What does self-priority mean?

Bigot, Alix [UCL] Bukowski, Henryk [UCL]

Research on self-related processes tends to be related to positive consequences. However, too much focus on the self is also associated to egocentricity, with little regard for others. What if information about the self and the others both need to be represented? The ability to understand others’ mental states is almost exclusively measured by performance-based tasks that do not enable its comparison with the understanding of self-experienced mental states. The level-1 visual perspective taking task (Samson et al., 2010) allow to assess the extent to which participants performed better at judging their own visual perspective than at judging the perspective of another person (Bukowski & Samson, 2017). This tendency refers to the Self-other priority dimension (SOP), and is interpreted as reflecting the attentional priority one mobilizes for information pertaining from the self-perspective in comparison to the information pertaining from the other person’s perspective. Through retrospective analyses of data collected in laboratory and via internet across more than 1500 individuals, we examine the behavioural correlates of self-priority and priority for the other perspective with empathic tendencies, narcissism, gender, and age. Whether self-priority relates to positive or negative outcomes in the context of perspective taking will be discussed.