Taking the perspectives of many people: Humanization matters

In a busy space, people encounter many other people with different viewpoints, but classic studies of perspective-taking examine only one agent at a time. This paper explores the issue of selectivity in visual perspective-taking (VPT) when different people are available to interact with. We consider the hypothesis that humanization impacts on VPT in four studies using virtual reality methods. Experiments 1 and 2 use the director task to show that for more humanized agents (an in-group member or a virtual human agent), participants were more likely to use VPT to achieve lower error rate. Experiments 3 and 4 used a two-agent social mental rotation task to show that participants are faster and more accurate to recognize items which are oriented towards a more humanized agent (an in-group member or a naturally moving agent). All results support the claim that humanization alters the propensity to engage in VPT in rich social contexts.