Taking Another Person’s Perspective Doesn’t Help You Understand Them | Hacker News Reader

Taking Another Person’s Perspective Doesn’t Help You Understand Them

nautil.us

61 pointsdnetesn22 comments

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.

Or they just got tired of arguing with you.

So a win/win!

It's called "The Echo Effect" and also has some scientific backing to it [0]

> we introduce the echo effect, a less researched phenomenon of verbal mimicry, in a real-world setting. Study participants, 330 currency exchange office customers, were assigned into one of three experimental and two control conditions. Careful attention to research design produced results that address issues raised in the mimicry literature and more clearly define the boundaries of verbal mimicry. The results demonstrate that while repetition of words is important in increasing an individual’s tendency to perform prosocial behaviors, the order in which they are repeated back is not; verbal mimicry is more powerful mechanism than dialogue; and, for nonmimicry control conditions, no response produces the same result as a brief response.

[0] https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X13506906

This is also called active listening. It's a very good, useful skill to have.

The actual claim being made is difficult to see on account of the way the article is written, starting with a misleading title. As far as I can tell, the claim is that while people think that taking another person's perspective is helpful, they are not generally as good as they think they are in doing so, because they rely too much on their own intuitions and do not ask enough questions of the other party. I have certainly met more than a few people who find it inconceivable that anyone would see things differently than they do, though I doubt that many of them are among the people who think there is much value in trying to see the other side's point of view.

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

Mind pointing out some examples of what you're referring to?

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.

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_...

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.

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.

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

That's very true, but it's still infinitely better than never making an effort to see anything from the POV of others. Most things in life that are worth doing fall into the category of things where you're constantly trying to attain some unattainable ideal, like always being rational or ethical or having a healthy lifestyle. Making the effort is far more important than scoring 100% on it.

Also, if someone never makes that effort, they will never even begin to understand and internalize the degree to which they're biased by their own perspective and experiences.

"'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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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