Heidi L. Maibom - The Space Between - How Empathy Really Works-Oxford University Press (2022)

The Space Between
The Space Between

How Empathy Really Works
H E I D I L . M A I B OM
1
3
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930912
ISBN 978–0–19–763708–1
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197637081.001.0001
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But let us, forsooth, my philosophic colleagues, hence-
forward guard ourselves more carefully against this my-
thology of dangerous ancient ideas, which has set up a
“pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge”;
let us guard ourselves from the tentacles of such contra-
dictory ideas as “pure reason,” “absolute spirituality,”
“knowledge- in-
itself ”:—
in these theories an eye that
cannot be thought of is required to think, an eye which ex
hypothesi has no direction at all, an eye in which the active
and interpreting functions are cramped, are absent; those
functions, I say, by means of which “abstract” seeing first
became seeing something; in these theories consequently
the absurd and the non-sensical is always demanded of
the eye. There is only a seeing from a perspective, only a
“knowing” from a perspective, and the more emotions we
express over a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we train
on the same thing, the more complete will be our “idea”
of that thing, our “objectivity.” But the elimination of the
will altogether, the switching off of the emotions all and
sundry, granted that we could do so, what! would not that
be called intellectual castration?
—Friedrich Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morals III, 12

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
PA RT I : P E R SP E C T I V E S : W HAT A R E T H EY ?
1. The Space Between 13

2. What Is a Perspective? 36
3. The Self as Agent, the Self as Observer 60
4. Victims and Perpetrators 86
5. Getting Interpersonal 106
PA RT I I : HOW T O TA K E
A N O T H E R P O I N T O F V I EW
6. Perspective Taking 133

7. Knowing You 155
8. Knowing Me 177
9. The Empathy Trap 199
10. Being Impartial 220
Notes 249
References 271
Name Index 301
General Index 305
Acknowledgments
This book is the culmination of more than six years’ research, and
many people have contributed to it by discussing my ideas with me.
Of those who have supported my work on the manuscript and offered
invaluable comments, Anthony Jack stands out. We have spent hours
discussing empathy and he has read through the entire manuscript and
commented on it. The book wouldn’t have been the same without him.
Jenefer Robinson is another person whose assistance has been inval-
uable. She has read various versions of the book and helped me think
through many of the difficult issues. At the very end of the process, as
I was grappling with how to illustrate the manuscript, my old friend
Peter Bruce stepped in and provided the beautiful drawings you see
in the book. Thanks, Peter! My PhD student, Kyle Furlane, has been
a great discussant and pointed me to some of the studies I discuss in
Chapter 2. I also benefited greatly from comments on the first part of
the book from a reading group at York University led by Evan Wenstra
and Kristin Andrews. The research group at the Institute for Logic,
Cognition, Language, and Information (ILCLI) at the University of
the Basque Country read through my manuscript in the final stages.
Zvi Biener, Kate Sorrels, Jeanne-Marie Musca, Tom Polger, Valerie
Hardcastle, Larry Jost, Colin Marshall, and Peter Langland-Hassan
read the zygote version of some of those chapters and their reflections
helped guide my writing. Angela Potochnik, Tony Chemero, and
Vanessa Carbonell assisted me greatly by commenting on more mature
chapters. Kyle Snyder provided comments and criticisms that helped
me make the central argument of the book clearer and more focused.
I am grateful to all! Thanks also go to my editor at Oxford, Peter Ohlin,
for pushing me to crystallize my ideas better.
In 2016–17, I was a Taft Center fellow, which allowed me ample time
to develop my ideas in concert with two other fellows, Arya Finkelstein
and Gergana Ivanova. Karsten Stueber visited at the end of the
x Acknowledgments
fellowship and commented on the first half of the manuscript. His wise
input made the book a great deal better than it would otherwise have
been. The Taft Center had already provided invaluable support the pre-
vious year, when it helped finance a visit to Macquarie University in
Sydney. Here, Jeanette Kennett led a seminar, where we discussed early
chapters of the book. I learned much from that.
I have given talks on various parts of this book to audiences of the
ILCLI research group at the University of the Basque Country, the
Center for Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Antwerp,
and the philosophy departments of Indiana University South Bend,
Southern Illinois University, Roskilde University, University of Rijeka,
Macquarie University, University of Memphis, Jadavpur University
in Kolkata, University of Wollongong, Carleton University, Case
Western Reserve University, University of Copenhagen, University
of Manchester, University of Cincinnati, and York University. I am
grateful to the audiences for frank and instructive discussions. During
the summer of 2019, Francesco Orsi organized a summer school at
the University of Tartu in Estonia with Bart Streumer and me. This
gave me a wonderful opportunity to discuss the book with a bunch
of very smart people, and to do so in an idyllic setting. I’ve also bene-
fited from discussions at conferences and workshops, such as those
by the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions; the
European Society for Philosophy and Psychology; the International
Society for Research on Emotions; the Brazilian Society for Analytic
Philosophy; the Workshop on Language, Cognition, and Context; and
a joint workshop between the philosophy departments at University of
Cincinnati and Ohio State University.
Last but not least, I have learned a lot from presenting some of
the materials here at graduate and senior seminars the University
of Cincinnati. At different stages of the book, I also presented the
materials to the Association for the Study of Psychoanalytic Thought
in Cincinnati. I am grateful to the participants for their incisive and
helpful comments and criticisms. Through it all, and particularly
during the trying isolation imposed by Covid-19, my friends, family,
and Crosby kept me sane (assuming, of course, that I [still] am).
Acknowledgments xi
The book was written while I was a professor of philosophy at the

University of Cincinnati, a Taft Center fellow, and, during the final
stage, an Ikerbasque research professor at ILCLI at the University of
the Basque Country, and while benefiting from grants from the Basque
Government (IT1032-16) and the Spanish Government (PID2019-
106078GB-I00 [MCI/AEI/FEDER, UE]).
Introduction
On May 1, 2009, President Barack Obama interrupted the afternoon

White House press briefing to announce the retirement of Justice
David Souter from the Supreme Court. It would now fall to him to ap-
point a new Supreme Court justice. “I will seek,” Obama announced,
someone who understands that justice isn’t about some abstract

legal theory or footnote in a case book, it is also about how our laws
affect the daily realities of people’s lives. . . . I will seek somebody
who is dedicated to the rule of law. Who honors our constitutional
traditions. Who respects the integrity of the judicial process and the
appropriate limits of the judicial role.1
This seemingly innocuous statement provoked the opposition and the

press to re-examine what else Obama had said about empathy and the
judiciary. The focus quickly turned to a speech to Planned Parenthood
back in 2007, while he was still campaigning for the presidency, where
he said:
What you’ve got to look at is, what’s in the justice’s heart? What’s their
broader vision of what America should be? Justice Roberts said he
saw himself as an umpire, but the issues that come before the court
are not sport, they’re life and death. And we need somebody who’s
got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young
teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or
African-American or gay or disabled or old—and that’s the criterion
by which I’ll be selecting my judges.2
This statement was widely interpreted to mean that Obama wanted to

appoint justices who would bend the rule of law to fit their intuitions in
particular cases or, much worse, flout the law altogether. The situation
The Space Between. Heidi L. Maibom, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197637081.003.0001
2 Introduction
was not improved by the fact that the judge he nominated, Sonia
Sotomayor, had once made comments that, to lawmakers like Mitch
McConnell, suggested she let her personal experiences and ideas in-
fluence her legal judgments. Perhaps most famous is her memorial lec-
ture to UC Berkeley’s School of Law in 2001, where she said:
I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her
experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion
than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.3
Sotomayor’s speech stoked the fear that identity politics would inform
her decisions on the Supreme Court. In the minds of many Americans,
particularly right-leaning ones, this implies introducing bias and par-
tiality into an otherwise fair judicial process. As Jeff Sessions insisted:
That is, of course, the logical flaw in the empathy standard. . . .

Empathy for one part is always prejudice against another.4
It was therefore paramount for Sotomayor to allay these concerns in

her confirmation hearing. In a seeming repudiation of Obama’s insist-
ence that his judges should be empathic, Sotomayor stated:
Judges can’t rely on what’s in their heart. They don’t determine the
law. Congress makes the laws. The job of a judge is to apply the law.
And so it’s not the heart that compels conclusions in cases. It’s the
law. . . . We apply law to facts. We don’t apply feelings to facts.5
This seemed to satisfy conservative senators and interest groups. There

was no further mention of empathy being important in judges. In
fact, a New York Times article written a year later described the word
“empathy” as radioactive. In 2011, the Christian Science Monitor pro-
nounced Sotomayor “not guilty of ‘empathy,’ ” based on a careful exam-
ination of her judgments on two capital cases.6
It is easy to think that this debate about judicial empathy is simply
another polarized issue between left and right, cooked up to appeal to
different political interest groups. Perhaps there is some truth to this.
But the concern that empathy is biased, subjective, and based in feeling
Introduction 3
as opposed to facts or reason is widespread. Left-leaning intellectuals

from the humanities and sciences have, just like McConnell, accused
empathy of bias. The philosopher Jesse Prinz and the psychologist Paul
Bloom have both argued “against empathy,” insisting that empathy
should play no role in morality. Their work has been followed by others
raising similar concerns, with such ominous titles as The Dark Sides of
Empathy.7
But to many of us it seems bizarre that something we were taught
on our mother’s knee to help us navigate social relationships should
be as pernicious and undermining of morals and the rule of law as
critics suggest. Something seems to have gone wrong. And, indeed,
it has. As someone who has done research on empathy for more than
15 years, I can attest to that. Empathy is poorly understood, and not
just among politicians or interest groups. Sometimes experts seem
more clueless about what they study than ordinary people, who de-
ploy it unreflectively in their everyday lives. Part of the difficulty,
people often point out, is that “empathy” is used to designate anything
from pity or compassion to the ability to understand that other people
have minds.
Although this is true, the problem goes deeper than that. The fact is
that we tacitly subscribe to a mistaken idea of what it is to be impartial
and objective. We assume that we are naturally more or less objective
in our assessments, allowing for some eccentricities, and that greater
objectivity involves the stripping away of our personal experiences.
We aim, as philosopher Thomas Nagel famously put it, toward a “view
from nowhere.” In law and ethics, we tend to talk more about impar-
tiality than objectivity, but the concern is similar. We strip away sub-
jectivity to get at objectivity, which is to say we abstract away from
our particular (biased) way of seeing things to get to how things are
in themselves. Whether this is the right way to do science is not my
target here. It may or may not be. But what is certain is that this is no
way to be objective about human affairs. Why not? Human beings are
not simply objects in the world. They are subjects—they experience it
and they act in it. As I am about to show, experiencing and acting in the
world involve having a certain perspective on it, namely seeing things
in terms of how they contribute to our survival and well-being. Each
of us is caught inside our own perspective until another person breaks
4 Introduction
through it by presenting us with theirs. It is the encounter with other

perspectives on the world that makes us aware of our own limitations
and paves the way for a less insular, more inclusive, and, yes, more ob-
jective way of understanding the world—our world. Empathy, rather
than making us less objective, actually makes us more objective and
more impartial.8
To see this, let us return to Obama’s quest for an empathetic judge.
He wasn’t interested in pity or compassion. Instead, he wanted
somebody who “understands what it’s like” for someone else. Why?
Sotomayor hinted at the answer in the speech that worried Senate
Republicans:9
I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people

concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance
in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and
ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities
permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and
cases before me requires. . . .
However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not
all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their
ability to understand the experiences of others. Other[s]‌simply do
not care.
Here Sotomayor acknowledges that her way of viewing the world is

neither unbiased nor objective. But the point isn’t that she, Sonia
Sotomayor, has limited abilities, assumptions, and perspectives. It is
that everybody does. We are the net result of our biological heritage,
our upbringing, our culture, our influences, etc. What sets Sotomayor
apart from some of her colleagues is not that she is more biased, but
that she knows she is liable to have limited and perhaps unique ways of
thinking about things. She therefore puts more effort into expanding
her views and re-evaluating her assumptions. But why, then, did she
also insist that being a Latina made her more suitable than a white man
for reaching good judgments on cases? Because she believes that her
experiences make her more likely to see what white male judges don’t,
and because her viewpoint balances the other types of biases we see in
the judicial system. Sotomayor continues:10
Introduction 5
As another former law school classmate, Professor Martha Minow

of Harvard Law School, states, “there is no objective stance but
only a series of perspectives—no neutrality, no escape from choice
in judging,” [which is why] I further accept that our experiences as
women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to im-
partiality is just that—it’s an aspiration because it denies the fact that
we are by our experiences making different choices than others. Not
all women or people of color, in all or some circumstances or indeed
in any particular case or circumstance, but enough people of color
in enough cases will make a difference in the process of judging. The
Minnesota Supreme Court has given an example of this. As reported
by Judge Patricia Wald formerly of the D.C. Circuit Court, three
women on the Minnesota Court with two men dissenting agreed to
grant a protective order against a father’s visitation rights when the
father abused his child. The Judicature Journal has at least two excel-
lent studies on how women on the courts of appeal and state supreme
courts have tended to vote more often than their male counterpart
to uphold women’s claims in sex discrimination cases and criminal
defendants’ claims in search and seizure cases.
What Sotomayor and Minow both recognize is that applying the law
in a perfect, unbiased, almost mechanical way is impossible. Instead,
the impartial application of the law is an ideal we aspire to, and one
that requires extraordinarily hard work to meet. To determine what
crime has been committed, intent and extenuating or aggravating
circumstances must be considered. This is not a mechanical pro-
cedure. Instead, the people in charge of this process, which can de-
stroy lives, are fallible and rely on their own partial experiences,
backgrounds, and concerns. The prejudice against African Americans
in the US legal system is legendary. What may be less known is that
studies in many states have found systematic prejudice in cases
involving women, primarily by male judges and lawyers. In the United
Kingdom, a study found significant correlations between decisions
by jury members and their gender, occupation, and level of educa-
tion. The legal system is anything but unbiased. What is remarkable
is how many people are blind to this fact, including judges and juries
themselves.11
6 Introduction
What is to be done? It seems obvious that we must first all recognize

