Person:

Gehlbach, Hunter

People are intrinsically motivated to connect to others socially. One of the most important mechanisms in fostering social relationships is social perspective taking (SPT) – our capacity to discern the thoughts and feelings of others. Thus, students in social studies classrooms might be motivated to engage with their subject either through taking the perspectives of their peers in class (interpersonal SPT) or through taking the perspectives of the historical and cultural figures they are studying (academic SPT). This article first provides a theoretical overview of the contrasts and similarities between these two forms of SPT. Next, it describes three examples of how these two forms of SPT might be implemented in teaching social studies.

The process of social perspective taking holds tremendous promise as a means to facilitate conflict resolution. Despite rapidly accumulating knowledge about social perspective taking in general, scholars know little about how the type of social perspective taking affects outcomes of interest. This study tests whether different ways to “walk a mile in another’s shoes” cause different outcomes. By taking advantage of a computer-based simulation (where participants can learn about others by virtually walking around in the shoes of other characters), we assigned participants from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (N = 842) to five different perspective taking treatments or a control condition. Results show that perspective takers who receive information about the other party foster more positive relationships and make greater concessions than participants who did not receive information about the other party. Furthermore, those who experientially learned about the other party’s perspective felt more positive about their relationships and made greater concessions during the negotiation than those who were simply provided information about the other party’s perspective. No differences were found between virtually and imaginatively taking the perspective of others. These findings suggest the importance of accounting for the type of social perspective taking in studying how this social-cognitive process may facilitate conflict resolution.

Increasingly colleges and universities use survey results to make decisions, inform research, and shape public opinion. Given the large number of surveys distributed on campuses, can researchers reasonably expect that busy respondents will diligently answer each and every question? Less serious respondents may 'satisfice,' i.e., take short-cuts to conserve effort, in a number of ways-choosing the same response every time, skipping items, rushing through the instrument, or quitting early. In this paper we apply this satisficing framework to demonstrate analytic options for assessing respondents' conscientiousness in giving high fidelity survey answers. Specifically, we operationalize satisficing as a series of measurable behaviors and compute a satisficing index for each survey respondent. Using data from two surveys administered in university contexts, we find that the majority of respondents engaged in satisficing behaviors, that single-item results can be significantly impacted by satisficing, and that scale reliabilities and correlations can be altered by satisficing behaviors. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of identifying satisficers in routine survey analysis in order to verify data quality prior to using results for decision-making, research, or public dissemination of findings

Frequently and accurately discerning others' thoughts and feelings is associated with multiple valued educational outcomes across an array of settings. Despite its foundational role in social interactions, it is unclear whether individuals can be taught to improve their social perspective taking capacities. This experiment assesses whether a curriculum taught to US Army personnel (N = 116) improved their social perspective taking prior to deployment. Results showed that participants improved their social perspective taking in three ways: through more accurately detecting biases in others, by generating more initial hypotheses to explain others' behaviors, and by adapting their hypotheses in the face of new evidence. The curriculum did not affect participants' perspective taking accuracy on a video measure. We discuss these findings with respect to their implications for other learning environments

When ordering items on attitude/opinion questionnaires, do survey designers bias respondents’ answers by the mere act of choosing to organize their survey in a particular way? We hypothesize that, under specific frequently-occurring conditions, respondents employ an anchoring and adjusting strategy in which their response to an initial survey item provides a cognitive anchor from which they (insufficiently) adjust in answering the subsequent item. Three experiments indicate that respondents anchor and insufficiently adjust in certain situations, anchoring and adjusting leads to higher inter-item correlations between adjacent items, and these inflated correlations can (spuriously) increase the reliability estimate of the scale that they comprise and affect the resultant correlations with other measures. These effects are not consistently accounted for by a “superior memory search” explanation. In organizing their surveys, researchers may wish to combat this bias by intermixing items designed for different, but related constructs.

Background/Context: Research indicates that social perspective taking – the capacity to discern the thoughts and feelings of others – plays a role in many important outcomes in schools. Despite the potential benefits for students and educators, little is known about social perspective taking as a process.

Purpose/Research Question: If educational researchers are ultimately to design interventions to help improve the perspective taking capacities of those in schools, they need to fully understand the underlying process, i.e., how social perspective taking actually happens. Particularly important is the need to understand: What strategies individuals use and what sources of evidence they draw from when they take the perspective of others?

