Egocentrism versus protocentrism: The status of self in social prediction

In this article, the author discusses the limitations of the egocentric view of self in which self serves as an automatic filter, inhibiting access to alternative representations of others ’ thoughts and feelings. The author then outlines a protocentric model, the self-as-distinct (SAD) model, in which generic represen-tations of prototypic others serve as the default; representations of self, specific others, or categories encode only distinctiveness from generic knowledge about prototypic others. Thus, self-knowledge is distributed both in generic representations in which self and prototypic others are undifferentiated and in a self-representation that encodes distinctiveness. The self-representation does not serve to make predictions about others because it encodes how self differs from the generic representation of others. Predictions that are the same about self and others are protocentric, based on generic knowledge that serves as the default. The SAD model parsimoniously accounts for many inconsistent findings across various domains in social cognition. Answering questions about other people’s covert psychological processes, their likely thoughts and feelings, seems difficult for at least two reasons. First, people do not have direct access to other people’s ongoing or likely future psychological experiences. Sec-ond, there is no one-to-one correspondence between events and other people’s reactions to these events; people do not always react the same way to a given event, and the same psychological reaction can be elicited in many different ways. Despite these apparently insurmountable challenges, adults, and even young children, have little trouble answering questions about other peo-ple’s likely future reactions and psychological experiences. In contrast to the apparent ease with which lay people make such predictions about others, theoreticians and researchers have in-vested much effort to resolve the question of how such predictions are made. The major issue of contention and the focus of this article is the status of self in making predictions about other people’s thoughts and feelings. One approach to the question of how people make predictions about other people’s psychological experiences holds that individ