that we are biased. But who thinks they’re biased? No one, it seems.
When ordinary people consider their own thoughts and attitudes, they
don’t look biased to them. Even extremists deny they are biased. The
Ku Klux Klan refuses to admit they are white supremacists and white
supremacists refuse to acknowledge that they are racist. The problem,
then, is not only with what is called “implicit bias”—bias that we are
unaware of—but also with explicit bias. The very word “bias” is part of
the problem. It has become synonymous with being unreasonable and
morally questionable. But bias isn’t a flaw in reason; reason itself is bi-
ased. Our reason is a kind of reason, the kind suited to our species. We
see the world in relation to our interests, concerns, and needs. Far from
being a problem, it is what allows us to survive and thrive. However,
bias becomes a liability when we are concerned with such things as
justice, truth, or interpersonal understanding. To correct for our own
partial perspective on things, we need to—you’ve guessed it—take
other people’s perspectives. So contrary to McConnell’s and Sessions’s
concerns that empathy introduces bias and subjectivity into an oth-
erwise orderly and impartial process, empathy helps counterbalance
pre-existing biases. Subjectivity is not a flaw in a person’s otherwise ob-
jective outlook on things. Subjectivity goes all the way down, though
there are clearly degrees of it. Most of us learn to incorporate other
points of view into our outlook as we grow up and mature. We remain,
nonetheless, creatures with a way of seeing the world that is not a view
from nowhere—as many people think true objectivity demands—but
a view from somewhere: a view from here.12
Accepting our fundamental subjectivity leads to a profound re-eval-
uation of empathy. Empathy can no longer be seen simply as a way for
us to understand the subjective and quirky aspects of another person.
Empathy is also a way for us to overcome our own limited view of the
world, other people, and ourselves. Rather than making us blind, em-
pathy opens our eyes to a greater reality. For instance, it allows judges
to gain a different perspective on a crime that they have been socialized
to see one way. They now possess more information about the event
that they are standing in judgment over. This does not mean that this
new way is the only way to think about the crime in question. But it is
another one; one that might be as valid. More ways of thinking about
Introduction 7
the case at hand therefore put the judge in a better position to offer
a more impartial ruling. So, contrary to simplistic objections to em-
pathy, empathy never was about embracing another’s point of view as
if it were the unvarnished truth. We empathize to balance our self-care
and self-interest with care for other people’s interests and well-being.
We empathize to transcend our culturally, temporally, and spatially
limited view on the world. What we often don’t realize is how egocen-
tric and narrow our image of the world is. And it therefore seems that
when we empathize with others, it is a way of getting nonobjective in-
formation about them. But our pre-existing ideas and attitudes are al-
ready subjective. As a result, empathy actually makes us less partial and
more objective.
This book aims to correct our mistaken view about what empathy is,
what it does, and why we need it. The first step is to recognize our own
perspectives. This is the topic of Part I. We think of ourselves, explic-
itly or implicitly, as agents who directly apprehend reality. Of course, if
pushed, most of us acknowledge that our own perspective is limited.
But we don’t act as if that were true. We acknowledge pockets of sub-
jectivity amidst an overwhelmingly objective and truthful assessment
of the world, ourselves, and others. We are wrong. Our point of view on
the world reflects who we are. The world is something we inhabit, and
that we use to stay alive and thrive, not primarily one we train a sci-
entific eye on, as I explain in Chapter 2. This is reflected in the way we
regard our own actions compared to how we see actions of people we
have no relation to. We take an agent perspective on ourselves and an
observer perspective on others, as I show in Chapter 3. When we take
another person’s perspective, we no longer view them from the posi-
tion of an observer, which I call “an observer perspective.” Rather than
seeing them from the outside and from a distance, we try to see the
world through their eyes, as if we were them, what I call “an agent per-
spective.” But there is a third type of perspective we can adopt when we
are more intimately enmeshed with other people, which I call “an inter-
personal perspective.” One form of this perspective is seen in conflict
situations, where we find victim and perpetrator perspectives. These
reflect distinctive views on a wrong that express each person’s relation
to it, as I explain in Chapter 4. There is also a more truly enmeshed and
cooperative way of relating to others, which I discuss in Chapter 5. In
8 Introduction
these interactions, we momentarily leave our individuality behind and

become as one with the other.
Once we have explored the first-person perspective and seen how
it sets up a fundamental distinction between how you regard yourself
and your own actions and those of other people, we can move on to
perspective taking. This, it turns out, is a complex procedure whereby
you use your own ego-centeredness to represent the point of view of
another person in their situation. It is a blending of self and other that
I call “the space between.” Since you can never enter into or adopt the
subjectivity of another person, you must use your own to simulate
theirs. This is not as hard as it seems because subjectivity has formal
and invariant aspects, as demonstrated in Part I. The “I” relation-
ship to the world can be replicated by other “I”s. To capture the situ-
ation situation that “I” is in, however, and the particular relations it
represents does require experiences and insights of a special kind. This
means that perspective taking can be difficult and daunting, as I show
in Chapter 6. Most of the time, though, we are not interested in cap-
turing the fine details of another’s experience. We have broader and
more diffuse concerns. Is this person positively inclined toward me?
Did what they just say reflect hostility? Will what I’m thinking about
saying hurt them? Are we on the same page? I discuss this in Chapter 7
and then move on to show how important taking other points of view
on ourselves is to understanding what we are really doing. Being re-
sponsible requires the ability to flexibly shift points of view, as I show in
Chapter 8. Psychological experiments show that taking another’s point
of view has positive effects on interpersonal relations, morals, and jus-
tice. But it is not an unmitigated boon. Others may harbor misleading
and oppressive views of us. Adopting them can be damaging, as we see
in Chapter 9. Empathy really does have a dark side. It might even have
more than one. But the solution is close at hand. We need to balance
different points of view. Another’s point of view shouldn’t simply over-
ride our own. Instead, it should give cause for reflection on how the
two can be accommodated in a coherent picture of the world. We often
use empathy to give us a fuller, more complete picture of reality. But
when perspectives clash, our reality isn’t simply enhanced by shifting
our point of view. It is potentially upended by it. And that is not always
a bad thing.
Introduction 9
By Chapter 10 we will be in a position to provide solid answers to the

questions raised here. One answer is that perspective taking, as well as
feeling with others, makes us less, not more, biased. The key to using
empathy in the context of morality and the law lies in triangulating
between different points of view. For instance, in adjudicating a con-
flict, we must consider the point of view of the two parties as well as
that of an involved observer (which might turn out to be us). Doing so
can give us all the impartiality we need. This might seem rather com-
plex, and it is. But there is no decent alternative. It is no good, for in-
stance, to imagine the point of view of an Ideal Observer. The problem
with such a fictional being is that although it may be ideal, it usually
fails to be human too, for in order to be “ideal,” such an observer must
be stripped of most of what makes it human, which is to say most of
what matters to ordinary people. Law and morality are not abstract,
universal, and eternal facts that we ought to fit ourselves to, even if we
must cut off a heel or a toe to do so. They are human endeavors, and
must therefore be fitted to human capacities, human interests, and
human experiences. The way to do that is to take the perspectives of
human beings. And this is why a certain view of impartiality and ob-
jectivity, which is so prevalent in our culture, turns out to be not only
wrong but also damaging.
I am a philosopher by training and profession. Therefore, Knowing
You, Knowing Me represents a philosophical outlook. There are many
books on empathy by psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists,
and other science writers. Many of them are excellent, but few of them
address the deeper aspects of empathy. What is needed is a good shot of
philosophy. Why? Because philosophy digs deep. Where the biologist
asks, “What makes an organism alive?,” a philosopher might wonder
what the nature of being is. When a psychotherapist asks a client,
“What do you remember about the event?,” a philosopher might in-
stead ponder what it is to remember. The question you ask determines
the answer. I ask what it is to take someone else’s perspective and why
it matters, and the answer I provide has implications for how we can
know ourselves, others, and the world around us—what it is to be a
self, how we exist in the world, and what objectivity is. And yet, this
is far from being a purely speculative book. My ideas and claims have
ample empirical support. Psychological data and philosophical ideas
10 Introduction
are interwoven throughout the book, hopefully satisfying the phil-

osophically and empirically minded alike. At the same time, you
will find every part of this book useful. Bad date? Go to Chapter 9.
Confused about why others are angry about what you did? Consult
Chapter 8. Looking to settle an argument with a partner? Confer with
Chapters 4 and 7.
By the end of the book, I hope you will see empathy as I do—as a
capacity that is more powerful, more complex, and more central to
our grasping reality than it is given credit for. Rather than trapping
us in another’s subjectivity, it provides a more expansive view of our
common world.
PART I
PE R SPE C T IV E S :
WHAT A R E T HEY ?
1
The Space Between
Hermia: “I would my father look’d but with my eyes.”

—William Shakespeare: A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, Act I, Scene I
The summer I first started thinking about this book, I went to see
our local Shakespeare Players perform in the park. Okay, so it
was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is not one of my favorite
Shakespeare plays—what with all the fairies frolicking about—but it
was a beautiful warm night, and I didn’t have anything else to do. The
play opens with a scene at the palace of the Duke of Athens. Egeus
has arrived to ask the Duke permission to kill his daughter unless
she marries Demetrius, the man he has chosen for her. Hermia, how-
ever, is in love with Lysander, whom she says is just as good a match as
Demetrius. Egeus is not impressed. As his daughter, he insists, she is
to do what he says. Then it happens. Hermia speaks directly to me, in
a manner of speaking. She turns to her father to make one last appeal.
She says: “I would my father look’d but with my eyes” (Act I, Scene I).
As luck would have it, I had just started working on a book on per-
spective taking. What are the chances, I thought? Pretty high, actually.
Once you start looking for examples of perspective taking, you find
them everywhere.
You might think that what Hermia wants is simple. She wants her
father to agree with her. End of story. A friend of mine, who’s a re-
nowned empathy expert, interprets the story this way. I disagree. Of
course, Hermia doesn’t want to die, and she doesn’t want to marry
Demetrius either. But that’s not why she asks her father to see with her
eyes. What she wants is recognition. And through that recognition, she
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197637081.003.0002
14 Perspectives: What Are They?
hopes to convince her father to let her marry Lysander. What, then, is
recognition? It is best brought out with the Duke of Athens’ reply to
her. “Rather your eyes must with his judgment look” (Act I, Scene I).
Hermia has disappeared as a person in the discussion. She is a thing
to be bartered and controlled. She is an object. And an object has no
point of view or, if it does, it is entirely irrelevant to what we do with
it. By raising her voice and asking her father—whose property she,
technically speaking, is in this society—to take her perspective; she
is showing that she is, in fact, a subject or a person, and that she has
her own way of responding to the world. She has an inner life. She is
a center of conscious experience. What she wants is to be recognized
as such.
Taking Hermia’s point of view on the matter of her marriage would
be an act of recognition. Recognition, however, is not agreement, as we
shall see. But when we successfully take another’s point of view, we em-
body, if even for just a moment, attitudes and thoughts that are closer
to hers than to our own. To see this, let’s see what Egeus says about the
situation (Act I, Scene I):
Thou, thou, Lysander, thou hast given her rhymes,

And interchanged love-tokens with my child:
Thou hast by moonlight at her window sung,
With feigning voice verses of feigning love,
And stolen the impression of her fantasy
With bracelets of thy hair, rings, gawds, conceits,
Knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats, messengers
Of strong prevailment in unharden’d youth:
With cunning hast thou filch’d my daughter’s heart,
Turn’d her obedience, which is due to me,
To stubborn harshness: and, my gracious duke,
Be it so she; will not here before your grace
Consent to marry with Demetrius,
I beg the ancient privilege of Athens,
As she is mine, I may dispose of her:
Which shall be either to this gentleman
Or to her death, according to our law
Immediately provided in that case.
The Space Between 15
This passage brings out the first misunderstanding about taking an-
other person’s perspective. It is not simply a matter of thinking about
the other person as having motivations, thoughts, or intentions. It is
not just about ascribing mental states to others, as philosophers say.
Without taking anybody’s perspective other than his own, Egeus
nonetheless succeeds in thinking that Lysander intended to seduce
his daughter and that Hermia has been seduced and is now stubbornly
refusing to do what he wants her to.
Looking over the passage again, it is apparent that his is a very pe-
culiar picture of a love affair: one seen entirely from the perspective
of someone whose plans and projects are thwarted by it. Egeus’s view
of the situation is hardly objective; it is a warped way of seeing things
only in terms of how they affect him. Consequently, the thoughts and
motives he imagines the lovers having are just bizarre. The way he sees
it, Lysander set out to seduce Hermia in the worst sense of that term;
he cunningly filched her heart. Hermia, on her part, is now refusing to
marry Demetrius for reasons that are as bad as Lysander’s ill-advised
seduction: out of stubborn harshness. And though Egeus acknow-
ledges that she is as much a victim of Lysander’s cunning as he is, he
still insists on her untimely death. A more Freudian interpreter might
note that “stubborn harshness” applies as much to Egeus’s own actions
as it does to her unwillingness to yield to his will, if not more so.
Shakespeare invites us to see the situation differently. Lysander
“feigns” love and steals Hermia’s heart by means of various “conceits,”
Egeus says. But why? If Lysander didn’t love her, why fake it? Perhaps
to gain sexual favors. But Lysander intends to marry her. Perhaps he
will gain social advantages he would not otherwise gain by marrying
her? But, if Hermia is right, he is as well placed socially as is Demetrius.
Isn’t, then, the best explanation of why he courts Hermia that he loves
her? The story Egeus tells doesn’t add up. The situation is not much
improved when we focus on his view of Hermia. Is her refusal to marry
Demetrius simply “stubborn harshness”? She is no doubt stubborn, but
she is not only stubborn. She can’t imagine life without Lysander or
being shackled to a man she doesn’t want. Moreover, her father’s insist-
ence that she marry his candidate just because it is his seems inconsid-
erate at the very least. Perhaps it is something like this Hermia wants
her father to see.
Were Egeus, then, to take Hermia’s perspective on things, he would

