Blame through my eyes: How first-person perspective shapes social attention and attribution in harmful interactions – a comparative eye tracking study
摘要
Rigid attributional patterns are a key component of social cognitive deficits linked to aggression. Prior eye-tracking research using a third-person perspective revealed that, compared to community adults, incarcerated violent offenders oriented less to faces and showed a stronger correlation between perceived intentionality and assigned blame (Intentionality/Blame isomorphism), a metric of attributional inflexibility. The present study investigated how adopting an immersive first-person victim perspective affects both I/B isomorphism and facial attention.
MethodsA total of 184 adults participated in our study, including 119 community members (60 female, 59 male) and 65 incarcerated violent offenders (32 female, 33 male). During the eye-tracking task, participants viewed 27 static visual scenes depicting ambiguous interpersonal harm between two actors - a harm doer and a victim - and were instructed to imagine themselves as the victim in each scenario. The scenes included both hostile (e.g., a harmful act) and non-hostile (e.g., mitigating expressions or gestures) cues. Independent samples t-tests were used to compare group differences in I/B isomorphism and face dwell time, and Pearson’s correlations were used to examine the relationships between variables.
ResultsConsistent with our hypothesis and contrary to findings from third-person studies, incarcerated violent offenders exhibited significantly lower I/B isomorphism than community adults under a first-person perspective. Furthermore, no significant differences in face dwell time were observed between these two groups.
ConclusionsThese results suggest that, among incarcerated violent offenders, adopting a victim’s perspective may disrupt rigid attributional patterns and normalize attention to social cues. These findings suggest that perspective-taking interventions could support improvements in empathy, cognitive flexibility, and overall interpersonal functioning.