Mindreading is integral to navigating social interactions, especially when they involve people from diverse cultural backgrounds who may have different ways of thinking, knowledge, and beliefs. The present study aimed to explore how accent as a social group membership cue impacts our perspective-taking abilities. To do this, 566 participants took part in the Strange Stories task wherein they listened to stories told by either native- or foreign-accented protagonists. Half of the stories required participants to take the protagonists’ perspectives (“mindreading” stories). The other half of the stories were void of mental states to capture participants’ baseline capacities for speech and narrative comprehension (“general comprehension” stories). On both types of stories, participants who listened to native-accented protagonists performed better than those who heard foreign-accented protagonists. Through examining the predictors of mindreading, we found that participants’ perspective-taking performance when listening to native-accented protagonists was simply explained by their general comprehension ability. Better mindreading of foreign-accented protagonists, however, was linked not only to comprehension but also with an intergroup factor: namely, having fewer friendships with people of different races and accents. We discuss the unexpected directionality of this association in light of how accents may impact the ways in which we engage with people who speak differently to ourselves via the social meaning attached to them.
Buckland et al. (Mon,) studied this question.