at least come to understand that his view of the situation is partial, bi-
ased, and incomplete. He is missing information that could turn out to
be crucial for him to make a good decision. If he is interested in making
good alliances through marriage, killing off a daughter isn’t the way to
go. It may save his “honor” in some sense, but it seems a strategically
problematic step, even by his own lights. Were Egeus a kinder man, less
obsessed with power and influence, he might be concerned to under-
stand his daughter better. Were he more reflective, he might want to
understand himself and his motivations better. These goals can also be
accomplished by taking Hermia’s point of view. But given the man that
Egeus is portrayed to be, he is unlikely to be moved by such motives.
He might, however, be interested in having a more complete picture of
the situation he finds himself in; one that is not so subjective. And the
fact is that contrary to what is often thought to be the case, perspective
taking makes you less, not more, subjective, partial, or biased.
Why? Because your own view is itself subjective, partial, and biased.
And, as we shall see, you don’t become more objective by excising ex-
perience from your view of the world. There is no view from nowhere.
The only way to move away from subjectivity toward objectivity is to
take many different perspectives. This implies that objectivity is always
a matter of degree. We cannot, as humans, achieve complete or perfect
objectivity. In fact, no living creature could. But we can expand our
knowledge of the world around us. As Nietzsche pointed out a long
time ago, “There is only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects
we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can
use to observe one thing, the more complete our ‘concept’ of this thing,
our ‘objectivity,’ will be.”1
Many people are skeptical about the possibility of taking another’s
perspective. The problem is that doing so seems to require an act of
identification. The worry is that such identification turns into mere pro-
jection, so that we don’t actually end up understanding the other at all.
Instead, we understand how we would react if we were in that person’s
situation. This can be useful, but it leaves little room for understanding
differences. How do we ensure that we capture the other’s particularity
in our simulation of her? Many philosophers and psychologists think
we can’t. Either it is impossible to do so in principle or it is too large
a project for anyone to take on. Chapter 1 takes us through this de-
bate and out the other side. It shows that the current debate involves
a profound misunderstanding of what we are aiming for in adopting
another’s point of view. It is not to become fully identified with that
person. Instead, it is to make sense of them from a standpoint between
ourselves and them. We must use our own knowledge, character, and
inclinations to understand them in their situation. However, we are not
positioned so differently vis-à-vis others as we think. Although there is
a gap between how we think of ourselves and how we think of others,
there is also one between our experiences in the present moment and
our experiences in the past. And they are quite similar. If we can ever
understand ourselves outside the present, we are about to see, we can
also understand others—at least in principle.
1.1 The Philosophy and Psychology

of Perspective Taking
Psychologists talk as if there were just two options when it comes to

taking another’s perspective; either you imagine the other in her situa-
tion or you imagine yourself in her situation. But it doesn’t take much
to see that merely imagining the other in her situation need not involve
taking her perspective. Even if Egeus had considered his daughter’s
feelings, he might have come up with resentful stubbornness all the
same. Have you not sometimes lain at night fuming over an insult
that you imagined was the result of malicious intent? If so, you are no
stranger to egocentric constructions of others. Particularly when we
are agitated, we base our ideas of people’s motivations on the way their
actions impacted us. We are often mistaken. And it does rather seem
that had we taken the perspective of the other person, we might have
understood the situation better. Imagine-other perspective taking
need not involve shifting one’s perspective at all.
What about imagining oneself in another’s situation? That seems
better, right? But the problem is, people say, that simply projecting
yourself into another’s situation merely tells you how you would react
to it. That is surely not what the other person is asking you to do.
Let us imagine, for a moment, Egeus imagining himself in Hermia’s
situation. What might he think? He, a middle-aged respectable citizen,

courted by a young man at his window, who sings to him and gives him
nosegays and sweetmeats? Outrageous! Would he prefer to while away
his days in a nunnery rather than consent to a prearranged marriage?
Unlikely. And so on. Pure projection fails miserably in this case.
Nonetheless, projection accomplishes one thing: it leads to partial
identification with the other person. How? By adopting a first-person
perspective on the situation they are in. And although pure projection
ignores all the other information that is relevant to how a person reacts
in a situation, it does organize information in the same way. That is,
you imagine that what is happening to the other person is happening
to you. As it turns out, this makes a significant difference. For one, you
will have a much stronger emotional reaction to it. If you don’t believe
me, just give it a try. Even psychopaths do well on this one.
Projective identification, though, is only part of the picture. We
must allow for differences between people. In the philosophical tra-
dition, the question of how to do this efficiently has played a pivotal
role. Jane Heal, an early proponent of the so-called simulation theory,
thinks that projection is only the first move when we simulate another
person. “Simulation” here means imagining that we are in another’s sit-
uation and then “seeing” how we would react to it. We simulate, the
idea goes, not in order to feel, do, or believe what the other person
feels, does, or believes, but so as to gain information about how we
would feel, do, or believe. To allow for interpersonal differences, we
need to make adjustments, says Heal. That is, we must add extra beliefs
(e.g., the earth is flat) or desires (e.g., I want to conquer Spain) when re-
quired. At the same time, we have to quarantine those beliefs or desires
that we have reasons to think are not shared by the target person.2
A fictional example might help here. In Jorge Luis Borges’s story
Pierre Menard, el autor del Quijote, Pierre Menard sets himself the task
of writing Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote again, word for word. He
begins by attempting to situate himself in the socio-historical context
of Cervantes:3
The first method he conceived of was relatively simple. Know

Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or
the Turks, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and
1918, be Miguel Cervantes. Pierre Menard studied this procedure (I
know he attained a relatively accurate command of seventeenth-cen-
tury Spanish) but discarded it as too easy.
The joke, of course, is that the method was thought to be too easy. And
yet recovering the Catholic faith, etc., would only be a fraction of what
it would take to be Cervantes. It is little consolation to point out that
the project is not to become another, but to understand him better by
imagining being him in a particular situation. For if understanding
Cervantes during his writing of Chapter XX of Don Quixote, for ex-
ample, really required imagining having the Catholic faith of the time,
fighting the Moors, forgetting European history between now and
1602, and so on, our task would only be slightly easier—which is to say
that it would be impossible.
The idea that it is ultimately not possible to imaginatively trans-
form oneself enough to imagine being in another person’s situation, as
if one were that person, has weighed heavily on philosophers’ minds.
It is the very same concern that a teenager has when, upon her mother
trying to console her after being jilted by her lover, she maintains
that her mother simply doesn’t understand what it is like to be her.
Although teenagers do lack experience, their ultimate concern is real
enough. Philosopher Peter Goldie puts it this way: People have unique
characters, particular ways of reasoning, certain types of biases, etc.,
many or all of which they remain unaware of, but that nonetheless
affect how they react in a situation. What it is like to imagine living
at the time of Cervantes is very different from how Cervantes ex-
perienced it. He was embedded in a time and a place without much
consideration of this fact. Menard’s simulation, by contrast, would be
based on an extensive reading of history, and would lead to different
reactions to, say, Moors. The hostile attitude of Cervantes is in his
bones; in Menard it is a conscious affectation.4
If we are to have any chance of taking another person’s point of view,
then, we cannot be required to fully imagine being them in their situ-
ation. But then what should we do to make up for the differences be-
tween ourselves and the person we are trying to understand?
1.2 A Method of Identification
We might get a better sense of why full identification with the person
we are trying to understand is not simply impossible but also unde-
sirable by looking at another fictional example. In Lars von Trier’s
1984 movie The Element of Crime, Detective Fischer uses a method of
identification to help him catch a serial killer, whose targets are girls
selling lottery tickets. And like Pierre Menard, he puts his back into
it. He doesn’t sit idly in his armchair with a furrowed brow trying to
bring up the right mental images or change the right kinds of beliefs.
No, he goes on the road. He uses an old police report to re-enact the
movements of the suspect. The idea is that by placing himself in the
same situations as the suspect and by following the same (limited) tra-
jectory as him, he will eventually gauge his plans and catch him. He
checks into the same hotels, takes the same medications, even sleeps
with the killer’s mistress. The danger is, of course, that the identifica-
tion becomes complete. And, sure enough, Fischer turns into the killer
he is trying to catch. Or, more precisely, he turns into another, but very
similar, killer of Lotto girls. The original killer is already dead. Killing
a girl himself—seemingly by accident—brings him no closer to un-
derstanding the killer’s motives. Indeed, the more he becomes like the
killer, the less he understands him. “I cannot stop until I understand,”
he says. But he never does.
Full identification, then, won’t help us understand the other person
because we have ceased to be. We are now the other person or, more
precisely, a doppelgänger of that person. We can’t be another person,
exactly, because any person is unique. But we could be an exact replica
of that person. If we have become such a replica we have, of course,
ceased to be ourselves. This may seem surprising at first. But imagine
we strip you of all your individuating characteristics: your character,
your experiences, your beliefs, and your preferences. What is left is a
center of conscious activity. A philosopher like René Descartes might
call it a Res Cogitans, or a Thinking Thing. Without your memories,
your character, and so on, there is nothing to distinguish you from an-
other Thinking Thing. You have been stripped bare; you are only there
in the minimal sense that you are capable of conscious activity. Once
we fill you back up, as it were, with the other person’s memories, beliefs,
etc., you have become a replica of that person. You cannot understand
the person you set out to understand because you no longer exist.
This line of thinking might seem like a sophism. Why wouldn’t you
just switch back after you have occupied the role of the replica for a cer-
tain amount of time? You could then use the memories that you have
acquired to understand the person whom you replicated. Why, for in-
stance, doesn’t Fischer return to his own self in good time and bring the
understanding he has achieved in the role of the killer to bear on the
case? The reason is that he can’t. Thoughts and experiences don’t work
that way. Any thought, desire, or experience takes place against the
background of other thoughts, experiences, and desires, and is made
sense of in that context. Remove the background, and the thoughts
lose meaning. Change the background, and the thoughts change their
significance. Philosophers call this mental holism.5
Holism is initially a puzzling concept, but it can be made quite clear
with some choice examples. Stephen Stich uses the following: Imagine
that you are visiting an old aunt, who suffers from dementia. As you sit
down to chat, she says, “President McKinley was assassinated!” You in-
dulge her and try to have a conversation about this. It quickly becomes
clear, however, that she no longer knows what a president is, and she
denies that a person who has been assassinated is dead. What sense
can you now make of her statement? She surely doesn’t believe that
President McKinley was murdered. This general point carries over to
all forms of thought. And it is not just knowledge gaps that are relevant.
The entire context of a person’s environment, access to information,
desires, etc., is relevant.6
Borges illustrates this idea very nicely. Remember Pierre Menard,
who thought it was too “easy” to become Cervantes? Well, he decides
to use his own experiences to rewrite Don Quixote instead. He knows
he cannot succeed fully, but he manages to reproduce certain passages
perfectly. But, the narrator of the story says, these pieces are “almost in-
finitely richer” than Cervantes’s original. I quote at length:7
It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’s.

