Heidi Maibom is professor of philosophy at University of Cincinnati. She is currently finishing up her book on perspective taking tentatively titled Knowing Me, Knowing You.
A post by Heidi L. Maibom.
In my last post, I criticized the distinction made in social psychology between imagine-self and imagine-other perspective taking. The problem is this. Imagine-other perspective taking, as described, does not actually have to involve perspective taking at all. Why not? Because all you are asked to do is to consider more closely the other person’s situation. But to do so one does not have to take on the other person’s perspective at all. If you, like me, believe that there is no God’s Eye perspective or perspective from nowhere, you should agree that we usually consider others from our own perspectives. I call this perspective on others a ‘third-person perspective.’ To take the other person’s own perspective, we have to consider the other person’s situation as if it were our own. We have to consider it from what I call a ‘first-person perspective.’
Imagine-self perspective taking does require perspective taking, but it seems to encourage unrestrained projection. We are told to imagine how we would feel if we were in the other person’s situation. Whereas this might be helpful, imagining that we ourselves are in the other’s situation suggests that we imaginatively replace the other person with ourselves. But this leads to other problems. What if I am imagining being in the situation of my friend whose child is very sick? In that case, I will also have to imagine having a child, just like my friend, but this is surely more than simply transposing myself, as I am, into her situation. Put differently, imagine-self must have more of the other person in it to be a successful strategy.
Good perspective taking—which incidentally is probably the normal kind—requires that we mix perspective shifting with imagining being like the other person as well as being in her situation. This mix takes us out of our selves even if it cannot turn us into the other person. In perspective taking we occupy a space between ourselves and the other. How? Or perhaps the most important question is: how can we reach the genuine other through perspective taking? My answer is: by occupying a first-person perspective when considering her situation. The importance of perspectives has generally been underplayed in the literature. Sure, we talk of perspectives all the time to loosely connote differences in opinion. My point is that perspectives are real and there is an important difference between taking a first-person perspective and a third-person perspective on the same thing. Perspectives are formal structure that operate a bit like filters. They are principled ways of making sense of the environment that are subjective in their very nature, but not private. Because they are not private, they can be occupied by different people.
It is often helpful to begin thinking about perspectives in terms of visual perspective. Consider videogames. In the old days, one used to see one’s avatar from above or the side moving rather stiffly through virtual space. This is a third-person perspective on oneself and one’s environment. First-person shooter games, on the other hand, present the world as you would see it were you actually in it. You see only part of the environment represented from the focal origination point of ‘your’ eyes, and most of what you can see of your avatar’s body are arms stretched out holding a large weapon. Everything is visually represented in relation to you (your avatar). This is a first-person perspective. Gamers report that games represented from a first-person point of view are more immersive and more realistic.
What is a psychological first-person perspective? Emerging research suggests it is something like this. The first-person perspective is associated with: a) greater focus on feelings, bodily sensations, and experiences (compared to actions and intentions); b) understanding the near-environment, rather than the greater context of one’s actions; c) not seeing one’s beliefs as beliefs; d) thinking of the antecedent of one’s actions as reason-based rather than the result of causal influences; and e) greater focus on objects that are spatially closer to one/the subject. Things get even more interesting when the first-person perspective is hitched to specifics, like being the agent behind a morally problematic action or the patient. As perpetrator, I will regard the action as less serious, more inevitable, more forgivable, and the victim more culpable for getting me to do it; I will recall extenuating circumstances and think the victim is overreacting. As a victim, on the other hand, I will think of the action as more serious, more incomprehensible, more angering, and morally wrong; I will see the action as the continuation of similar provocations by the perpetrator (when possible). This gives us a sense of the difference perspectives make to the way we conceive of things.
Yes, but how will we know to view the actions this way? The answer is that it comes for free in shifting your perspective on others to a first-personal one. The victim-perpetrator literature shows that if you ask people to take the perspective of a perpetrator in a story, their way of viewing the wrong comes to conform to that of the perpetrator.
I think it is easy to see how this changes the way we think of perspective taking. The mere fact that a perspective brings with it systematically different ways of representing the world, in terms of both thinking and feeling, shows that there is a way of embodying the subjectivity of another. Sure, you can’t capture all of it. You won’t have her memories, her predilections, or her plans for the future simply in virtue of imagining being in her situation. But you will be able to relate to the situation in terms of the subjectivity of someone in that situation. And that can give you quite a bit of information. Sometimes that is all people ask of us when they want us to imagine that we are in their shoes.
None of this is to say that it is straightforward. To truly adopt someone else’s first-person perspective means that when we rely on our own experiences to understand the other person’s experiences, we have to do the right kind of egocentric adjustments. If I imagine being a pain about the way someone drives my car, I cannot simply imagine being in the passenger seat of that person’s car. I must instead imagine being in the passenger seat of my car. And we have reasons to think that people either are not very good at doing this (perhaps because it is a complex exercise of the imagination) or that they are resisting imagining themselves acting in ways that they find morally problematic. So, there is certainly work to be done when imagining being in someone else’s shoes. However, what the research on perspectives show is that it is not impossible to get to embody the subjectivity of another to some extent. It is quite achievable.
One last point. There are many ways we can be in the dark about what others are going through. One is that we have failed to consider what it is like to undergo what they are undergoing. Another is that we have too little experience of, or information about, what it is that they are going through. Merely shifting your perspective won’t help you with the latter. But it will help with the former.