Research

When Do We Take Others' Perspectives?

We all see the world from unique viewpoints. To effectively navigate our complex social world, it is critical to see through others' eyes. However, people often fail to recognize others' perspectives and fall prey to their egocentric tendency. It is thus important to ask the question: Under what circumstances are we more likely to take others' perspectives?

"What number is under the paper?"
People are more likely to correctly answer "87" when he is gazing at or reaching for the paper

Goal-Directed Actions Trigger Visual Perspective Taking
Understanding another's visual experience is a stepping-stone towards understanding that mind. Therefore, I examined whether observing another person’s gaze or reaching actions towards an object enhanced people’s tendency to take his visual perspective. The answer is YES; furthermore, the triggering power of reaching was stronger than gaze when cognitive demand was high (e.g., time pressure, difficult task) or when both actions were presented in videos instead of photographs.

Publications:

Zhao, X., & Cusimano, C. & Malle, B.F. (2015). In Search of Triggering Conditions for Spontaneous Visual Perspective Taking. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2811-2816. [pdf]
Journal article under review. Access the preprint on PsyArXiv and additional materials on OSF.

"What number is on the table/floor?"

To find out how people responded, you can also watch Xuan's 6-minute talk, "Through the Eyes of a Robot", now available on Youtube

The Appeal of Human-likeness: Taking the Perspective of Men, Machines, and Matters
What is the appeal of robots that look and act like humans, even though machines can take on any physical forms—and the configuration of a human body imposes many physical constraints and technological challenges? Using spontaneous visual perspective taking as a case study, my project provides a psychological account to this puzzle. While people have acquired sophisticated social cognitive mechanisms through interacting with other humans, robots that appear and act like humans may readily trigger these mechanisms in a brief exposure; specifically, the more an agent resembles humans, the more it triggers spontaneous visual perspective taking in human observers.

Publications:

Zhao, X., Cusimano, C., & Malle, B. F. (2016). Do people spontaneously take a robot’s visual perspective? Proceedings of the 2016 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI'16). [pdf]
Journal article in preparation/under review, manuscript available upon request.

"Who did a better job answering her question?"
Really, it depends on her mental states—does she want to learn or to teach this number?

To Take or Not to Take Her Perspective: Selective and Prosocial Perspective Taking
To successfully navigate the complex social world, we often have to juggle various viewpoints and even choose between conflicting ones. Perspective selection—deciding whose perspective to take—is a central and pervasive problem we often encounter from ambiguity resolution in conversations to large-scale collaborative efforts. In this project, I study whether adults, and even four-year-olds, understand when perspective taking is appropriate and necessary.

Publications:

Zhao, X., Malle, B.F., & Gweon, H. (2016). Is it a nine, or a six? Prosocial and selective perspective taking in four-year-olds. Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [pdf]
Journal article in preparation

Selected Ongoing Projects

Some ongoing projects are direct follow-ups to the above projects. For example, I am:

Exploring the spatial characteristics of the spontaneous activation of Level-2 perspective taking
Studying how goal-directed movements can trigger observers' Level-2 perspective taking automatically using RT and eye-tracking measures
Decomposing "human-likeness" into distinct human features (e.g. head, eyes, and limbs) and study how various features systematically influence people’s perceptions of and reactions to humanoid robots
Building a computational model on how people select between self- and other-perspective in ambiguous contexts

Below are two new projects I have been working on:

A Heart for Cooperation:
Feeling Another Human’s Heartbeat Promotes Prosocial and Cooperative Behaviors

Recent technology makes it possible to feel others' heartbeat through electronic devices. In this project, I study whether feeling the heartbeat of a stranger, and even an outgroup member, increase prosocial and cooperative behaviors. This project won the first prize at the Society of Personality and Social Psychology through the Q&pAy grant contest.

Collaborators: Bertram Malle (Brown CLPS), Malte Jung (Cornell Information Science), Desmond Ong (Stanford Psychology), Jean Costa (Cornell Information Science), Oriel FeldmanHall (Brown CLPS)

How likely will you give up control of driving to the car that makes one of these decisions?

Autonomous Vehicle: Moral Decision Making and Trust
The rapid development of autonomous driving technology poses deep questions about moral decision making by machines. In two projects, I have studied 1) people’s lay perceptions of moral norms and responsibility for traffic accidents involving autonomous vehicles, and 2) how an autonomous vehicle's moral decision can influence people's trust in the machine.

Publications:
Li, J., Cho, M.J., Zhao, X., Malle, B. F., Ju, W. (2016). From Trolley to Autonomous Vehicle: Perception of Responsibility and Moral Norms in Traffic Accidents with Autonomous Cars. Society of Automotive Engineers World Congress (SAE'16). [pdf]
* Li, J., * Zhao, X., Cho, M.J., Malle, B. F., Ju, W. (In preparation). Moral utilitarianism in self-driving cars improves perceived trustworthiness. (* J.L. and X.Z. contributed equally)