The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):
. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of

deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and
the future’s counselor.
Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius”
Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history.
Menard, on the other, writes:
. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of
deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and
the future’s counselor.
History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a
contemporary of William James, does not define history as an in-
quiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not
what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final
phrases—exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s coun-
selor—are brazenly pragmatic.
The contrast in style is also vivid. The Archaic style of Menard—
quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so
that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of
his time.
Menard reproduces perfectly the written words of Cervantes. But

even so, those words take on a different significance. Why? Because
the interpretation of words, and the interpretation of what someone
says, takes place against a background of knowledge. Menard’s words
must be understood in the context of his knowledge, his time, and his
life. Only this can give us a proper understanding of Menard’s passage.
It is this interplay between the universality of language and ideas and
the particularity of their expression or occurrence that Borges is con-
cerned with.
Even if Detective Fischer was rehabilitated, and fully himself again,
and was able to explain his experiences using words he would have
used while he was identifying with the killer, these words would mean
something different in his current context. Suppose his words reflect
his thoughts—a quite reasonable assumption—and it was possible for
Fischer to retain only those thoughts that relate to the serial killer’s
thoughts, plans, and personality. Still, those thoughts would take on
a different significance as they are being thought by him, Detective
Fischer. There would be no thrill, for instance, at the thought of mur-

dering a little girl.
The idea that Fischer can’t simply import the thoughts he had when
he was deep in his simulation of the serial killer into a present rehabil-
itated self is not as strange as it might initially seem. After all, mem-
ories are not old movie reels waiting to be replayed. Memories are
constructed. They retain their central elements, but many things can
change: the location of the event, the significance of it to one’s life, one’s
emotional reactions to it, even one’s recall of what one felt. Unlike a
movie reel, which plays the same movie on any projector, memories
are filled in by all sorts of other facts about a person’s psyche. A couple
of examples help highlight this point.8
A philosopher I know fell down the stairs when he was pretty
young. It was a frightening experience, which he claims to recall
very clearly. This is often true of traumatic memories. But, he says,
he recalls himself falling down the stairs of a house that they moved
to when he was a teenager. He knows those were not the stairs he fell
down, and yet he has this powerful memory of his fall that always
happens on those stairs. Memory is fickle that way. It usually retains
central information well—falling down the stairs—and reconstructs
the rest from materials currently available in the person’s mind. To
complicate things further, what matters often changes over time.
Diary writers, such as myself, are often shocked to discover that the
way they now think of a certain period of their lives bears little re-
semblance to the way they thought of it at the time. I recall a certain
time of my life mainly as exciting, promising, and relatively happy. My
diary, however, makes it clear just how unhappy and anxious I was at
the time.
We often assume that perspective taking can only be useful if we are
able to adjust our psychology fully to that of another. But since time,
resources, and psychological abilities stand in the way of full identi-
fication, any attempt at taking another person’s perspective is bound
to fail. In my mind, this view is mistaken. Full identification amounts
to self-transformation. But we want understanding, not self-change.
Our understanding always takes place against the background of
our knowledge, experiences, and the way we are situated in time and
space. Understanding itself is a contextual act. For me to understand
you, I have to understand your experiences using my own background

beliefs, experiences, aspirations, and so on.
Not everybody thinks this is an obstacle to taking another person’s
perspective or, as they would say, simulating another. Instead, they
think this is why we are able to understand others in the first place, as
we are about to see.
1.3 Perspective Taking as Reenactment
There are many reasons some philosophers believe we simulate others’

thought processes in order to understand them. One is that the alter-
native is that we apply something like a folk theory to others. Although
this idea long appealed to philosophers, and still does, it has certain
problems. A simulationist like Karsten Stueber has been quick to point
these out. On the so-called theory theory view, if I see Jamie heading
down to the pub after he says, “I want a beer,” I can infer that he believes
that he can get a beer in the pub by applying a part of my theory, which
says that if a person wants q, and believes that if p then q, then she
will try to make p happen. The trouble is, of course, that even if we do
happen to know that Jamie wants a beer and that he thinks he can have
one at the pub, he might not go to the pub. Perhaps he has a nice beer
in the fridge, perhaps he thinks having a beer right now is a bad idea,
or maybe he thinks there are people at the pub who will hurt him if he
shows up. No amount of theory could help us predict what Jamie will
do. We cannot even be sure that just because Jamie went to the pub
after saying he wanted a beer, he went there because of his desire for
beer. Perhaps he thought the pub was a spaceship, or perhaps he went
there to use the loo. Who knows? To predict what people do, we must
know more than just a handful of their beliefs and desires.9
The only way to truly get started on this process is to rely on our own
background knowledge, Stueber says. Recall Stich’s example of the old
aunt talking about President McKinley’s assassination? We can agree
that we can’t really ascribe her the belief that President McKinley was
assassinated. Why not? Because she lacks other beliefs required to give
life to otherwise empty concepts or words. A belief only makes sense
against a background of other beliefs. This has enormous implications
for understanding others, of course. We must bring other people’s

beliefs to life against a background. But that can only be our own. We
use our own sense of relevance, context, etc., to make sense of what
the other person is thinking or doing, or to predict the same. We are
not simply applying a theory. We are using our own experiences, our
own good sense of what is relevant to what, and so on. But rather than
seeing this as a problem, we should recognize that it is what enables in-
terpersonal understanding in the first place! That is the glass-half-full
version of the idea I broached in the last section.
I think this reasoning is right. We can understand others only
against the background of our own knowledge and experiences. But
philosophers who think simulation is the way to understand others
are wrong in other ways. Most importantly, they are wrong about the
fact that we understand others always as from the inside. Remember
Egeus’s view of his daughter’s love affair? He thinks of Hermia’s refusal
to marry Demetrius in terms of stubbornness born from an illicit se-
duction. This is an explanation, and a psychological one at that. But it
is not the result of taking Hermia’s perspective. It very much expresses
Egeus’s own view. Nonetheless, he is using his own background expe-
rience and knowledge almost as much when he thinks about Hermia
from his own perspective as he would were he to understand her from
her own. Taking another person’s perspective, then, is a way of under-
standing that person from their own point of view, not one’s own. And
it is this fact that makes the difference. To see how, let’s look at a real-
life example of successful perspective taking.
Some years ago, I went on a road trip to the Maine coast with my
dog, Rune, and my friend, Julie. One night, we had dinner at a lob-
ster shack and Julie offered to drive home so I could have another beer
with my lobster duo. I took her up on the offer. But the drive back was
awful. As Europeans, we both drive stick. But my God, the way she
drove my car! She was in fourth gear at 30 miles an hour. And as if that
wasn’t bad enough, she took the tight country lane corners without
downshifting. I watched the speedometer with bated breath, sweating
in silence. In the end I could stand it no more. I demanded—more or
less—that she use a lower gear on the corners. She gave me a puzzled
look and said something about this being the ideal gear for the speed,
but downshifted, nonetheless. I felt awful. “She does me a favor and
I criticize the way she does it,” I thought. “I’m an awful person!” I began
to apologize profusely. But Julie was pretty cool about it. “At first,”
she said, “I couldn’t understand why you were getting so upset. Then
I thought about how I would feel if Timothy drove my car. And I would
totally feel the same way.” (Timothy is her husband.) And everything
was okay again. As the French say: tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner
(“to understand all is to forgive all”).
Julie saves the day by putting herself in my situation. But notice how
she does it. She does not fully project herself into my situation. If she
did, she would imagine sitting next to herself and thinking critically
about how she was driving. But she didn’t think she was driving ir-
responsibly at all. And, let’s face it, she probably wasn’t. She was just
driving differently from how I would. So simple projection would
not have helped. Instead, she imagines herself in the passenger seat
of her own car. Then she imagines someone she is close to—not her-
self—driving that car. If you think it’s simple, you are wrong. She first
identifies what the problem is. It’s not actually the way she is driving so
much as the fact that she is driving my car. She then imagines another
person driving her own car while she watches from the passenger seat.
From that position, she finds it easy to imagine getting agitated about
how that person drives her car, even if that person—her husband—is a
perfectly good driver. What drives this transformation is her replacing,
in the imagination, objects that are related to me in a certain way for
objects that are related to her in a very similar way: her car, not mine;
her husband, not her. That is what is perspectival about perspective
taking. That is what it is to imagine what happens to another is hap-
pening to you.
There is a puzzle, though. Because Julie replaces a number of things
in my situation with objects that have a certain significance for her and
then imagines her own reactions, in what sense does she understand
what I am going through?
1.4 The Problem of Understanding Other People
Understanding others by imagining ourselves in their situation

appears to be doomed if we are serious about really understanding
the other person, and not simply how we would react in their situation.
Because we must provide the psychological background to their situa-
tion, we always get stuck with ourselves. Perspective taking invariably
fails to give us what we want. The world is disappointing that way.
I have no quarrel with the world being disappointing at times. It’s
just another fact. What I do object to is the idea that we cannot truly
take other people’s point of view. I think we can. That is why I’m writing
this book. To see why I have this confidence, let’s take a little detour
through the history of philosophy of mind.
Writing in the 17th century, French philosopher, mathematician,
and scientist René Descartes had a profound impact on Western
thought. His ideas have been so influential that he is known as the
father of modern philosophy, which presumably makes Plato or
Aristotle the father of ancient philosophy. (Sadly, philosophy appears
to be motherless.) Descartes is associated with rationalism, dualism,
and the Cartesian coordinate system. You might know him from the
many recent bashings of his ideas in popular science circles, such as
Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error. Undergraduates, however, usually
know him from his Meditations on First Philosophy. In this work, he
aims to provide a foundation for science by re-examining all know-
ledge. Descartes’s reasoning goes like this. The big bugbear of phi-
losophy dating all the way back to the ancient Greeks is skepticism.
Can we ever know anything? Or are we merely stuck thinking that we
know? Sense perception is pretty persuasive, but then again, how can
we know that our experiences of the world correspond to the actual
world? Put differently, it seeming to me that I see a duck walk across my
lawn is not enough for me to know that there is a duck walking across
my lawn. There must actually be a duck walking across my lawn. How
do I figure that out? I can’t. Because to truly do that, I must be able to
access the world other than through my perceptions of it. But that’s not
possible, right? Maybe.10
Faced with the rather obvious problem that we are often deceived by
our senses and that there is no way to be sure that we are not, Descartes
came up with a criterion of truth he thought we can rely on: certainty.
What we are certain of, we cannot doubt. If we cannot doubt some-
thing, Descartes reasoned, we are certain of it, and if we are certain
of it, we know it. We use the power of our own minds to get at reality.
We rely on reason, not the senses, to get to knowledge. This is why

Descartes is known as a rationalist. Skepticism can now be used as a
method to arrive at what we can and cannot doubt. Using this “meth-
odological doubt,” Descartes sets out to take us through all the things
we can doubt. It’s a great idea with only two flaws. The first is that it
seems possible that our minds are simply unequipped to discover the
ultimate nature of reality, doubt, or no doubt. The second flaw is that
we can doubt almost everything. We can doubt, Descartes says, that
the sun is shining, that the birds are singing, and that 2 +2 =4. We can
even doubt that we have bodies, that we are real. Some people believe
that we are holograms or simulations of people. We could be living in
a version of The Matrix. If the inverse of doubt is certainty, it seems we
cannot be certain about much at all.
Can we be certain about anything? Luckily, we can. We can know that
we exist as consciousnesses or, as Descartes would put it, as thinking
things. How? Try doubting that you are doubting. How would you do
that? By doubting. Even if you are more skeptical than Descartes, who
thought he could not doubt that he doubted, you can agree that even
if you think you could be wrong about actually doubting, you couldn’t
be wrong about thinking. As Descartes says, I doubt, therefore I think.
The thing is that if you think, you must exist. Or, more precisely, if I
think, I exist. I have no certainty at all that you exist. Why? Because
it is the very act of thinking that verifies our existence. Since we have
no way to be certain that other people actually think too, the fact that
other people have minds is as doubtful as the fact that the bowl I’m
eating from is round and green, say. In short, I can be certain that I
exist, at least as a consciousness, but I have no such certainty that you
do. In his last meditation, Descartes attempts to establish that you too
exist (well, that other minds do), and that you and he have bodies. The
trouble is that to do so, he must rely on the assumption that God exists
and is good, and so would not deceive us, none of which is indubitable.
In other words, Descartes’s method gives each one of us reason to think
that we, but not others, exist as thinkers. This leaves us in a strange sol-
ipsistic hinterland. But it captures something important about the way
we think about our own minds and the minds of others.
Most of us do not actively doubt that other minds (read: people)
exist, but we are aware that we can never reach out and access these
minds the way we access our own. As a philosopher would say, my mind
is transparent to myself, whereas your mind is opaque to me. And vice
versa, of course. On this picture of the human condition, the epistemic,
or knowledge, gap between people is insurmountable, permanent, and
ineradicable. It is what gives rise to what is called “the problem of other
minds.” I know what you’re thinking. And you’re right. Other people
are often troublesome, but this is not what philosophers are concerned
about. They wonder how we can ever know that other people exist at
all. Perspective taking is meant to help bridge the gap between my
mind and yours, by replaying in my own mind, whose contents are im-
mediately available to me, what I imagine goes on in yours. Perspective
taking is a form of introspection via (partial) identification.
And yet, perspective taking can’t bridge the gap between knowing
my mind and knowing yours even when I take your perspective be-
cause it doesn’t give me the kind of access to your mind that I have to
mine. This is often seen as the fundamental difficulty. There is no way,
the thinking goes, of bridging the knowledge gap between my mind
and yours. However, the truth is more interesting and surprising. There
is a gap between direct and indirect access to the mind, of course, but
it is much wider than we thought. The problem is not that I am me and
you are you, and that we are therefore locked each inside our ineradi-
cable subjectivity. The real issue concerns how a person’s psychological
background—her knowledge and experience, her wants and needs,
her habitual ways of thinking, and so on—interacts with the partic-
ular experience she is having in a situation. And that changes even
within the life of a single person. To see this, let’s have another look at
Descartes’s cogito argument.
When Descartes proved that he existed as a thinking thing, he
seemed to assume that he, René Descartes, existed as the person he
is, except for his body. But does his argument entitle him to assume
this? Imagine that you are Descartes. You have doubted everything
you thought you knew, except these indubitable facts: I am doubting,
which means that I must be thinking, and therefore I exist. When you
conclude that you exist—albeit only as a thinking, and not also as an
embodied, thing—do you not assume that you, as the person you are,
exist? You are the person who takes yourself to have grown up in La
Haye en Touraine, who has a great facility with mathematical proofs,
who thinks your mother died when you were only one year old, who
once wanted to be a military officer, and so on. But if it is the self-veri-
fying nature of thought that proves your existence, because there must
be a thinker of thoughts, surely all you are licensed to conclude is that
something thinks. To say that that thinker is me smuggles in more
than that.
Nothing about the nature of thinking can ensure that what does the
thinking is identical with what did the thinking that is now remem-
bered. In other words, when I run through the cogito argument, I can
conclude that I think, but only if ‘I’ refers to whatever is doing the
thinking. That is not necessarily me, Heidi Maibom, as a person who
was born in Rødovre, who sat down to write this morning, and so on.
For all I know, the thinker of thoughts passes out of existence each time
a thought does. The only certainty we can have, it seems, is that for
each act of thinking there is something that does it. I cannot be sure
that it is me in any robust sense. And so, the gap in knowledge is not
simply between our minds and other minds. It is between the unshak-
able knowledge that I have that ‘I’ am now thinking this or that, and
that this ‘I’ is the same as the ‘I’ of previous experiences that can be
brought to mind. None of this provides any certainty that the ‘I’ that
thinks these thoughts is the same person who conceived of writing this
book, for instance.11
My point is not that Descartes was wrong. He was. The problem is
that so are we, for we all think that being able to recollect a past makes
it our past. We take for granted that we exist over time. I think I am
the same person now as I was when I got up this morning. Why?
Because I can recall getting up in the morning. My certainty seems
immediate and is not based on further ideas about the probability of
memory swapping or implanting, and so on. The point of the matter
is, I can be no more certain that I am the same person who got up this
morning than I can be that you are thinking about Descartes right now.
Introspection gives me access to my inner mental life now, but it leaves
my continued existence as doubtful as the existence of others. I cannot
be sure that any of the things I remember doing or thinking or wanting
were actually “my” doings, thinkings, or wantings. I may never have
experienced what I think I did. The lesson is this. My relation to my
own thoughts outside of the present moment is not fundamentally

