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Many of our distinctively human social traits are interwoven with simulational propensities. A stroll through simulation-related topics includes the psychological underpinnings of social bonds, our fascination with fiction, and the relevance of simulation and empathy to moral theory. The “chameleon effect”, which involves unconscious mimicry of facial expressions, postures, and mannerisms, promotes cohesion and liking within a group. Enactment imagination and empathy lie at the core of our experience of fiction. Emotional empathy, i.e., affective contagion, is a crucial determinant of the quality of life, and high-level empathy, or perspective taking, plays a critical role in moral motivation and moral principles, especially universalization principles like the golden rule.

Given the multidimensional nature of both perspective taking and prosocial behaviors, the authors advance an information processing position that attending to characteristics of tasks used to assess these constructs will clarify the nature of their associations. A meta-analysis is presented to address the task specificity hypothesis such that perspective taking and prosocial behavior are more strongly related with greater similarity in the task dimensions of emotionality, target protagonist, and context specificity. Results support this hypothesis; the magnitude of relations between perspective taking and prosocial behavior was independently predicted by each dimension, and higher task similarity on two dimensions substantially increased explained variance. Age differences in links between perspective taking and prosocial behavior were also found suggesting that effects are strongest in middle-childhood and adolescence. Implications are discussed for the study of social cognitions and moral behaviors.

Speakers describing locations in dialogue can speak from their own point of view, from their partner's, or from another perspective which avoids the choice. As a new study shows, speakers' mental rotation ability — and the relative ability of their partners — notably affects whose perspective they take and their communicative success. This chapter details this new study.

This chapter provides a fine-grained analysis of the interactions involving shifts in the motion verbs come and go in a map task. It finds that verb shifting was aligned to shifts in spatial perspective and to the speaker's stance to the co-participant with respect to information owned and shared.

A large tradition of work in moral psychology explores the capacity for moral judgment by focusing on the basic capacity to distinguish moral violations (e.g., hitting another person) from conventional violations (e.g., playing with your food). This method plausibly reveals a capacity for a kind of coremoral judgment. Recent evidence indicates that affect plays a crucial role in mediating the capacity to draw the moral/conventional distinguish. However, the prevailing account of the role of affect in moral judgment is problematic. This chapter argues that the capacity to draw the moral/conventional distinction depends on both a body of information about which actions are prohibited (“a normative theory”) and an affective mechanism that confers a special status on the norms.

This chapter explores in detail the nature of the affective response to suffering in others. Humans exhibit importantly different kinds of response, each of which apparently emerges fairly early in development. The psychological underpinnings of altruistic motivation are especially complex, and the chapter argues that altruistic motivation depends on a basic affective system, a “Concern Mechanism,” which requires only a minimal capacity for understanding other minds.

In this chapter, I explore how the process of perspective taking not only influences social bonds and trust building but also trust repair processes. Perspective taking involves imagining others’ thoughts and feelings from their point of view. It influences trust repair by influencing how transgressors, who have violated the trust of another, and victims, whose trust has been violated, approach the issue of repair. Perspective taking can influence transgressor’s ability to identify asymmetric trust breaks (those perceived by the victim only). It can also influence the victim’s ability to facilitate trust repair in a more effective and socially complex manner than by simply airing his or her grievances. Perspective taking should enhance both parties’ ability to perceive factors mitigating attributions of responsibility, reduce negative affect, and restore cooperation. In sum, I propose that the intrapsychic process of perspective taking and the interpersonal processes it elicits can facilitate actions that repair trust through multiple mechanisms.

This chapter argues that maladaptive patterns of behavior, such as pathological altruism, can be explained by the influence of the verbal/cultural context. Once established, those maladaptive patterns can be very pervasive, regardless of their lack of apparent benefit. The chapter presents an evolutionarily consistent approach to language and cognition in which the cultural environment precisely selects certain patterns of behavior that, although useful for the survival of the species, can also keep the individual in a vicious cycle of behavior that can damage himself as well as others. The chapter describes four processes that may be key to pathological altruism: experiential avoidance, perspective-taking, values-based actions, and conceptualized self. The human species is characterized by high levels of adaptability. However, it is crucial not to underestimate the complexity of verbal and cultural influences, and to create models that allow us not only to understand, but to modify them.

