Please Ask Me What The View Is Like From Over Here

Grace Teo, Ph.D.,
Senior Research Psychologist

How many times have we been told to “put ourselves in someone else’s shoes” or “see things from the other person’s point of view?”  According to the best-seller by Dale Carnegie, perspective taking is one of the principles for How to Win Friends and Influence People. It is not just negotiators or salespeople who have to practice this. We all try to do this when trying to understand our customers, staff, co-workers, bosses, friends, family, people we like, and people we don’t. Perspective taking happens when we imagine ourselves in the other person’s shoes. The thing is, our ability to take the other’s perspective relies on our imagination of what this other person is like and what we think we know about them, but this may not be accurate at all. Social psychology studies show that our reading of other people’s behaviors can be fraught with attribution bias, clouding our understanding of who the other person is. Some of our attempts at perspective taking can also be influenced by the stereotypes and biases we consciously or unconsciously have about different groups of people. When we have little information about the other person to go by, we may tend to overthink their intentions and read too much into things. When we have a lot of information to work with, we may still not select the correct information to focus on to understand what is most compelling for the other person at that particular time. How many well-meaning people have bought gifts that weren't really what the recipient wanted despite putting themselves in the other person’s shoes? I, for one, have done that for sure. 

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It's not that there are no benefits to perspective taking at all. Perspective taking can help foster information elaboration that facilitates creativity in diverse teams and can help guard against automatic expressions of racial bias. There is also neuroscience research that suggests that exercises that included perspective taking can change the socio-affective and socio-cognitive brain networks in a positive way. However, putting ourselves in the other person’s shoes to understand them doesn’t always work because sometimes we really don’t know where the person is. A study showed that perspective taking did not necessarily lead to understanding the other person better, although it made the perspective taker feel more confident in their judgments. Interestingly, this confidence may hinder the perspective taker’s receptivity to learning and listening.  

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What should we do then? Here’s an idea: maybe we should simply just ask them. Perspective getting is when we ask other people their viewpoint and where they are coming from. There is less imagining and guessing, and more listening. (Incidentally, my colleague, Dr. Abich's, blog post suggests that technology designers and evaluators do just that – ask and listen to the end-user.) Compared to perspective taking or other strategies such as perspective giving where we describe the other person’s experiences to a third person, perspective getting seems to help reduce exclusionary attitudes, which are feelings that distance ourselves from the other person, including prejudice towards outgroups. 

So while it’s good to put ourselves “in the other’s shoes” to understand them better, we need to recognize that our attempts to imagine what the other person is thinking and feeling can be obscured by our own bias when interpreting their behaviors, and/or the lack of accurate information. In addition to perspective taking, we should also just ask the other person about their views and listen unreservedly to them with an open mind.

​What’s your perspective on this?