asymmetrical to my relation to other people’s thoughts. I can know
that I think that I remember going to the shops yesterday, but I can’t be
certain that I did. I would have to rely on information outside my own
mind to verify whether I actually did. This is not altogether different
from the possibility of my knowing your mind. I am much closer to
you than either of us thought I was. The gap between us is not what we
thought it was.
Descartes, then, was wrong, not about the certainty that thinking, or
consciousness, exists, but about it establishing our existence as persons
or individuals, who exist over time. So how does this relate to whether
or not we can ever truly understand others by taking their perspective?
After all, many of us won’t want to buy into a notion of knowledge that
requires certainty since that won’t take us that far, as the failure of the
Cartesian project shows. If the only thing we can be certain of is that
something is thinking while thoughts occur, then we can’t know much
at all. We can’t know whether we are in the Matrix or not, for instance.
Consequently, theories of knowledge have taken a different direction.
But what doesn’t change is the fact that the principled gap we thought
existed between us and others exists between us in the present and
everything else, including our own past, our existence over time, and
other people’s minds. Why?
The key to answering this question is to ask: Can you ever under-
stand yourself? If you think you can, most of the time, then you can
also understand other people. Metaphysical worries about the exist-
ence of persons over time aside, it is a fact that we change—which is
to say that what we think, what we want, how we act, and so on do not
remain static. Even our characters change; introverts sometimes be-
come extroverts and vice versa. Our background psychology, which
helps make sense of our momentary experiences, is in flux. This is why
we can be surprised when we read our old diaries. Usually, we change
slowly and gradually so that the change is imperceptible. But some-
times the change is more sudden and profound. The following cases
illustrate rather powerfully the point that I am trying to make.12
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James recounts the
following testimony of a young man:
For two years of this time I went through a very bad experience,
which almost drove me mad. I had fallen violently in love with a
girl who, young as she was, had a spirit of coquetry like a cat. As
I look back on her now, I hate her, and wonder how I could ever
have fallen so low as to be worked upon to such an extent by her
attractions.13
The man goes on to describe the courtship and the point at which he
suddenly fell out of love. Once out of love, he can no longer “see” how
he could have been so infatuated with the girl. If I am not much mis-
taken, falling madly in and out of love in ways that later seem incom-
prehensible happens at least once to many of us. Although we know
that, as a matter of fact, we had the experiences we had, we don’t under-
stand why. We can’t even recreate the experience in the imagination.
This is particularly true of very passionate states. We have changed
and, as a result, can’t make sense of our former selves.
The fact that we constantly change illustrates that we need have no
better understanding of ourselves in the past than we have of another
person who is as different from who we are now as is our former self.
The barrier remains. The problem, then, is not subjectivity. It is that we
must understand from the standpoint we occupy now. This would be
bad news were it not for the fact that at least some of the time, we can
gain something of an understanding of ourselves in the past, even when
we have changed a fair bit. Having a child is something that changes
you. New things begin to matter to you, you have new experiences, and
old ways of living fade into the background. Things you find you were
worried about missing when you settled down are now almost entirely
out of mind. Crowded bars with loud music, once something sought
after and enjoyed, have lost their appeal. When you then think back on
your former childless self and the things that mattered to that person,
the things she worried about, you might find a bit of a stranger there.
But—and this is the important point—it strains the imagination to in-
sist that you simply cannot understand your former self in principle.
What is true is that looking back, you feel somewhat alienated from the
you years ago. If you try, however, you can probably connect with her.
How? By using the very same method you would use to understand
others: by putting yourself in her shoes.14
In cases where we have changed substantially, we often have to iden-

tify with ourselves in the past. That is sometimes quite tough, particu-
larly if one does not like one’s former self. But even in cases where we
feel closely identified with our past selves, we are using our own cur-
rent psychological background to breathe life into who we were. The
former case is no different, in principle, from the case where I try to
understand someone else. It is indisputable, of course, that in my own
case I typically have access to more information than I do in the case
of another person and that I have much of it from my previous self ’s
point of view. But the background that I must rely on to make sense of
the past is not the background that was operative in that past. It is the
background now. This implies that what matters for accuracy is going
to be similarity, not uniqueness. As long as our backgrounds are sim-
ilar enough, my understanding you is not greatly different from my
understanding me. The upshot is that we can understand other people
almost as well as we can understand ourselves, in principle, because we
use largely the same methods in both cases.
1.5 The Space Between
To take another person’s point of view, then, it is neither possible, nor

desirable, to attempt to imagine being that person in all their distinc-
tiveness. Instead, we shift our egocentric center of gravity, as Robert
Gordon once put it, into another person, keeping in mind seemingly
relevant differences, but otherwise counting on our psychology to
fill in and do the rest. This leads to perspective taking that is neither
simple projection nor detached description. We are neither quite our-
selves nor the person we are trying to understand. We are, in a manner
of speaking, in “the space between.” As I have stressed, we are also in
“the space between” when we try to understand our past selves.15
“Hang on,” you might say, “egocentric what?” To say that we have an
egocentric center of gravity is one way of describing our perspective on
the world. It captures the fact that the world around us is pulled into
our center of interests in a way that centrally informs how we think of
it. This captures nicely, I think, our thoughts and desires. But there are
other, much simpler ways of thinking about perspectives on the world,
and that is by looking at our senses, particularly vision. That kicks off
our exploration of perspectives and what they are, which is the topic of
the rest of Part I of this book. Chapter 2 explains what a visual perspec-
tive is and why it serves as a metaphor for the way we relate to the world
as actors. It turns out that the way we perceive things is a function of
our being embodied and our doing things. We aren’t the disembodied
thinkers that much intellectual history assumes we are.
By Chapter 3, we get to what is special about the perspective we have
on ourselves compared to the perspective we have on others, and that
exploration continues into Chapter 4. What we find is that the reason
perspective taking is possible and useful is because the perspective of a
conscious, embodied, perceiving, and acting human being has formal
and invariant features that fundamentally inform how such a being
experiences and thinks of the world. This includes a certain way of
thinking about oneself compared to other people. Because a perspec-
tive does not differ from person to person in its bare architecture, by
changing my perspective to yours, I am in fact capturing part of your
subjective experience. I am relating everything in your situation to you
as if you were me, that is to say, egocentrically. This one unifying aspect
of perspective taking tends to be ignored. Mostly, researchers discuss
all the background thoughts and feelings that need to be adjusted, and
this tends to focus our attention on our differences. But there is one
glaring similarity we all have in common: We are all agents making our
way in the world.16
As we go on to see, having a perspective is what makes us who we
are. We can’t not have a perspective. To some, this might suggest that
we can never be objective or impartial. To be objective, Thomas Nagel
has argued, requires us to have a view on something from no particular
place. Since we are, by nature, creatures that have a view from some-
where, namely ourselves, it is an ideal we will probably never meet.
I think differently. I agree that objectivity is an ideal, in the sense that
we can never meet it. But I don’t think objectivity is about removing
every vestige of a perspective. Instead, it is about including as many
different perspectives as we can. This may seem counterintuitive if
you fix on the dictionary definition of “objectivity,” which, at least in
Merriam-Webster, includes “not influenced by personal feelings, inter-
pretations, or prejudice.” We cannot understand the world without
interpreting it, but what we can do is come up with a more impartial

view of it. We do so by taking more perspectives and incorporating
them into our own. That is as objective or impartial as we can hope to
be. There is no God’s Eye view of things, because if there were, it would
be a view from nowhere. And a conscious mind is always somewhere.
It is always the mind of a situated creature that needs to survive. But al-
though we cannot adopt a view from nowhere, we can adopt many dif-
ferent perspectives successively and thereby come to a more nuanced
way of seeing the world.
One last thing. In case you were wondering, Hermia is unsuccessful
in persuading her father. But she does end up with Lysander, after a
long night of frolicking fairies, betrayals, and enchantments.
2
What Is a Perspective?
The notion of “perspective” as we use it today originated with visual art.

Perspective is the technique of drawing solid objects on a flat surface so
as to represent height, width, depth, and the relative position of objects
when seen from a particular point in space. Before Renaissance artists
and philosophers like Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti
outlined the principles of perspective, pictures were not painted in
perspective. Instead, we have the beautiful but flattened images so fa-
miliar from Babylonian, Greek, and Egyptian art.
Once discovered, however, linear perspective revolutionized
painting. In The Story of Art, art historian Ernst Gombrich illustrates
its importance by contrasting it with the rich wall paintings from the
Hellenistic period, ca. fourth century BCE. During this period, fig-
urative art began to consider the real-life setting of what it portrayed.
Instead of simply picturing flat figures against an empty background,
as many Greek vases do, we get realistic-seeming landscapes. And
yet something is missing from Hellenistic paintings: perspective. As
Gombrich writes:1
Everything was charmingly arranged in these pictures, and all the

set-pieces were looking their best. We really feel that we are looking
at a peaceful scene. Nevertheless, even these works are much less re-
alistic than we might think at first glance. If we were to start asking
awkward questions, or try to draw a map of the locality, we should
soon find out that it could not be done. We do not know how great
the distance between the shrine and the villa is supposed to be, nor
how near or how far the bridge from the shrine. The fact is that even
Hellenistic artists did not know what we call the laws of perspective.
The famous avenue of poplars, which recedes to a vanishing point
and which so many of us drew at school, was not then a standard
task. Artists drew distant things small and near or important things
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197637081.003.0003
What Is a Perspective? 37
large, but the law of regular diminution of objects as they become

more distant, the fixed framework in which we can represent a view,
was not adopted by classical antiquity.
Almost all the figurative paintings we are familiar with now are in
perspective. They present foreshortened figures and objects that di-
minish as they recede from the focal point of the painting. A painting
in perspective represents how the world looks to a person seeing the
scene from a particular position in space. This stands in contrast
to earlier figurative art, which had been as focused on representing
what the artist knew about the objects and the space he or she was
painting as on how they looked. These pictures are beautiful in their
own right, but they do not represent scenes as we might see them
if we were looking at them. They are also less informative as to the
layout of the space they represent. The fact that perspective and in-
formation about spatial layout go together reveals something impor-
tant about seeing. Not only do we see the world through an egocentric
frame but we also see it in a way that allows us to extract information
about distances to, and sizes of, objects relative to us, and relative to
one another.
Seeing reveals a deeper truth about how we exist in the world. We
are not contemplators, or objective spectators, of the world first, then
actors second as we learn to translate our perception and knowledge
into know-how. By the time we start reflecting on the world, we have
already been enmeshed in it as situated and embodied agents, as we are
about to see. There is therefore an expanded sense in which we have
perspectives on the world. The world reflects our interests, our desires,
our emotions, and our plans. Why? Because they affect what we see
and how we see it. It is therefore not true that we experience the world
objectively. We experience the world relative to us. Fortunately, that
relativity is not completely subjective. Being situated in the world by
means of our bodies is our common fate. The particular way we are sit-
uated makes a difference, but despite that difference, we can still all ap-
preciate pictures painted in perspective. Perspectives have formal and
invariant features that we are able to capture and that allow us to take
up different vantage points than our own despite being dissimilar to the
person whose perspective we adopt.
In this chapter I give substance to the idea of perspectives. We

each have a perspective on the world that permeates the way we see
it. This is not a little quirk at the limits of our otherwise objective way
of seeing things. It is how we experience the world, full stop. I begin
by discussing perspective in vision. Seeing has often been modeled
on looking at still pictures. This is a mistake, I argue. The way we see
things is not independent of our capacity to move around in space, and
this ability is itself connected to our physical frame and abilities. This
somewhat egocentric frame is just a frame, I go on to show. It is an
“empty” self if you like, still in need of the stuffing that completes a
person. This frame is of central interest to our exploration of perspec-
tive taking. However, perspective is not simply a feature of perception.
It funnels into our imagination and infuses the very way we think of
the world. This was a fundamental insight of phenomenologists, like
Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Looking at their reasoning helps bring out the centrality of agency to
our primary conception of things. I conclude by reflecting on how the
fact that even cognition is perspectival affects our view of objectivity,
impartiality, and hopes for understanding the world in itself.
2.1 Visual Perspective
When you first learn to draw in perspective, you start with a one-point
perspective. Draw a horizon. Determine where your vantage point
is going to be. The vantage point is the spot from which the scene is
viewed. It will be somewhere below the horizon, most commonly in
the middle of the picture. The direction upward from there is your van-
ishing point, the point where all orthogonal lines converge. Imagine
yourself at a railroad track looking directly down it. Off in the distance
directly ahead of you the two rails converge. Now, we all know that the
rails do not actually converge but that they continue side by side. But
we can only see so far. We can only see part of our environment, and
what’s more, what we see isn’t particularly objective. We do not, in the
general run of things, see the true size of objects. The perceived size of
an object is a function of its actual size, the distance from the eyes, the
angle from which the object is seen, and certain other factors (such as
size constancy). Of course, vision doesn’t just work with one vanishing
point. There may be many, just as we see in more complex works of art.
But the point is that in order to draw objects in a scene how they would
look to a perceiver, we don’t draw them as they are, but distorted in a
way that is relative to the vanishing point or points, which is a function
of the place from which the scene is seen (Figure 2.1).
You might remember that Gombrich talked about the laws of per-
spective. These laws regulate how lines intersect at the vanishing point
and the gradual diminution of objects as a function of the distance
from the focal point (the viewer). This is not simply some random
quirk of vision. The size of objects relative to one another within one’s
visual field combined with the converging lines at the vanishing point
makes it possible to determine the distance between objects. This is
why Gombrich says that pictures drawn in perspective allow you to
see the spatial relation between objects represented in that picture.
This is immensely useful for figuring out how to move your body so
as to complete your goals. How wide should your grip be as you pick
up this particular object? How far away are the trees? Can you hang
Figure 2.1 Simple one-point perspective drawing. Illustration by