This chapter presents an account of how the primitive moral sense possessed by early humans and other primates evolved into the complex sense of morality possessed by modern humans. Mental mechanisms that endow people with a sense of morality evolved in ancestral environments as tools in strategic social interactions. Although people use these tools to advance their adaptive interests, the self-serving biases inherent in them are constrained in a variety of ways, including the reactions of others. Perspective-taking, which originally evolved to enable people to advance their interests in strategic social interactions by anticipating how others would respond to their behaviors, mediated the expansion and refinement of the human conscience. Research that has mapped the brain regions that are activated by moral problems has demonstrated that people may derive moral judgments from “old brain” and from “new brain” structures, and that these structures may interact in a variety of ways.

The goal of this chapter is to propose a narrow conceptualization of empathy as a complex imaginative process in which an observer simulates another person's situated psychological states [both cognitive and affective] while maintaining clear self‐other differentiation. Theoretical and methodological reasons are given to support this conceptualization, which focuses on three principal features of empathy: affective matching, other‐oriented perspective taking, and self‐other differentiation. The proposed narrow conceptualization differs in some important respects from recent conceptualizations offered by philosophers and social scientists yet captures several of the key intuitive characteristics of the ordinary use of the term empathy and dovetails with recent empirical research.

In everyday life, there seem to be two antecedents of empathic concern: (a) perceiving the other as in need and (b) valuing the other’s welfare. This chapter considers each of these antecedents, as well as other possible ones—perceived innocence, similarity, and perspective taking. Cognitive abilities required to perceive need are specified, raising the possibility that only humans have the capacity to experience empathic concern. It is suggested that valuing another’s welfare naturally leads to perspective taking, allowing the latter to serve as a proxy for the former in laboratory research. Valuing of the other’s welfare is linked to human parental nurturance, which is emotion-based and goal-directed. Neurochemistry and neurophysiology of parental care and empathic concern are considered. Individual differences, including gender differences, are viewed as moderators rather than antecedents of empathic concern.

The development of children's understanding of perception has been tested with a number of experimental paradigms which involve asking children about the way things look. The results of these experiments have been interpreted as evidence for children's acquisition, at around the age of four, of a representational theory of perception. According to this standard interpretation, children's understanding of the distinction between appearance and reality and their ability to understand other's perceptual perspectives on the world, can be explained in terms of their coming to understand that perceptual experience represents objects and situations as being a certain way. In this chapter I argue that this interpretation is not supported by the evidence provided by the experiment, and that children's understanding is better explained by their developing understanding of objects and the way they look (and how to make claims about their looks).

We propose a new developmental model that unites two phenomena that have so far been studied in isolation: joint attention in infancy and perspective-taking in young childhood. In this model, infants' abilities to jointly attend to objects and events with others, even though it does not require any understanding of perspectives, provides the necessary foundation and sets the stage for the later emerging ability to understand perspectives. Any perspectival difference presupposes a shared object onto which the perspectives converge—joint attention constitutes this shared object of perception. The understanding of perspectives then develops in two distinct steps. First, infants and young children learn to take perspectives, which allows them to understand others' speech acts and actions involving (perceptual, epistemic, or conceptual) perspectives that differ from their own. Second, children between 4 and 5 years of age come to confront perspectives: they can now explicitly acknowledge that the same object may be viewed or construed in alternative ways. This way of looking at children's developing social cognition sheds new light on the ‘old' problem of theory of mind.t

The relational astuteness that underlies brokerage process and knowledge articulation is the major focus of this chapter. One’s ability to encode a communication has to work hand in hand with the ability to read one’s audience, in order to shape the knowledge that is to be articulated and manage relationships. The chapter first examines the social astuteness that underpins a dyadic exchange, drawing on Mead’s symbolic interactionist perspective and the communication practices of role taking, self as object, imaginative rehearsal, and behavioral adaptation. The chapter then extends that approach to the triadic perspective emphasized in this book. The chapter next explores perspective articulation in greater depth and then turns to riffing—another facet of social skill—where actors draw on the voice or lived-in experience of another individual or category of individuals to drive innovation. The chapter concludes with field observations to capture the influential program manager’s social skill.

