
Taking Another Person’s Perspective Doesn’t Help You Understand Them - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/taking-another-persons-perspective-doesnt-help-you-understand-them
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everdev
I've seen first hand many times how simply repeating the person's position
back to them helps two parties understand each other.

You don't have to agree with them, but if you keep repeating their points with
the preface "It sounds like you believe..." (or similar variations so as not
to sound pretentious) until you get a "Yes" in response, then you've
effectively understood them and they've felt understood by you.

Shared reality is different from agreement, but it is very possible with
patience and non-arguable phrasing.

~~~
DelightOne
Or they just got tired of arguing with you.

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mwfunk
So a win/win!

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avs733
Can we stop with the nautil.us stories? They are badly done science reported
poorly and in misleading ways. This is the second or third one this week that
makes broad assertions from highly minute data samplesm

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throwaway284534
I couldn't agree more. Their articles are low quality and meander through
their subject far too long. It's also suspect that their articles frequently
hit the front page, despite having few comments.

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StanislavPetrov
This study is extremely flawed, like many (if not most) sociological studies.

> Participants were randomly assigned to read a short descrip- tion of just
> one of these tests and were presented with one sample item. Participants
> then predicted which of two groups of people was more accurate in an
> experiment: people in a control condition who simply completed the test
> without further instruction, or people in a perspective taking condition who
> were asked to com- plete the test while “trying to adopt the perspective of
> the other person, putting yourself into the other person’s shoes as if you
> were that person.” Participants predicted the outcome of the ex- periment by
> choosing one of three options: “Condition 1 (Control) did significantly
> better,” “Condition 2 (Perspective Taking) did significantly better,” or “No
> significant difference between the two conditions in performance on the
> test.”

[http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/nicholas.epley/Eyal_Steffel_...](http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/nicholas.epley/Eyal_Steffel_Epley_2018_Perspective_Mistaking.pdf)

There conclusions are based on a test that is dependent as much on the reading
comprehension and decision making-abilities of the participants as their
ability to empathize and understand.

>Despite a large scientific literature on the consequences of perspective
taking in social interaction, whether perspective taking actually increases
accurate insight into the mind of another person is unclear.

I would love to sit down at a poker table with these researchers to assist
with their clarity on this subject. Like most sociological "studies", these
people (who I will not call scientists) are making broad assumptions based on
observations of a small group of people. Their observations may be an
interesting novelty, but this is not science.

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crazynick4
It's only possible to effectively "put yourself in another person's shoes" if
you have previously experienced their situation.

If you are just imagining what their experience would be like rather than
referring to actual past experience, you will be prone to error because it
would come down to how good your imagination is at representing their reality.

~~~
mattj1
You'll be prone to error, but it's not impossible to gain perspective through
analogy and empathy.

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Woberto
"'To understand someone, we should not imagine their point of view but make
the effort to “get” their perspective. True insight into the minds of others
is not likely to come from honing your powers of intuition,' Epley wrote, 'but
rather by learning to stop guessing about what’s on the mind of another person
and learning to listen instead.'”

It took me a while to learn this with my SO, but now that we try this more
often we've definitely noticed an improvement in our disagreements. Of course,
I had to be open to listening in the first place, which is something that
probably prevents empathizing with a stranger of an opposite mindset.

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e12e
> we've definitely noticed an improvement in our disagreements

You disagree more? Or in the cases were you disagree, the reason is more a
fundamental difference of opinion, rather than a misunderstanding?

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dstick
As one half of a couple that’s been going strong for 12 years now I can attest
to the fact that trying to “stand in her shoes” was a sure-fire way for me to
make a bad situation worse :p

It took a lot of time and gradually developed over the course of our
relationship but what we do now mostly resembles debating. Very very fierce
debating depending on the subject!

So my personal experience completely gels with the findings in this research.

Aside from that it’s also pretty annoying whenever someone else says “I get
how you feel because XYZ”, when you feel XYA. If the other is off only by a
little bit, it frustrates more than it makes you feel heard.

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drasticmeasures
Trying to _fully_ understand a living person is as futile as trying to pin
down a river so you can dissect it.

That is, a person is capable of changing like the flow of a river, and while
you can analyze who they were in the past, and -- if they're alive -- make
predictions about who they will be in the future based on their past, or draw
conclusions based on similarities with other people's paths, you can never
truly know something that is always capable of change at any time.

But you can know them well enough. Is that frightening, depressing or
liberating?

    
    
      To better understand someone you have to empathize;
      to better empathize you have to understand them.

~~~
krapp
Rivers don't tend to change their flow suddenly or unpredictably, though, and
I don't believe people's personalities or opinions do either. Change in both
tends to be gradual in the short term, even if diverse over the long term, and
can be understood by studying the environment in which flow occurs.

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drasticmeasures
I agree. You can know them well-enough for practical purposes; sometimes they
will surprise you.

As an aside, I think the antonym of "lonely" is "understood", and when you
empathize with someone, you put yourself in their position and feel
understood, and thus less lonely.

    
    
      A person can feel lonely in a crowd
      but not alone when their self is understood
      even when alone in a cell 
      made of all (flesh, concrete or abstract)
      that barriers can be built of.

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raleighm
This appears merely to test whether being told to take another's perspective,
after already reading the other’s words, and having no opportunity to engage
with the other or gain new information, helps with "accuracy". Would it be
surprising if it didn't help much? The whole point of taking another's
perspective is to "get" it and it often involves asking questions.

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anotheryou
Well telling people to think about how the other one would think might simply
add another abstraction on top of normal empathy and therefore cause
inaccuracy.

Especially in direct conflict between two parties I think it helps enormously.
Usually it can explain how the other does not act in malice, but out of less
hurtful reasons.

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Razengan
When taking another person's perspective is difficult to do (e.g. because you
cannot relate to it), looking at _myself_ from someone else's perspective
_does_ help me improve my interactions with them (but it's uncomfortable when
you don't like what you see.)