Peter Bruce.
your hammock from them? It turns out that the perspectival world is
an actionable world. It practically shows you how to move your body
through space, gives you a sense of how long it will take to get to a par-
ticular place, and so on. So whereas Hellenistic paintings were fairly re-
alistic when it came to the particular objects portrayed, they obscured
their spatial relations to one another and to the viewer.
Another way in which visual perception gives us an actionable
world is by giving us the experience of a three-dimensional world,
even though our retinas are only capable of creating two-dimensional
images. Seeing in three dimensions might not be particularly impor-
tant if we were immobile viewers of the world. For creatures who move
around in it, however, it is extremely useful, if not absolutely crucial,
for survival. But three-dimensionality or depth is not only a feature
of space. It is also a feature of objects. Since we see always in perspec-
tive, we only see an object from a particular angle. And yet instead of
experiencing surfaces, the light reflecting off which is all our eyes de-
tect, we experience whole objects. In other words, although we do not
see the other side or the fullness of the object, we visually experience
the object that we see from a certain angle as being a full three-dimen-
sional object. Philosophers and psychologists call this ‘amodal comple-
tion.’ Amodal completion gives us three-dimensional objects, albeit
not a comprehensive view of said objects (we do not see it simultane-
ously from all sides). As Alva Noë puts it, “When you look at a circular
plate, held up at an angle, you experience its circularity in its merely
elliptical shape.”2
If you are not into art, videogames may be a better illustration. If
you are as old as I am, you might remember when videogames first
appeared. I recall spending the bulk of my confirmation party up-
stairs with my friends playing table tennis on a small handheld de-
vice (Pong, see Figure 2.2). We took turns. In those days, your avatar
(you in the game) was represented as just one object among others,
albeit usually a distinctive-looking one. You were able to control this
small homunculus by pushing certain buttons. Still, you saw your-
self in these games, typically from a bird’s-eye perspective or from
the side at a distance. Playing these games was fun enough, although
personally I never took to doing so. Then came the first-person
shooter games (see Figure 2.3). They are radically different. Instead
Figure 2.2 Pong. Illustration by Peter Bruce.
of seeing yourself fully in the scene among all the other things—
mostly creatures bent on killing your alter ego—you see only as much
of yourself as you would in real life and, just as importantly, you see
where you are in the same limited way. You can look ahead of you,
look to the side, or turn around and see what is behind you. Whereas
in the old videogames you could see what would approach you from
many sides—if you were paying attention, that is (which I never
seemed to do)—you cannot see what is outside your line of vision in a
first-person shooter game.
First-person shooter games are much more immersive than are
first-generation video games. And it is not simply because the virtual
world stretches out in front of your eyes just as the real world does. It is
also because when you turn your avatar, the scene changes, and when
you move her backward or forward, things get closer or move far-
ther away. As you move, the environment changes. You explore what’s
around you. You are not simply a passive viewer of it. It seems like you
are there in the scene. It feels real.
In Figure 2.3, you are mostly implicitly represented. You are the van-
tage point. You are able to see your arms and your hands, but not your
Figure 2.3 First person shooter. Illustration by Peter Bruce.
body as a whole. You don’t know where you are because you see your-
self being somewhere, as in old-fashioned computer games. Instead,
you know where you are in the game-world because of the way that
world looks. You are the focal point of everything you see. The visual
world radiates out from your body, and all objects are seen in rela-
tion to it. Space itself is represented on an egocentric frame of refer-
ence. Think of how you think of the objects around you: as being near,
far, tall, or reachable. These are all relational properties. They are not
properties the objects have intrinsically, that is, purely in virtue of the
objects that they are. They are relationships to other objects. In this in-
stance, they are relationships to you.
First-person shooter games help us understand the nature of the
visual world. As you explore your world, “you” are largely an implicit
self. But you are implicit in everything you see. This is a fact that rarely
occurs to us as such. You don’t think of yourself as seeing from a cer-
tain perspective every time you see something. There is no reason
you should, since this is the only direct visual experience of the world
you will ever have. There is nothing to compare it with. As Ludwig
Wittgenstein once said, “The aspects of things that are most important
for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity (One is un-
able to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes).”3
The way we see things does not simply reveal that we are embodied
because our perceptual organs are bodily structures, but also because
our seeing things the way we do requires coordination with other
senses, such as proprioception (our ability to sense our bodies’ posi-
tion in space), and with systems controlling locomotion. It turns out
that in order to experience yourself as moving through the environ-
ment, as opposed to experiencing it coming toward you (a crucial
difference), your visual system must access information from sys-
tems that control movement. In other words, your ordinary visual
experience of the world as you move in it is not the result of visual
calculations alone, but of visual and motor information. We see the
way we do because of the bodies we have and our ability to move
them. Can this be faked? Of course it can. A determined skeptic might
even use videogame technology to make his point. And whereas first-
person shooter games are pretty good, virtual reality technology is
even better at simulating our exploring new worlds. But assuming
that we do not actually have bodies but merely experience the world
as if we did is not the best explanation, of course. The best explanation
is that we have bodies.
This embodied, physical self is very different from the Cartesian
‘I’ we met in the previous chapter. As embodied conscious creatures
we always experience the world from a certain vantage point. Just like
Cartesian selves is impoverished compared to our real selves—they are
pure centers of conscious activity—our embodied selves are what some
call “naked selves.” What that means is not that you are unclothed, but
rather that you are empty. The stuffing that is usually what you think of
as yourself (your past, your current projects, or your character) is not
required in this characterization. Instead, the naked self is what you
come to occupy if you are a protagonist of a body-switching movie,
such as Freaky Friday. You now take up this much space, see things
from this height, and are able to reach this far or run this fast. A dif-
ferent way of putting things is that there is something distinctive about
occupying a visual perspective that isn’t personal. And, as a matter of
fact, this is not special to vision. It is a characteristic of how we think of
and refer to ourselves. What do I mean by that?
2.2 The Empty Self and the Body Snatcher
In a well-known article (to philosophers, at least), “The Essential

Indexical,” John Perry describes a profound insight he had while
shopping. He notices a trail of sugar on the floor and thinks,
“Someone is making a mess.” He decides to follow the trail to alert
his fellow shopper of this fact. But as he pursues the trail of sugar, it
only gets thicker. He never catches up with the shopper. Eventually
the truth dawns on him. He is the shopper making the mess. More
precisely, he thinks, “I am making a mess.” It is this realization that
makes the difference and allows him to take action. No true descrip-
tion of him, or even his own name, can play the same role. Why not?
Because he would then have to connect that description or name with
himself. He would have to know that he is John Perry. Under normal
circumstances, he does, of course. But there are many not too far-
fetched scenarios where this is not the case. Perhaps he has temporary
amnesia as a result of knocking his head on something or perhaps he
is high or profoundly confused. His thinking “John Perry is making a
mess” will not make him do anything. He must first realize that he is
John Perry.4
‘I’ has a unique action-relevant and self-referential quality that
descriptions, or the name, of the referent do not. “My pants are on fire”
is poised to lead to immediate action in a way that “Heidi Maibom’s
pants are on fire” is not, even if I am the one having both thoughts.
Indexicals like ‘you,’ ‘now,’ or ‘here’ work similarly; they too are
uniquely action-apt in a way a description of the actual referent isn’t.
But what is curious about these powerful actionable terms is that they
are, at the same time, essentially empty. They can be filled with any-
thing or anybody that fills a certain role. Whenever I use ‘I,’ I refer to
myself, and whenever you use ‘I,’ you refer to you. We can be as dif-
ferent as we want, but we are still perfectly capable of using ‘I’ to refer
to ourselves. This is because there is nothing personal about the ‘I.’ The
‘I’ tells you nothing about the speaker except for the fact that she is
referring to herself, whomever she is. An amnesic person can wake up
and think to herself: Where am I? Who am I? ‘I’ simply refers to the
locus of thought and experience. As Jean-Paul Sartre might say, it is the
vanishing point of the world. ‘I’ points to the individual who is having
an experience in a way that is unique, yet naked. It is this nakedness

that makes perspective taking possible. Let’s look at an example to get
a better sense of this.5
In Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s quirky movie Being John
Malkovich, Craig, an out-of-work puppeteer, stumbles across a portal
to John Malkovich’s mind in the office where he works filing papers.
He enters. Once inside, he sees the world through Malkovich’s eyes,
hears with Malkovich’s ears, and has the sensation of touching what
Malkovich touches. He perceives everything Malkovich perceives.
After 15 minutes he is ejected and finds himself in a ditch next to the
New Jersey Turnpike. He rushes back to his office to impress Maxine,
the woman of his dreams, with philosophical-type questions
about the nature of self, about the existence of a soul, you know, am
I me? Is Malkovich Malkovich? . . . Do you see what a metaphysical
can of worms that portal is? I don’t see how I can go on living my life
the way I’ve lived it before.
Maxine is unimpressed until she realizes the financial implications of

Craig’s discovery. Together they place an ad, which reads:
Ever wanted to be someone else? Now you can. Visit JM Inc.
They draw big crowds. Everybody wants to be someone else, even for
just a quarter of an hour, particularly if that someone is a famous movie
star. Craig’s wife wants in on the fun too and makes him take her to
his office after hours. Like him, she has a profound experience. She
dialogues with him about it:
Lotte: “It was like everything made sense, you know. I knew who I was.”
Craig: “But you weren’t. You were John Malkovich.”
Lotte: “I was, wasn’t I? I was John Malkovich!”
To the logical mind, this makes no sense at all. Lotte can’t be Malkovich
because Malkovich is Malkovich. Or is he? Later in the movie, Craig
figures out a way not to be ejected from Malkovich’s mind when his
15 minutes are up. No doubt thanks to his puppeteering experience,
he learns how to possess and control Malkovich. As Malkovich, he

can have the woman he could not otherwise have, namely Maxine. He
leaves acting and gets into—surprise, surprise—puppeteering. Craig
has become John Malkovich, or, perhaps, John Malkovich has be-
come Craig.
Why can such a ridiculous conceit work, even as a movie? It seems
absurd. And yet, there are dozens of body-switch or body-swap movies
out there. It is not just Hollywood that finds the idea intriguing. The
possibility of people switching bodies has roots in John Locke’s phil-
osophical reflections on personal identity. Locke asks us to imagine
a shoemaker changing bodies with a prince. Assuming that the swap
goes off without a hitch, what can we learn about personal identity?
According to Locke, that the person stays the same. He has merely been
given a new body much as one might be given new clothes. For the
shoemaker, as for Craig inside Malkovich, the world is now indexed to
this new body. And to the extent that they can control their new bodies,
they are now those agent-bodies. That is, Craig’s, the shoemaker’s, and
the prince’s perceptual experiences are essentially tied to the ability
to move and control the body that is having those experiences. This
means that Craig gets to have the experience of sex with Maxine, for in-
stance, even if his own body is in no way involved in the act. He is also
subject to insults or praises directed at Malkovich, he feels pain in the
Malkovich body, and so on.6
Whatever these body-switch movies say about reality, they indi-
cate something about conceivability. It is really not that hard to im-
agine occupying a new body. This differs, in rather interesting ways,
from the total identification we explored in the previous chapter. Craig
does not become Malkovich as Fischer becomes the Lotto girl mur-
derer. Although Craig being inside Malkovich, controlling him, clearly
is a trope for some degree of identification, the identification Fischer
attempts is on a different scale. There is no Fischer left, it seems, at
the end of this process. Conversely, there is little of Malkovich left at
the end of Craig’s sojourn. But the Malkovich body is there. As such,
Craig adopts the point of view of the Malkovich body. There is an in-
variance here in Craig’s and Malkovich’s experiences of the world. The
greater significance of things, the resultant associations, etc., belong
to each one and affect how they make meaning of the experience. But
the central embodied aspect remains the same (or largely similar) and
that, we shall see, is what matters.
2.3 Seeing in the Imagination
The idea of entering someone’s mind and having their experiences is a

