Perspective-Taking & Social Networks

How does perspective-taking relate help adolescents navigate social networks?

During the transition into middle school, which coincides with early adolescence, forming and maintaining peer connections is a vital developmental task! One factor that may play an important role in supporting peer connections is mentalizing, or engagement in understanding the mental states of others. In ongoing work, I’m working to understand how mentalizing — specifically, taking another’s perspective— is related to peer connections over the first year of middle school, using social network surveys and questionnaires collected three times over the course of 6th grade. The preprint is coming soon, but here are some highlights:

• I used stochastic actor-oriented modeling (SAOM) to model probabilities of changes in ties within each school’s social networks (both peer connections and close frienships) along with probabilities in changes in individual covariates (in this case, perspective-taking).

• We found that students who enter middle school with higher levels of perspective-taking nominated more classmates as peers they spend free time with in one of the two schools examined. Additionally, students who enter middle school with higher levels of perspective-taking identified more close friendships across 6th grade. Together, these findings indicate that perspective-taking could be an important avenue for supporting peer connections during the transition to secondary school!