirical evidence, her treatment of perspective-taking beyond the expert stage thins out substantially, relying mostly on diagrams over concrete articulations on how perspective-taking unfolds beyond the third-person perspective."