metaphor, of course. Having found no doors into the minds of others,
we are limited to our ability to imagine what others experience. But
the imagination, it turns out, is also perspectival and represents the
world in an indexed, or self-referential, way. Take imagining seeing
something. It is much like actually seeing something. That’s why some
philosophers think that the imagination uses the visual system to do
so. Not only does it seem like I see the stairs in my house from a certain
angle when I imagine seeing them, but the imagination also works in
other vision-like ways. Take the example of rotating objects mentally.
In experimental tests, psychologists show people a cube-like object
and ask them to rotate it in their minds a certain number of degrees.
Doing so takes time, of course, but what is interesting is that it doesn’t
take the same amount of time. Rotating a cube 120 degrees takes longer
than rotating it 45 degrees.
The fact that it takes longer to imagine rotating an object the fur-
ther we rotate it strongly suggests that we are using our visual system
to do so, because if we were to rotate it in our hands, it would take
longer to move it further. It seems that we are rotating by means of
going through the transitions of seeing the object that we would have
had we actually rotated the object. Other evidence that suggests that
imagining seeing involves the visual system comes from patients who
suffer unilateral visual neglect. Such patients are unable to see what is
in one side of their visual field. One study found that patients unable to
see anything in the left side of their visual field were also unable to im-
agine anything on the left side of an imagined scene seen from a certain
vantage point. Another study discovered that lesions to the fusiform
facial area, a visual area in the brain specialized for facial recognition,
cause impairments in both seeing and imagining faces.7
That imagination is vision- like doesn’t mean that we imagine
in pictures, of course. We are unlikely to. Why? Well, first of all, ask
yourself, who would see these pictures? You can’t be seeing them
if by ‘you’ we mean the person we usually refer to, because this pic-
ture is supposed to be inside your mind. So, do you have a little ho-
munculus—or, in Austin Powers speech, a “mini-me”—inside who is
watching them? Does this mini-me have eyes? If so, doesn’t the same
problem arise again? If mini-me imagines things visually, then there
must be a mini-mini-me who sees these images. But if this mini-mini-
me imagines things visually, then . . . It doesn’t take many iterations to
realize that this way of thinking leads to infinite regress. Second, we
imagine seeing things that are more determinate than a picture could
represent. Take a look at Figure 2.4. You will see a cat running either
up the stairs or down the stairs. You can flip the picture any way you
want, but you are interpreting it as one thing or the other. This is the
result of seeing the picture as representing one determinate thing. In
other words, imagining pictures can’t explain what we do when we
imagine seeing something; we also need to imagine an interpretation.
Third, while we do sometimes imagine something more specific than
a picture can represent, most of us are unable to visualize a scene or a
person with the same degree of specificity as a picture. I might imagine
Figure 2.4 Cat running up or down the stairs? Illustration by Peter Bruce.
two people kissing but rarely the particular hue of their skin, their hair
color, and so on.8
A more promising idea is that imagining seeing is like seeing in
many ways. For instance, the process of imagining (visually) is like the
process of visually perceiving objects. Although the two are evidently
different also, the difference is a matter of degree, not kind. Perhaps
mental imagery is constituted by partial enactment of the percep-
tual acts that one would perform were one actually perceiving what
is imagined. The idea, first proposed by psychologist Ulrich Neisser,
enjoys the support of some intriguing evidence. People who imagine
watching a game of table tennis, for instance, move their eyes (i.e.,
saccade) in ways that would be expected were they actually watching
such a game. Other studies also suggest that seeing something and vis-
ually imagining that thing are organized similarly. People take longer
to respond to objects at the periphery of their visual field compared to
objects at the center of it, for example. When a person visually ima-
gines a scene, she also takes longer to respond to what she imagines
at the periphery. Again, when we imagine seeing something, we are
doing much of what we do when we actually see that something. Lastly,
it would seem that the rapid eye movement that gives REM sleep its
name is related to the exploratory saccades during ordinary vision.
That is, when we dream, our eyes move behind our closed lids in the
way they would were we actually seeing what we only dream we see.
Seeing isn’t a spectator sport. It isn’t seeing pictures. Neither is imag-
ining seeing.9
The important point here is that since we imagine the world in
vision-like ways, and since vision is essentially perspectival, we have
every reason to think that our imagination is perspectival too. You
can test the idea yourself. Just imagine the stairs in your house. You
will imagine seeing them from some perspective or other. So, whether
we actually perceive it or we merely imagine it, the world is always ex-
perienced in perspective. When we experience things in perspective,
things are put in relation to us. They are facing us, running away from
us, in our way, towering over us, or barely visible. We do not experi-
ence an objective world, as from a God’s-eye point of view, and then
try to determine our relation to it. We are already situated physically in
the world, which we represent in ways that facilitate acting in it. What
we experience is a function of many of our primary concerns, such

as our need to navigate our environment and use it for our nourish-
ment or our safety. Our primary way of being in the world, then, is
not as distanced observers, but as engaged actors. Yet the fact that our
experiences of the world are egocentric is by no means obvious to us.
Egocentricity has a bad reputation, and for excellent reasons. But
it is worth keeping in mind that egocentricity keeps us alive. If a large
animal is running toward us, it behooves us to respond egocentric-
ally—as if to a threat—and not dilly dally with deeper reflections on
what that thing might be in its own right. It is no lucky accident that
we are both embodied beings navigating a world and also beings that
perceive the world in relation to ourselves in a rather primary way. Is
this merely a feature of our experiences and our imagined experiences?
No. It permeates our view of the world. To get a sense of why this is the
case, it is worth saying a little about the philosophers who have been
the most important in bringing out this fact, namely the German and
French phenomenologists and existentialists.
2.4 Dasein: Being in the World
Since the seminal work of Immanuel Kant, we have understood that

our own constitution is partly responsible for the objects of expe-
rience. We experience the world we do because of who we are. Kant
thought our minds impose what he called forms of intuition—space
and time—and conceptual categories—such as causation, unity, and
possibility—to what is “out there.” Doing so makes experience possible
in the first place, he argued. Moreover, we can discover our own con-
tribution to the world we experience by reflecting on what would make
such experiences possible in the first place. Our experience of the
world, Kant insisted, is the result of these psychological impositions
and the objects themselves, or Ding(en) an sich.
Following this general line of thinking while at the same time
updating it, Edmund Husserl maintained that the conceptual catego-
ries that make our experience what it is are more prevalent and varied
than did Kant. He also thought we are in no position to say anything
about what lies beyond our experience of the world, Kant’s flirtations
with the notion of the Ding an sich notwithstanding. Instead, Husserl

insisted that philosophy must focus on the phenomena, that is, the
contents of our experience. And by contrast to Kant’s transcen-
dental technique of exploring the preconditions of certain types of
experiences, Husserl proposed we could discern the subjective features
of experience by examining experience itself. The philosophical dis-
course changed from a focus on knowledge of the world to an explo-
ration of the experienced world, or phenomena. Hence, the school
associated with Husserl came to be known as phenomenology. It was
all the rage in the 1930s and profoundly influenced both Gestalt psy-
chology and French existentialism.10
Husserl, much like Descartes before him, focused on the mind’s role
in constituting experiences. But he largely ignored the role of the body
and the environment. It would take Martin Heidegger and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty to make central the role of physicality in constructing
the world as we experience it. Heidegger started this movement by first
criticizing the idea that we come to the world as detached observers of
it. Instead, he insisted, our reflective thinking about the world is deriv-
ative of a prior practical engagement with it. Think of it this way: We
act in the world first and think about it second. Know-how is prior to
know-that. Our primary engagement with things is as users of them.
We must figure out what to eat and how to get hold of it, avoid being
eaten ourselves, and so on. Theoretical reflection takes the backstage.
The implication of this idea is that we are badly mistaken when we as-
sume, in our philosophical theorizing, that our ability to use things is
secondary to our previous theoretical or disengaged exploration of
them. Our engagements with the world result from our interests. We
are not naturally detached from the world around us. This fact is, of
course, reflected in the way we think of most things around us: in rela-
tion to us personally or to human interests generally.11
Our primary way of encountering the world, according to
Heidegger, then, is as skilled and purposeful users of it. But our ability
to manipulate objects in the world is not a purely mental one. Our
interests are partly determined by our physicality, and our skills in tool
use are the result of the capabilities of our bodies. The world presents
itself, or discloses itself to us as Heidegger would say, in a way that is rel-
ative to our bodies. Put this way, the idea seems obvious. Of course, our
bodies matter to the way we perceive, and are able to act in, the world,
wherefore it must also be foundational to our way of thinking about
it. But philosophy has a long history of being mind or idea focused.
Just think of Plato’s Ideas. Such ideas are more or less ideal objects that
we may hope to grasp (or recollect) after long and arduous thinking
and debating with other curious and intelligent individuals. Once we
grasp them, we avoid being at sea in the constantly changing landscape
of experiences and objects. Of course, the question then arises, “What
have we gained knowledge of?” It certainly isn’t the world we live in.
But I digress. Looking back, it seems a bit embarrassing that we should
have ignored the body for so long. But the devaluing of the body and
the lionizing of the mind is also a long-standing sociological phenom-
enon, so perhaps it isn’t so surprising.
Despite his focus on tools, or objects as tools, Heidegger didn’t go
into much detail when it comes to the contribution of the body to ex-
perience. The part of the body most associated with Heidegger’s phi-
losophy is, unsurprisingly given the focus on tools, the hand. We see
things, Heidegger would say, either as ready-to-hand (zuhanden),
i.e., as things to be used in one way or other, or as present-to-hand
(vorhanden), namely as objects of theoretical or scientific exploration.
This relative oversight of the rest of our physicality allowed Merleau-
Ponty to stand out as the phenomenologist of the body. Heidegger
stressed our action-based orientation toward the objects of our expe-
rience. Merleau-Ponty distilled that idea into the notion that the world
is a space of possibilities. These possibilities are partly determined by
our bodily capacity for movement. Skills open up new possibilities for
us, new ways of engaging with the world, and therefore a new way of
thinking about it. Our intentionality is ‘motor-intentionality,’ he says.
Instead of thinking of action and perception as distinct, he suggested
they form part of the same act. Kant believed that conceptual cate-
gories organize our experience, but Merleau-Ponty argued that the
organizing principle is based in our readiness to engage with objects
the way we do. For instance, my seeing objects as full objects with a
front and a back even as I am presented with only one of their sides
is not the result of some complex conceptual mathematics, but issues
from my being able to do certain things with such objects, such as
move around them, turn them, avoid bumping into them, and so on.
Human consciousness of things is based on ‘I can,’ not on ‘I think that,’

as Cartesian philosophy seems to imply.12
But it is not just the body that plays a constitutive role in the objects
of experience. Gestalt psychology pointed out that the particular sit-
uation we are in colors the way we perceive objects. This idea later
came to form a central part of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. To illus-
trate the point, he gives the example of a tower that seems farther away
as a result of the detail with which the hills around it are represented.
My favorite example, however, is of St. Paul’s Basilica in Rome, whose
dome appears to increase in size the farther you move away from it
up Via Niccolò Piccolomini. Were you to block out of your vision the
surroundings, so that you see the dome only, it would appear much
smaller. Where we see something influences how we see it. And al-
though we are smart enough not to take such simple visual illusions
too seriously, our way of thinking about the world is itself colored by
the context in which we are presented with it. And this is not, of course,
only true of our physical context. It is true of our mental state also.
Heidegger was famous for introducing the idea of moods and their
pervasive influence on our experience of the world. Modern emotion
research is sympathetic to this idea too, as we shall see in Chapter 6.13
Do we really experience the world in a fundamentally embodied
and interest-relative way? Well, there is extensive evidence that what
we see and how we see it are influenced by bodily position, movement,
emotions, desires, and interests. What we hear, smell, taste, or know
also affects vision. Information received in the primary visual cortex
is sent along two separate routes as the information is processed. The
so-called dorsal stream is specifically associated with visually guided
reaching for, and grasping of, objects based on their moment-to-mo-
ment location, shape, and orientation. It is also connected with tool
use. The processing here is specifically sensorimotor. The ventral
stream, on the other hand, is connected with recognition and dis-
crimination of objects. Hence, the dorsal stream is often thought to be
for action and the ventral for identification. Things are not quite that
simple, of course. Functionally, the two networks are closely linked.
Even during a seemingly simple task, such as grasping an object, there
is substantial interaction between processing in one stream and pro-
cessing in the other. Although there are some who argue that the
operation of the two networks is dissociable, so that a person’s visual

experience may be the result solely of one functioning network, many
supposed dissociations don’t hold up across the board. What does this
mean? It means that what we see is entangled with what we do, what we
might do, or what we intend to do.14
Psychological experiments show how this works in practice. The
presence of one’s hand dispels certain optical illusions. For instance,
when people wear goggles that enlarge objects, the objects seem to
shrink back to normal size when they place their hands next to them.
The opposite happens when the goggles minimize the size of objects. In
both cases, seeing their hands next to an object causes people to judge
it to be smaller/larger than when they don’t. What this indicates, Sally
Linkenauger, Veronica Ramenzoni, and Dennis Proffitt argue, is that
the size of graspable objects is calculated in relation to the perceiver’s
body, specifically the size of the grasp of their hands.15
Another nice example is this. A famous visual illusion, called
the Ebbinghaus Illusion, demonstrates how context affects size
calculations. In Figure 2.5, the central circle is the same size in both
images. However, the one surrounded by small circles appears much
Figure 2.5 The Ebbinghaus illusion. Illustration by Peter Bruce.