Participants: To investigate this question, a sample of 18 adults from an array of different professions (who were nominated as adept perspective takers) and 13 high school students (who were nominated as struggling with social perspective taking) participated in the study.

Research Design: Participants completed in-depth interviews and a think-aloud protocol as part of this mixed-method, exploratory study. The interviews and think-alouds were coded for the type of social perspective taking strategy participants employed and for the sources of evidence they relied on, respectively.

Findings: Results indicated that participants relied on 12 different types of SPT strategies and drew from seven different sources of evidence when discerning others’ thoughts and feelings.

Conclusions/Recommendations: These findings provide foundational knowledge that lays groundwork for ultimately developing approaches to teach social perspective taking. At a practical level, these findings provide options for students’ and educators’ to experiment with as they attempt to take the perspective of one another.

Parents' attitudes about their children’s schools matter. Their views can shape their children’s attitudes about school, affect their levels of family-school engagement, and influence their residential and school enrollment decisions. This paper describes the development of a survey scale to assess parent perceptions of the climate of their child’s school. Our comprehensive scale development process incorporated feedback from academics and potential respondents from the outset of the design process to enhance scale quality. We conducted three studies with national samples of parents (n = 385; n = 253; n = 266) to gather evidence of scale score reliability and valid score inferences based on convergent/discriminant validity. Through confirmatory factor analysis we identified a theoretically grounded factor structure that fit the data well. Interestingly, we found no evidence that parental response patterns distinguish between academic and social elements of school climate. Furthermore, we found that parents of younger children, on average, had a more positive perception of the school’s climate than parents of older children. We conclude by discussing how researchers and Pre-K – 12 schools and districts can use the scale to aid school improvement efforts.

When people perceive themselves as similar to others, greater liking and closer relationships typically result. In the first randomized field experiment that leverages actual similarities to improve real-world relationships, we examined the affiliations between 315 ninth grade students and their 25 teachers. Students in the treatment condition received feedback on five similarities that they shared with their teachers; each teacher received parallel feedback regarding about half of his/her ninth grade students. Five weeks after our intervention, those in the treatment conditions perceived greater similarity with their counterparts. Furthermore, when teachers received feedback about their similarities with specific students, they perceived better relationships with those students, and those students earned higher course grades. Exploratory analyses suggest that these effects are concentrated within relationships between teachers and their “underserved” students. This brief intervention appears to close the achievement gap at this school by over 60%.

Teaching and learning are fundamentally social enterprises. In attempting to understand, explain, and predict social behavior, social psychologists have amassed scores of empirically-grounded, fundamental principles. Yet, many such principles have yet to be applied to classrooms despite the social nature of these settings. This article illustrates how infusing novel concepts from social psychology into teachers’ repertoires holds untapped potential to improve their pedagogy, ability to motivate students, and capacity to enrich students’ understanding of subject matter. This article first examines three domains of social psychology – social cognition, influence/persuasion, and interpersonal relations – and illustrates how applications of principles from each domain could benefit classrooms. Next, two exemplars are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of past interventions that are rooted in social psychological principles. Finally, pathways through which teacher educators can introduce new social psychological concepts and applications to teachers are explored.

Background: Although teacher-student relationships lie at the heart of students’ schooling experience, fundamental questions regarding these relationships remain unanswered. Aims: This study investigates three related questions about these relationships: To what extent do they change from the beginning to the end of a school year? Are any emergent changes associated with shifts in students’ academic or motivational outcomes? Are certain “upstream” factors associated with improvements or declines in teacher-student relationships? Sample: We investigate these questions with a sample of middle school students (N = 119) and their teachers (N = 30). Methods: Through a novel approach which accounts for both perspectives within teacher-student relationships, we assess these relationships at the beginning and end of the school year. Using multi-level models, we examine how changes in these relationships are associated with changes in students’ grades, homework completion rates, self-efficacy, and effort. In addition, we examine associations with two potential precursors to teacher-student relationships: students’ accuracy in taking their teachers’ perspective and their perceptions of similarity to their teachers. Results: We find that substantial changes occur in these relationships from the beginning to the end of the year; these changes are associated with shifts in important student outcomes; and changes in students’ social perspective taking accuracy and perceived similarity to their teachers correspond with changes in teacher-student relationships. Conclusions: Given the malleability of teacher-student relationships and their importance for key achievement and motivational outcomes, we advocate for researchers to conduct field experiments to inform how to improve these critical relationships.