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How to seem telepathic: enabling mind reading by matching construal
1Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, 84105, Israel. taleyal@bgu.ac.il
Psychological Science
|May 21, 2010
Summary
Understanding social perception requires adjusting your focus. To know how others see you, think about yourself more abstractly. To know how others see themselves, think about them more concretely.
Area of Science:
- Social Psychology
- Cognitive Science
- Behavioral Economics
Background:
- Individuals often struggle to accurately perceive how others view them.
- This difficulty stems from a mismatch in the level of detail used in self-evaluation versus observer evaluation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the role of construal level in social judgment accuracy.
- To identify strategies for improving the accuracy of understanding others' self-perceptions and how one is perceived by others.
Main Methods:
- Four experiments were conducted to test the effects of construal level on social judgment.
- Participants were manipulated to think about themselves or others at different levels of abstraction (high or low construal).
- The accuracy of social judgments was assessed under different conditions, including perspective-taking.
Main Results:
- Thinking about oneself at a higher level of construal improved accuracy in understanding how observers perceive oneself.
- Perspective-taking was less effective than adjusting self-construal level.
- Thinking about others at a lower level of construal improved accuracy in understanding how they perceive themselves.
Conclusions:
- Accurate social inference depends on matching the level of construal to the target of judgment.
- To understand how others evaluate you, adopt a higher-level self-construal.
- To understand how others evaluate themselves, adopt a lower-level construal of them.
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