Alex Gillespie’s research while affiliated with London School of Economics and Political Science and other places

Perspective-taking is a routine and seemingly intuitive part of our everyday social life, yet at the same time, it is a difficult phenomenon to describe, conceptualize, and enhance. This entry considers (1) ways of conceptualizing the primary elements of perspective-taking; (2) reframing perspective-taking as an interactional achievement rather than a purely cognitive skill of the individual; and (3) the relationship between perspective-taking and our ability to imagine possible futures.

Position exchange theory (PET) explains how our life-long immersion within and movement between a wide variety of sociocultural positions contributes to our development as persons with unique capabilities of self- and other understanding, perspective taking, agency, imagination, and creativity. An important part of our sociocultural constitution as persons involves the occupation and taking up of social psychological positions and perspectives within, and extending beyond, the interactive exchanges, routines, practices, and traditions in which we are embedded and which define our ways of life. By using the symbolic resources of language, human beings are able to distance themselves from the here and now and engage in reflection that might involve consideration and perhaps enactment of alternative ways of acting. However, PET stresses the importance of recognizing that even the most sophisticated acts of imagination and creativity have their origins in and are sustained by actual social, physical position exchanges experienced throughout our lives. At the heart of position exchange theory is the fostering of reversibility, whether in children’s games like hide-and-seek or in the thrust-and-parry of academic debate. We do not need to imagine ourselves entirely out of our life experiences with others and create possibility de novo. The reversibility that flows from position exchange ensures that our interactivity with others, their actions, lives, and circumstances sets the horizon of our own possibility.

Diaries have been generally understood as “windows” on sense-making processes when studying life ruptures. In this article, we draw on Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of self-writing as a “technology of the self” and on sociocultural psychology to propose that diaries are not “windows,” but technologies that aid in the sense-making. Concretely, we analyzed three non-exhaustive and non-exclusive uses of diary writing in times of vulnerability: 1) imagination of the future and preparation to encounter difficulties; 2) distancing from one's own experience; and 3) creating personal commitments. Our longitudinal data comprised three public online diaries written over more than twenty years, belonging to three anonymous individuals selected from a database of more than 400 diaries. We analyzed these three diaries by iterating between qualitative and quantitative analysis. We conclude that: 1) beyond their expressive dimension, diaries are technologies that support the sense-making process, but not without difficulties; 2) diaries form a self-generated space for dialogue with oneself in which the diarist also becomes aware of the social nature of her life story; 3) diaries are not only technologies for the Socratic “know thyself” but also technologies to work on oneself, especially in terms of the personal perspective on the past or the future; and 4) the practice of diary writing goes beyond sense-making towards personal development and the desire to transform one's life trajectory.

Societal crises are not only macro phenomena; they are also micro and personal. While the macro social impact of societal crises has received a lot of research attention, there has been less examination of how people navigate their own life course through societal crises. Adopting a sociocultural approach to the life course and a mobility lens, we will analyze longitudinal diaries in public digital repositories written over 20 years. We will examine how three different global crises (September 11th, 2001, the financial crisis in 2008, and Covid-19 2020) have been experienced by diarists and how this affects their im/mobility trajectory and their imagination. Our approach makes three main contributions: we focus on the micro within the macro, namely individual sense-making and imagination within societal crises; we use a novel longitudinal dataset of online digital diaries to open a window on sense-making, mobility and imagination; we propose an innovative methodological combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis of longitudinal diaries.

Position exchange theory (PET) explains how our life-long immersion within and movement between a wide variety of sociocultural positions contributes to our development as persons with unique capabilities of self- and other understanding, perspective taking, agency, imagination, and creativity. An important part of our sociocultural constitution as persons involves the occupation and taking up of social psychological positions and perspectives within, and extending beyond, the interactive exchanges, routines, practices, and traditions in which we are embedded and which define our ways of life. By using the symbolic resources of language, human beings are able to distance themselves from the here and now and engage in reflection that might involve consideration and perhaps enactment of alternative ways of acting. However, PET stresses the importance of recognizing that even the most sophisticated acts of imagination and creativity have their origins in and are sustained by actual social, physical position exchanges experienced throughout our lives. At the heart of position exchange theory is the fostering of reversibility, whether in children’s games like hide-and-seek or in the thrust-and-parry of academic debate. We do not need to imagine ourselves entirely out of our life experiences with others and create possibility de novo. The reversibility that flows from position exchange ensures that our interactivity with others, their actions, lives, and circumstances sets the horizon of our own possibility.

Humans live in a world of possibilities that is sustained by semiosis, that is, the dynamic construction of symbolic systems through which we coordinate action and imagine possibilities. In this chapter, I draw on the work of Valsiner to explore the ways in which culture, as a symbolic system, can either expand or restrict this process of guiding ourselves into the future. I examine two extreme cases: first, expansive semiosis is observed in Samuel Beckett’s short story Company; second, restrictive semiosis is observed in an intergroup context. Both cases illustrate the possibility for reversals between “I,” “you,” and “they”; but, while Beckett deliberately proliferates these reversals, in the intergroup context, multiple strategies are used to limit such reversals so that they only occur when there is strategic benefit. These dynamics, of dissolving and reifying the distinctions between self and other, can only be understood by considering the actual semiotic content of the stream of semiosis.

Development is a core theoretical issue for psychology. Yet, the root metaphors that guide theory and research on development have rarely been questioned, and the limitations and blind spots of these metaphors have not been made explicit. In this article, we propose an exercise in theoretical imagination. We start by reviewing the metaphors commonly used in developmental psychology. We then develop four alternative metaphors that, despite being present in the general semiosphere, have not received much theoretical attention. In order to evaluate these metaphors, we introduce a case study of the development evident in a woman’s diary. On this basis, we invite psychologists to examine new metaphors and thus expand the horizon of possible theorizing.

Revolutions are not only fought in the streets, they are also fought at the level of ideas. I conceptualize how ideas collide in people’s thought, talk and texts as semantic contact. The focus of my review is to identify how people use semantic barriers to subdue disruptive ideas attributed to outgroups in terms of three layers of defense. Avoiding entails denying outgroups any perspective. Delegitimizing entails acknowledging the perspectives of outgroups but dismissing them as uninformed or deceptive. Limiting entails acknowledging some validity in the outgroup perspective but isolating and rationalizing the implications. The reviewed research reveals that the outgroup is not only ‘out there’ but also lurks within the self’s talk and thought, being resisted and suppressed in proportion to its disruptive potential.

Do autistic people read autistic behavior in the same way as neurotypical observers? We consider evidence that suggests autistic-to-autistic interactions demonstrate enabling norms and question the possibilities for neurotypical researchers to learn from autistic social appraisal.