John Barresi INTENTIONAL RELATIONS AND DIVERGENT PERSPECTIVES IN SOCIAL UNDERSTANDING

It is a common notion that we understand ourselves better than we understand other people. It is also apparent why we think this is so. After all, we know much more about ourselves than about others, including our memories, our present intentions, and our future goals. And we care more about ourselves than we care about others, so we are more likely to attend to and interpret our own activities than we are likely to attend to and interpret the activities of others. Yet, it is also a common notion that a person has the least knowledge of his or her own biases or prejudices, and that it is often a naive observer, who can better interpret the meaning of someone's actions when such biases are involved. In the present paper I intend to take a closer look at the bases for knowledge of self and other, and, in particular, to look more closely at the consequences of divergent sources of information and perspective on this knowledge. In the process I will also consider the role that motivations play in social understanding of self and other. But, in addition to considering social understanding between individuals, I will also consider social understanding between groups. I will argue that there is a strong analogy between these two types of understanding, and that the basis of this strong analogy is the means by which we process information about our own group versus an opposing group. Thus, I will claim that the biases that occur in interpersonal social cognition are matched by comparable biases in intergroup social cognition.