Sex differences in social and spatial perspective taking: A replication and extension of Tarampi et al. (2016)

Abstract

Tarampi and colleagues (2016) found that females performed better on spatial perspective-taking tasks when social information was present. They interpreted this finding to suggest that adding social information would uniquely improve the performance of females due to their better social perspective taking. In this replication and extension study, we tested an alternative explanation for their results: the tasks with social information also provided spatial information which could explain improved performance. In a study with 278 college students, we used the two versions of the tasks from their study (no social or spatial information and with social and spatial information) and added two versions that isolate only social and only spatial information. Our replication of Tarampi et al.’s analyses found no difference in females’ performance on the tasks; however, when both females and males were included, we found some evidence for better performance in the social and spatial condition. Examining both males’ and females’ performance in all four conditions, we found that males outperformed females. In addition, participants who completed tasks with spatial information performed better. Findings suggest the difference observed in Tarampi et al. may have been due to the inclusion of spatial information, not social information, that improves task performance for both females and males. These results suggest that spatial perspective-taking performance is better when given even subtle spatial cues, but that social information alone does not appear to improve performance, despite ties with social perspective taking.