This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Heidi Maibom’s recent book The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works (OUP 2022). See here for an introduction from Heidi. Commentaries and replies are appearing Tuesday through Friday.

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The Skill of Perspective Taking: Commentary from Amy Kind

It’s a pleasure to have this opportunity to comment on Heidi Maibom’s recently published book, The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works, which I read with great interest, and from which I learned a lot.  Calling upon an extensive array of empirical research, personal anecdotes, and examples ranging from Shakespeare to de Beauvoir to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Maibom develops an account of empathy in terms of perspective taking, and much of the book is devoted to developing an account of what perspectives are and how perspective taking works.  In short, on Maibom’s view, to take someone else’s perspective requires us to recenter ourselves away from ourself and towards that person.

How does this recentering work?  Describing it in terms of a process of identification and imaginative projection, Maibom notes that we best proceed not by imagining being the other person nor by putting ourselves in the other’s situation, but by mapping out an appropriate analog of their situation.  Suppose I’m trying to understand how a friend feels when they learn that their spouse is surprising them with a weekend getaway to San Francisco for a sushi tour of the city.  If I imagine myself in that situation, I won’t come to understand how they feel, since there are important differences between them and me.  They love sushi, and they’ve never been to San Francisco before.  I don’t really care for sushi (don’t judge!) and as a resident of southern California, a trip to San Francisco isn’t that unusual or difficult to arrange.  So, to understand how they feel, I should instead imagine my spouse surprising me with, say, a weekend getaway to New York for a Broadway extravaganza.

This recentering process is often not easy.  And it turns out that often we are not very good at it.  But that’s not meant to be cause for despair.  For as Maibom emphasizes, perspective taking is a skill, and we can train ourselves to get better at it (see, e.g., p. 65).  Given that much of my own work over the last few years has been concerned to argue that imagination is a skill and to develop a skills-based framework for it (see, e.g., Kind 2020, Kind 2022), this part of her discussion had special resonance for me, and it’s this point that I want to focus on in this commentary. 

In fact, Maibom does not say as much as one might want that directly addresses how we can get better at the skill of perspective taking.  Her main suggestion for how we can train ourselves to do better is to learn from relevant psychological research, research that can help us identify “common pitfalls.”  Consider what psychologists refer to as the focalizing illusion.  When we focalize, we home in almost exclusively on central features of a given situation and ignore other features, thereby representing the central elements of the situation in a decontextualized and thus inaccurate way.  Here’s an example.  As I write these comments in late August, I have to decide what kind of mask policy to adopt in my classroom when classes begin.  In thinking about it, and about how I’d manage teaching for three hours while wearing a mask, I end up focusing on various features like discomfort, breathing difficulties, and whether students will be able to hear me.  I worry about how dreadful I’m going to find the experience.  But when I’m so exclusively focused on those mask-related issues, I don’t think about other factors that will affect my experience – like how energized I get by being in a classroom, how much I like the material that I’m going to be teaching, what a good crop of students I have, and so on.  As Maibom says, “One reason we do not always get good results from imagining from scratch, then, is that we imagine the situation in an impoverished way, and not properly situated in the flow of life” (p. 163).  To get better at perspective taking, then, we have to guard against focalizing.  And indeed, psychologists have found that errors due to focalizing can be significantly minimized by drawing someone’s attention to other features of the relevant experience.  So if we can train ourselves to broaden our imaginative focus, to develop the practice of reminding ourselves to build in details of the larger context, then we will do a better job when we try to take someone else’s perspective.  And we can draw similar lessons from other pertinent psychological research.

All of that sounds promising.  But it’s important to note that this kind of training addresses steps fairly late in the perspective taking process.  It’s relevant to how we engage in our imaginative projection once we’ve more or less identified what imaginative projection to undertake.  But how do we make that identification?  In order to construct an appropriate analog for myself of your situation, I need to be able to pick out the salient aspects of your situation.  Sometimes others can help us with that.  In the example from Buffy on which Maibom relies, when Buffy is having trouble figuring out why Willow is doing what she’s doing, remarks from Spike and Dawn help her to realize that the salient detail has to do with Willow’s deep love for Tara, and that she should she should be thinking of how she would feel if what happened to Tara had happened to someone for whom she has that kind of deep love.  But we don’t always have friends around to help us.  How do we train ourselves to figure things out for ourselves?  How can we improve at this?  And how can we improve at this in a general way, so that we can do better at perspective taking across the board?  Maibom has little to say on this score.  Though she gives some examples where she (or a friend) has managed to achieve the relevant insight needed in a particular example of perspective taking, the examples seem mainly to involve sudden bursts of inspiration, and thus they don’t provide us much guidance for what steps we could take if we wanted to be proactive at getting better at this important activity.

Perhaps one thing we can do is to train ourselves to listen better when others talk to us – to really hear them.  Doing so might help us to identify and understand better what features of a situation are salient for them.  Of course, this kind of listening will not always be possible, since we sometimes want to take the perspectives of people to whom we don’t have any access.  But developing stronger listening skills will nonetheless prove helpful in a large number of perspective taking cases.

