Perspective-taking

Imagining how someone else sees things doesn't make you better at reading them. Asking does. Stepping back from your own problems does help you think more wisely.

• Evidence: Some

The idea

“Put yourself in their shoes” is common advice. It covers two different things, and the evidence treats them very differently.

Guessing what another person thinks. You imagine their point of view and work out what they must feel or want. This feels like understanding. But you’re still guessing, using what you already believe about them. Researchers call the fix “perspective-getting”: find out from the person directly.

Stepping back from your own situation. You look at your own problem as if from the outside, the way you’d look at a friend’s. People are usually wiser about other people’s problems than their own. Stepping back narrows that gap.

How to use it

With other people: ask, don’t guess

1. Notice when you’re mind-reading. “She’s annoyed with me.” “He doesn’t care about this project.” These are guesses until you check.
2. Ask a short, open question. Then listen to the answer without arguing yet.
3. Repeat back what you heard and ask if you got it right. This catches misunderstandings early.
4. Believe the answer more than your theory. If what they say surprises you, that’s the point. You’ve learned something new.

With your own problems: step back

• Ask the friend question. “If a friend told me this exact story, what would I notice? What would I tell them?”
• Use the neutral observer. Picture someone neutral who wants the best for everyone involved. How would they describe the disagreement? What good might they see coming out of it?
• Write it down. A few minutes of writing from the outside view is enough. Do it after a conflict, once you’ve cooled down a little.

Common mistakes

• Trusting your imagined version. The more confident you feel about what someone else thinks, the more it is worth checking.
• Asking, then not listening. A question asked to set up your own point isn’t perspective-getting.
• Using “I see your point” to end the talk. Understanding someone doesn’t mean you have to agree. It just means your next move is based on what’s true.
• Stepping back to avoid feeling anything. The aim is a clearer view, not pretending you don’t care.

Evidence

Imagining doesn’t improve accuracy; asking does. Across 25 experiments, researchers told people to take another person’s perspective, then tested how well they read that person: emotions from faces and posture, fake versus real smiles, lies, a spouse’s preferences. Most people expected imagining to help. It didn’t, and overall it slightly lowered accuracy while sometimes raising confidence. In a final experiment, getting the other person’s view through conversation did improve accuracy [1]. This is one research team’s work, but the series is large and consistent.

Stepping back makes you wiser about your own problems. In three experiments with 693 people, participants reasoned more wisely about someone else’s relationship problem than their own: more aware of what they didn’t know, more open to compromise, more willing to consider other views. When told to take a distanced view of their own problem, the gap disappeared. This held for adults aged 20 to 40 and 60 to 80 [2].

A short outside-view exercise helped couples. In a two-year study of 120 married couples, half did three seven-minute writing exercises over a year, describing a recent disagreement from the view of a neutral third party who wants the best for all. Marriage quality kept falling in the comparison couples but stopped falling in the writing group, apparently because the arguments upset them less [3]. That’s one study, and it needs repeating.

Rated Some. The findings come from well-designed experiments, but each main finding rests mostly on one team’s work.

Topics: Perspective, Relationships, Conflict, Empathy, Communication

Sources checked 4 October 2026. Spot a mistake? Tell us.