The ability to understand other people’s minds is surprisingly vulnerable to brain damage. It can be compromised in various neurological disorders and following damage to various brain areas. Interestingly, the difficulties that the patients encounter point to considerable heterogeneity in the origin of their impairments. The aim of this chapter is to discuss what this heterogeneity tells us about the building blocks of our ability to understand other people’s minds, and what it tells us about the nature of the knowledge and processes involved in this ability in relation to high-order functions such as executive function and language.

This chapter examines empathy as a construct, with an emphasis on a sense of similarity in feelings experienced by the self and the other. It explains how confusion between self and other can turn empathy into sympathy or even personal distress. It reviews the results of recent social neuroscience research that investigated the behavioral and neural responses of people to the pain of others. These studies show that a person who perceives another individual in pain results in the activation of the former’s neural network involved in the processing of firsthand experience of pain. The chapter also looks at the neural circuits responsible for a person’s ability to perceive the pain of others in the context of the shared-representation theory of social cognition. In addition, it discusses perspective taking and the ability to differentiate the self from the other.

This chapter addresses two questions that empathy is supposed to answer and relate them to eight distinct phenomena that have been called empathy. The first is how one can know what another person is thinking and feeling and the second is what leads one person to respond with sensitivity and care to the suffering of another. The first phenomenon related to empathy is knowing someone else’s internal state, including his or her thoughts and feelings, also known as cognitive empathy. The second is adopting the posture or matching the neural responses of an observed other, or facial empathy. The third concept is coming to feel as another person feels while the fourth is intuiting or projecting oneself into another’s situation. The fifth concept, imagining how another is thinking and feeling, has been variously termed psychological empathy, projection, and perspective taking. The last three phenomenon have been described as “changing places in fancy,” projective empathy, decentering, personal distress, pity, compassion, sympathetic distress, or simply sympathy.

This chapter examines the pessimists’ argument that there is no point in solving the logical problem due to the existence of sufficiently strong empirical and theoretical grounds against mindreading in animals. It describes an abstract framework for solving the logical problem, along with a viable evolutionary theory of animal attribution of perceptual states. The framework and the theory together provide the foundation for designing experiments aimed at testing perceptual state attribution in animals which overcome the logical problem. The chapter outlines three types of experimental designs: visual perspective taking with chimpanzees using transparent colored barriers, visual perspective taking with chimpanzees using size-distorting barriers, and visual perspective taking with ravens, chimpanzees, and dogs using deceptive amodal completion stimuli. Finally, it discusses the appearance-reality mindreading theory.

Pragmatic representations attribute self-centred action-properties—properties that are relevant to the performance of my action. Vicarious perception attributes other-centred action-properties—properties that are relevant to the performance of someone else’s action. This chapter argues that vicarious perception is a thus far unexplored, very rudimentary, and ontogenetically as well as phylogenetically basic form of social cognition. Some important debates in cognitive science about theory of mind can be fruitfully addressed if we introduce this concept. More precisely, while it is not clear whether non-human primates and infants under one year are capable of theory of mind, it could be argued that the empirical findings show that they are capable of vicarious perception. The phenomenon of seeing something as emotionally relevant to someone else—a form of emotional engagement called ‘vicarious emotional engagement’—is also explored as an alternative to empathy and sympathy.

Referential descriptions can vary in the quantity and nature of the information they encode. How much and what types are jointly determined by the communicative needs of the addressee and cognitive pressures on the speaker. This chapter explores the interplay of these two forces in cooperative and competitive contexts. Participants were asked to play a communication game in which a speaker directed an addressee to manipulate objects in an array. The perspectives of speaker and addressee were arranged so that one of the objects visible to the speaker was concealed from the addressee. Speakers were adept at adapting their descriptions according to their communicative goals and the needs of their audience. However, they did not do so perfectly in either cooperative or competitive situations. There were indications that speakers may have been more sensitive to their audience’s knowledge and needs in competitive than cooperative situations. This may be because cooperative communication usually allows speakers to rely on addressees to indicate when their needs have not been met. Competitive communication does not allow for such feedback, and thus places greater urgency on keeping independent track of the addressee’s perspective.