Can you resist the influence of others? Altercentrism, egocentrism and interpersonal personality traits

Bukowski, Henryk [UCL] Courtain, Audrey [UCL] Samson, Dana [UCL]

As egocentric individuals, we spontaneously rely on our own knowledge and feelings when thinking about others. However, we are also altercentric individuals since our knowledge and feelings can be biased by what someone else (we think) is thinking. This study aimed to document the presence of egocentrism and particularly altercentrism and their potential relations to personality traits. One hundred participants completed a visual perspective-taking task optimised to measure both egocentric and altercentric biases. We further tested the presence of altercentrism in a task where participants had to make finger movements while inhibiting the imitation of someone else’s finger movements. This latter relatively simple and low-level altercentric interference measure correlated with participants’ altercentric interference in the visual perspective-taking task. I will describe how egocentrism and altercentrism propensities are distributed across individuals and how they relate to various interpersonally relevant personality traits (such as narcissism, machiavellism, and dispositional empathy).