larger than the one surrounded by big circles. Nevertheless, if you ask
a person to grasp a circle or even just touch it, the illusion is reduced
by around 30%. The hand also plays a role in the amount of visual pro-
cessing of the objects close to it. Objects close to hand, or that one ima-
gines reaching for, are attended to much more carefully and appear
more detailed in perception. Their details are also remembered better.
And they are not related as much to the subject’s background know-
ledge as are objects out of reach. What that means is that we don’t think
about the larger significance of objects within our reach as much as we
do when it comes to objects outside our reach. Instead, we focus on
their perceptual characteristics. Things we can reach with tools, which
are typically held by our hands, are also attended to more carefully
and appear closer to us as a result of their reachability, it seems. Even
more bizarrely, Jessica Witt and James Brockmole found that holding a
gun makes you more likely to think another person is holding a gun,
even when they are not. This is an intriguing line of evidence that lends
some support to Heidegger’s insistence that being ready-to-hand is a
distinct mode of experience.16
But although hands are quite important, the body, as a whole, and its
capacities exert a big effect on how we perceive our environment. For
instance, people with ankle weights see jumpable gaps as being longer
than they would have perceived them to be were they not wearing
those weights. Researchers theorize that this is because we calculate
the size of gaps we can traverse in terms of the body’s ability to jump
over them. The heavier the weights, the harder it will be, wherefore the
distance seems greater.17
Even more intriguing is that people’s emotions also play a role in
how they see things. Spider phobics, for instance, see spiders as being
closer and running faster than people who are not afraid of spiders.
This has led emotion theorists like Lisa Feldman Barrett to argue that
emotions influence perception to the extent that the visual system uses
affective information to disambiguate and interpret visual stimuli.
What we see, she says, is in large part the result of what we expect to
see. In order for perception to work as fast and effectively as it does,
we cannot sit around and wait for visual information to be carefully
processed. Instead, we must guess what’s there based on rudimen-
tary information. Cognitive scientists will recognize this process as
predictive coding. Guessing is therefore second nature to perception

and emotions help us guess better. This explains our affectively colored
way of seeing the world, such as seeing people as mean, dangerous,
frightening, or sexy.18
2.5 Our World and the World in Itself
It should now be clear that we don’t experience the world like scientists,
but rather in a way relativized to our physical bodies and our animal
natures. We are always in relation: to things, to other people, to plans,
and so on. We are fully immersed in the world, not removed from it
as disinterested observers. This might not come as a surprise. That is
presumably why we need scientists. But there has long been a tradition
in philosophy—and in psychology—of thinking of science as an ex-
tension of common sense. The basic scientific outlook—for instance,
that an impartial view is the better view, that we must have consist-
ency in our thinking, and that our ideas of the world should be based
on observation of it that can be repeated by another person—is not
that different from the way a sensible person would think, the story
goes. On top of that, it turns out that ordinary people have a relatively
sophisticated—though at times wrongheaded or misleading—view of
the world, and one that seems to track the nature of the objects they are
concerned with. People make generalizations about the capabilities of
various animals partly based on the species or genus that they are part
of. Doesn’t this show that these people have a theory of animals, a sort
of folk biology? And can’t this be true of our understanding of other
people (folk psychology) and the physical world (folk physics)?
The picture just presented obviously conflicts with such a view. Folk
theories clearly represent a more reflective and spectatorial view of the
world, whereas the ideas I have presented assume that we act in the
world first and reflect on it second. But of course we do reflect on the
world and attempt to think of it as independent of our relation to it. We
can be relatively detached observers. As Thomas Nagel says, this is a
way of thinking of the world not in terms of how “it looks, feels, smells,
tastes, or sounds.” We are, he says, ultimately aiming at understanding
the world in a way that has nothing to do with a perspective; we are
aiming at a view from nowhere. This is a typical statement of what ob-

jectivity is. We abstract away from the particular and detract from our
ideas of things everything that might have to do with our experience of
them. That means saying goodbye to relational properties, namely the
features objects have in relation to us. These, we are told, are subjective.
But in truth, they are anything but subjective because they describe
relationships in a world where everything is interrelated and where the
functioning of one thing is rarely independent of the functioning of
another.19
My view of objectivity is not Nagel’s. I agree with him that we do not
want a picture of the world solely in terms of our sensory perceptions
of it. We do need abstract characterizations of objects and people so
that our theories (and institutions) can apply to more than one indi-
vidual. But that doesn’t mean that we should aim to shed these other
characterizations. Do I understand a banana better if I forget how it
tastes or feels? Do I understand a person better because I don’t give
a damn about what happens to her? I submit that I don’t. Objectivity
is not about less but about more perspective. When I am able to see
that the plate is round even though it appears to be elliptical from the
angle from which I see it, this is not the result of subtracting informa-
tion about that object. Instead, it is a way of integrating information, or
potential information, from a variety of different perspectives on the
plate. Although being detached is something we can be, and often are,
it is not the defining feature of objectivity.
When we engage with our environment, we do so with interest.
This is as true of our inner scientist as our inner humanist. A scien-
tist is intensely interested in what she works on, but her interest is
not to use so much as to understand. However, understanding is not
independent of who does the understanding. Our understanding is
human understanding. And so, science caters to the human mind, as
my colleague Angela Potochnik says. But, as we have seen, the human
mind is an engaged and embodied mind. Reason or rationality, much
as we laud this capacity, is not centerless. The human point of view
is always a view from somewhere. Still, we study the world with the
aim of understanding it as it is in itself independent of our interests
and our embeddedness in it. This observational view is one way to
engage with it, but it is not, as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty pointed
out, our primary way of doing so. Since we are capable of both fully
immersed engagement with and distant contemplation of the world,
the two viewpoints inevitably infect one another to some extent. Once
we have studied herbs, for instance, we do not come to them quite the
same way as we did before. Even so, a new dichotomy inevitably arises
from the old: one of an immersed use of the world and the other of a
distanced contemplation of it.20
That our primary way of engaging with the world is as embodied
and situated human agents with interests and concerns all of our own
is the heart of subjectivity. This subjectivity is not, however, solipsism,
but intersubjectivity. A good part of what constitutes our experiences
are features that most human beings share: our physical structure, the
capabilities of our bodies, species-and culture-relative interests, and
so on. These are exactly the kinds of things that we can adopt in taking
another’s point of view. Doing so gives us a fundamentally different ex-
perience of someone’s world than the one we have while observing that
person from a distance. This will become clear as we move on to the
research on psychological perspectives in Chapter 3.
2.6 Conclusion
We are not located in the world as objective spectators in it, who then
learn how to use our knowledge of things as they are in themselves to
manipulate them. Instead, by the time we start reflecting on it, we are
already enmeshed in it as embodied agents. We have a point of view
on the world as a function of the beings that we are, our situation, our
interests, and our capacities. We can distance ourselves from our paro-
chial interests and distinctive sensory modes, but we are unlikely ever
to be able to conjure up a world that is not interest laden. We always
occupy some perspective or other even as we lean toward abstraction.
Our representation of the world is perspectival to the extent that it
represents it on an egocentric frame.
Part of that egocentricity is no doubt unique to each individual, but
the general structure of the frame is more universal. The relational
framing, the primacy of action, and the importance of bodily struc-
ture and capacities form a relatively invariant structure. As humans we
have overlapping views of the world. Perspective may be a central fea-

ture of subjectivity, but it is intersubjective at its core. I used the term
‘the naked self ’ to capture this point earlier in the chapter. But enough
about the world. This book is about people, although I do of course re-
alize that they are in the world. We have distinctive ways of engaging
with other people too. And the differences between those ways and
the way we engage with ourselves unreflectively is what perspective
taking exploits. In the next chapter I move from philosophical and
metaphysical reflections to the psychology of action explanations. The
differences I discuss there provide support for the idea that there are
distinctive ways of thinking about what others do and what we do.
3
The Self as Agent, the Self as Observer
Alan Sillars is an expert on interpersonal communication. He films

partners as they try to work through a problem. He then replays the
film to each person and asks them to report what they were thinking
and what they thought their partner was thinking at certain points
during the discussion. Table 3.1 captures an interaction between hus-
band and wife. In the middle is what they say to one another. On the
sides are their reports of their own thoughts and feelings and their
interpretations of what the other is communicating.1
In many personal interactions, people understand each other
poorly. This trend is exacerbated in conflict situations. One of the
problems, Sillars says, is that people fail to take the other’s perspective.
Instead, they approach the conversation, and interpret the utterances
of their partner, from their own narrow point of view. Table 3.1 makes
this clear.2
A person tends to see the world as an extension of his or her interests,
as we saw in Chapter 2. In the example in Table 3.1, the couple fails
to communicate, even as they are saying things to each other, because
their interests are misaligned. She hears what he says as relevant to her
concerns about being a bad wife, whereas he understands everything
she says as a failure to understand the importance of saving money. Put
in terms we have used before, the psychological backgrounds of the
two are different and this difference sets the stage for profound mis-
understanding. But people’s interests do not simply differ willy-nilly.
There are formal and structural invariances between how a person
tends to see him-or herself and how he or she tends to think of others.
This means that to take another person’s perspective, we don’t need to
know about all her interests, such as wanting to be successful at her job
or loving rare pre-Columbian artifacts. What we need is to imagine
we experience the world from inside her agency. I will get to perspec-
tive taking in Chapter 6. In this chapter, however, I focus on what a
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197637081.003.0004
Table 3.1 Interpersonal communication between husband and wife.
She thinks She says He says He thinks

Again, I kind of felt But my point She’s getting off
he was attacking [interrupts] Yeah, is . . . the subject again,
me and. I was but I don’t buy just trying to
trying to make a things for myself. get her to the
point and let him But my point is point . . . Frustration.
see, that it’s not just [interrupts] that you can’t
frivolous things but I know but . . . save. How come,
necessities . . . that each month, we’re She’s twisting it
he won’t buy out of money around again.
because he’s so I don’t know before the end of “Something we
frugal. . . . .There are the month? need for the house.”
a lot of things There’s no difference.
Here I was getting we need for It doesn’t matter if If we can’t afford it,
offended. I kind the house. it’s for you or the it’s not responsible.
of felt like he was house. We can’t The whole point is
uh . . . saying always afford it. trying to get her to
that I wasn’t a I don’t think you save money.
good wife, or understand.
a competent Right, well like if
adult, and that Again feeling
it is a decoration, [rolls his eyes
bothered me. BUT [with frustration of not
and looks at the
emphasis] . . . like ceiling] getting the point
the sofa . . . across to her. We
We have should save, whether
Here again, I was it’s $100 a month or
furniture. We
feeling threatened No but . . . whatever, but put
aren’t sitting on
and kind of the floor. something aside,
defending myself. instead of always
[interrupts] What being broke.
about the rug?
[sharply] What The old rug was
do you mean, perfectly fine but She’s still off the
I was trying to “perfectly fine?” you replaced it. subject. She’s
make my point, but comparing us to
he wasn’t taking it. Which is okay, other people, and
I was offended, and Well, I’m just if we have every situation is
maybe anxious. saying that if you the money. different. Trying to
What’s going to knew what other focus on the point.
happen when the couples spend, It doesn’t matter. Still frustrated.
baby comes, when you would You don’t
we need things for realize how little understand.
the baby? we do.
From Sillars 2011.

psychological perspective is and begin to outline its formal features.

A first-person perspective involves a particular way of thinking about
oneself, about others one observes, and about people one interacts
with. I call these, respectively, an actor perspective, an observer per-
spective, and an interactor perspective. These are not perspectives of
different people. They are aspects of what we might call the first-person
perspective, which is really just to say the perspective any one person
has on the world.
In section 3.1, I discuss research by Betram Malle and his team of
psychologists on how actors think of themselves and how they think
of others. In section 3.2, I discuss autobiographical memory research,
which indicates that we sometimes recall our past, not as actors, but as
observers of ourselves. These asymmetries are not random. Memory
perspectives track the experiential access we have to others and our-
selves, and they focus on some features over others. In section 3.3,
I present a grab-bag of results that again show asymmetries along the
lines we would expect if our experiential access to self and others were
different. In section 3.4, I sum up our results. However, although much
can be learned from understanding the difference between an agent
and an observer point of view, we should not ignore the fact that when
we are actively engaged with others, we are not in a position to observe
them. Hence, the first-person perspective must include a third option;
which I move on to in Chapters 4 and 5.
3.1 Thinking about Others, Thinking about Oneself
A visual perspective has formal features that are relatively invariant.

If somebody else can occupy your position and movement through
space, they have the same visual perspective. But what sense does it
make to suppose that we, as persons, have a perspective on the world
that is invariant in just the same way? After all, thought is not an organ
that can be pointed only in one direction. We saw part of the answer in
Chapter 2. Because we are embodied agents first and thinkers second,
our bodies and our basic needs structure the way we experience the
world almost as much as the shape and location of our sensory organs.
Often, we experience the world very similarly due to our similar needs
The Self as Agent, the Self as Observer 63
to grow, survive, reproduce, and raise offspring. But there are many
differences also, given our particular bodies, abilities, environment,
etc. Nonetheless, the relation an agent bears to the world is similar
to that of other agents. What do I mean? I can recollect things about
my past, I am aware of feelings in my body, and I have access to the
thoughts that I am having (or at least to some of them). When it comes
to others, I don’t have such access. I can, however, see how they move,
the way they express themselves using their bodies, the way they come
across to another person, and so on. Although I usually know when
I move my body and what I say, my relation to those things is from the
inside, whereas my relation to your movements and speech is from the
outside. This discrepancy gives rise to my thinking about myself and
what I do in one way, which psychologists usually call an “actor per-
spective” (I call it an “agent perspective”), and my thinking about other
people in another way, which they call an “observer perspective.” Put
slightly differently, my perspective on the world is one in which I am an
agent and an observer of you. Your perspective is one in which you are
an agent and an observer of me.
In a series of experiments, psychologist Bertram Malle and
colleagues asked people to describe and explain actions, both their
own and those of other people. They found that we are less likely to
mark beliefs as such when we report on our own compared to when
we report on those of other people. In other words, I am more likely
to explain another person’s actions by saying things like “she took the
potion because she believed that it would save her life,” rather than “she
took the potion because it would save her life.” I tend only to mark my
own beliefs as beliefs when I doubt their veracity. “I think I put the vase
in the downstairs cupboard” expresses a belief that I put the vase in that
cupboard, but also a degree of uncertainty. