Individualism, relational responding, and social shifting: Social shifting involves relational responding

Summary:  View help for Summary Being able to coordinate the perspectives of oneself and others is likely to be helpful in diverse contexts. For example, teachers shift between their own perspectives and those of their students. Social shifting is an aspect of executive functioning and may constitute a rapid form of social perspective-taking. Furthermore, there is evidence that reading facilitates perspective-taking because it involves readers shifting perspectives, such as those of different characters in a novel. In the current research, we asked: (1) Would contextual differences in terms of a single word reference to a college course in “English” versus a course in “statistics” influence undergraduates’ performances on social shifting tasks? (2) What are the potential differences in education undergraduates between responding on the basis of spatial relations versus temporal relations in social shifting tasks? (3) What are the potential differences between adults in the U.S. versus German in social shifting and related tasks, and do these tasks correlate with each other?