Taking Another Person's Perspective Increases Self-Referential Neural Processing

The ability to adopt the perspective of another person has been identified as a critical component of social functioning that pre-dicts level of empathic concern for other individuals (Davis, 1983) and level of category-based responding toward out-groups (Gal-insky&Moskowitz, 2000).One explanation for these effects holds that in taking another person’s perspective, one comes to treat that person as more ‘‘selflike’’; indeed, the extent to which perceivers describe another person as sharing their own personality attri-butes increases after they imagine an event from that person’s perspective (Davis, Conklin, Smith, & Luce, 1996). An alterna-tive explanation, however, is that perspective taking might lead only to a shift in non-self-based social-cognitive processes de-ployed when considering the minds of others (Mitchell, Heath-erton, &Macrae, 2002). How exactly does taking another person’s perspective lead to greater overlap between self and other?