How Teaching Perspective Taking to Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders Affects Social Skills: Findings from Research and Suggestions for Practitioners
Teach perspective-taking only inside the social activity you want the client to use, not as stand-alone drills.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Peters and colleagues read every paper they could find on teaching perspective-taking to people with autism. They did not run new kids through drills. They simply asked, 'Do stand-alone false-belief lessons help clients make friends?'
Their review covered kids, teens, and adults. It pulled data from single-case studies, group experiments, and classroom programs.
What they found
The team found a clear split. Practice on false-belief or deictic-frame tasks helps clients pass theory-of-mind tests, but the skill stays in the testing room. Real social gains show up only when perspective-taking is woven into live social-skills lessons.
In short, isolated perspective drills are a dead end for friendship goals.
How this fits with other research
Begeer et al. (2015) ran an RCT that fits the warning: short ToM lessons lifted false-belief scores yet parents saw no change in daily social acts. The review now gathers many studies to show the same pattern.
Waugh et al. (2015) seem to disagree at first glance. Their kids gained both ToM and social responsiveness. The key difference is they blended visual story work with friendship-skill drills, exactly the 'embedded' method the review endorses.
St. Clair et al. (2023) push the idea further. They used rules, many examples, and praise to teach three autistic children to judge what others know. Gains spread to new people and items, showing applied perspective-taking can be taught when it serves a social purpose.
Why it matters
Stop carving out separate 'theory-of-mind blocks.' Instead, slip perspective prompts into the social routine you already run. While two peers build a Lego set, ask, 'How will your friend know which brick you need?' and reinforce accurate guesses. This keeps the skill tied to the friendship outcome you and the parents actually care about.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Behavior–analytic practitioners working with individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) may be approached to incorporate perspective taking into a client’s programming. Teaching perspective taking to individuals with ASDs has received attention in both the developmental psychology and, more recently, the behavior–analytic literature. The results of our review of the current evidence suggest that although perspective-taking repertoires believed to be related to social skills can be taught (false belief task performance, deictic frames), only directly teaching the social skills of interest (or applied perspective-taking skills) results in improvements in socially important behavior. The aim of this article is to provide practitioners with the current state of research on how teaching perspective taking affects social skills and to provide suggestions on how these findings might be incorporated into their practice.
Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2018 · doi:10.1007/s40617-018-0207-2