Beyond the Self: How Egocentric and Allocentric Perspectives Influence Belief Updating

Introduction: Social belief updating is asymmetric: people revise their judgments more readily when an advisor confirms their view than when they are contradicted, and scale their revision to advisor confidence only under agreement (Kappes et al., 2020). Whether this asymmetry depends on belief ownership remains unknown. We tested whether adopting an allocentric perspective – reasoning on behalf of someone else – reduces this bias. Methods: Fifty-two participants completed a within-subjects belief updating task. In Session 1, they judged real estate prices and rated their confidence (0-100). One week later, they revisited judgments in two blocks: egocentric (own prior judgments) and allocentric (same judgments framed as belonging to fictitious individuals), each with an advisor's opinion and confidence. Continuous confidence updating (ΔConf) was analysed with Linear Mixed Models; categorical judgment revision (switch rate) with Generalized Linear Mixed Models. Results: The perspective manipulation was effective (p < .001). H1 was confirmed: in the egocentric condition, sensitivity to advisor confidence was greater on agreement than disagreement trials (estimate = 0.282, p = .016), replicating Kappes et al. (2020). H2 was not supported: the Perspective × Agreement × AdvisorConfidence interaction was non-significant (p = .421; BF₀₁ = 63.66). H3 was confirmed: the allocentric condition showed a reduced asymmetry in categorical switching (OR = 1.74, p < .001). Conclusions: Asymmetric integration of advisor confidence persisted regardless of perspective, suggesting it operates independently of personal ownership. Yet the threshold for categorical judgment change was lower allocentrically, revealing a dissociation between graded evidence integration and decisional switching as separable components of belief revision.