Still, listening might only take us so far.  Returning to the sushi/San Francisco example, it might be that when I talk to my friend, they mention repeatedly how they’ve never been to San Francisco before.  Clearly that fact is salient.  But it’s not the only salient fact.  Perhaps they’ve also never been to Fresno, but they wouldn’t be particularly excited for a weekend getaway there.  So I am going to have to make some further extrapolations, even after careful listening.  Part of the skill of perspective taking will lie in recognizing what kind of extrapolations to make.

At this point, however, a worry naturally arises.  If I really were able to recognize what features of a person’s situation were relevant – if I were able to do all the relevant extrapolations – then it becomes hard to see how the further step of the imaginative projection matters.  If Buffy were really to realize that what’s salient is how much Willow loves Tara, then does she really need to imagine what she’d do if what happened to Tara had happened to someone she loves?  If I were to really realize that what’s salient is that visiting San Francisco is very high up on my friend’s bucket list, then do I really need to imagine how I’d feel if I was surprised with a trip to a city very high up on my own bucket list?  It looks like it is the extrapolation, and not the perspective taking per se, that’s doing most of the work.

An analogous kind of worry is often raised in discussion of the epistemic value of imagination, when critics worry that imagination cannot do any justificatory work (see, e.g., Spaulding 2016).  As a general matter, I myself am strongly inclined to think that such worries can be answered, but in this context, they seem especially pressing.  I’d love to hear more from Maibom about how she’d go about addressing them.

References

Kind, Amy.  2022.  “Learning to Imagine,” British Journal of Aesthetics 62: 33-48.

Kind, Amy.  2020.  “The Skill of Imagination,” in Ellen Fridland and Carlotta Pavese, eds., Routledge Handbook of Skill and Expertise, 335-346.  Routledge.

Spaulding, Shannon.  2016.  “Imagination Through Knowledge.”  In Amy Kind & Peter Kung, eds., Knowledge Through Imagination, 207-226. Oxford University Press.

Response from Heidi L. Maibom

In her commentary, Amy Kind focuses on the skill of perspective taking. She rightly points out that I say little about how to hone that skill, although I do make some suggestions about how to avoid the worst pitfalls. Incidentally, in my first proposal I suggested appending a list of tips about how to better take someone’s perspective, but the powers that be deemed it insufficiently serious for an academic book and the idea was nixed. Instead of producing such a list here, I want to focus on the rather substantial challenge to my view that Kind mentions at the end of her comment.

My account of perspective taking involves a way of representing the situation in terms of its relevance to the other. Here, the simulator aims to relate to the target’s situation in such a way as to replicate the agent’s relation to that situation. This, Kind says, seems to presuppose quite a lot of folk psychology reflection before the imaginative process has even begun. If so, isn’t the real work done here? The answer to that must clearly be ‘no,’ since otherwise it is hard to see how perspective taking can play the role that I suggest it does.

What the critic suggests is that instead of relying on the imagination, we rely on rules or generalizations to determine what is relevant to people in certain situations. The problem with holding such a position is that we can now ask how we know how and when to use these rules or generalizations? If we require other rules or generalizations for this, it seems we get stuck with an infinite regress. But if we assume that a certain know how characterizes such application, we might ask why accounts like mine cannot help itself to such an explanation also. After all, relevance is a contextual phenomenon. If some sort of theoretical structure allowed one to determine relevance, it would have to be a theory that applied to all possible contexts, which, if nothing else, is empirically implausible. That relevance is worked out in some automatic way in virtue of a skillful activation of the imagination is more plausible although such an account will need to be worked out in more detail, of course.

Take the central example of Julie understanding my attack of backseat driverism by imagining how she would feel if her husband was driving her car. She understands that my upset arises from the fact that she is driving my car, not just any car, and does not reflect on our friendship. But this is not how she explains it. As far as she is concerned, what does the explanatory work is her imagining her own reaction to her husband driving her car. Julie does need to have a sense of what is relevant, but why not suppose that this falls out of the act of attempting to imagine the right things? Moreover, representing the mattering in terms of it mattering to her, is something some kind of relevance schema won’t give you.

Having said that, I disagree that mere relevance can do the job in helping someone recognize why the other reacts as they do. For it is in virtue of our own reaction, which represents a self-relevant way of relating to the world, that we recognize why others react as they do. It is not cool thinking that is the hallmark of perspective taking, but a way of seeing things as mattering, in a warm, engaged, and interested fashion.

One last point. We are used to thinking of justification in terms of analytic reasoning. But might there not be justificatory empathic reasoning? I think that there is. And I’m not the only one. My friend, Anthony Jack, is at pains to persuade people that there is such a thing as empathic reason, which is often ignored because its contours are quite different from analytic reason. Many of the skills that we use in empathizing with others are based on ancient sensitivities, or attunements, to others, such as the tendency to “catch” other people’s emotions (emotional contagion), for our ideas to become more similar through repeated interactions, our almost intuitive tendency to take into consideration others’ visual perspectives. There is no discernable declarative reasoning pattern in these that we can put into words—or at least not easily so—but why should we assume that this isn’t a form of reasoning?

Reference

Rochford, K.C., Jack, A.I., Boyatzis, R.E., and French. S.E. 2017. Ethical leadership as a balance between opposing neural networks. Journal of Business Ethics, 144, 755-70.