The Spatial Model of Group Perspectives

Abstract

Our social group memberships, along several lines such as race, gender, and socioeconomic status, seem to have profound effects on the ways we interpret the world. My dissertation provides a new framework to understand how these different patterns of mental representations between members of different social groups are generated. I develop a structural notion of group perspectives to explain the systematic differences in interpretation that group members exhibit and build on this notion of perspectives to explain the possibility and limitations of perspective- taking (i.e., the ability to take on the perspectives of others).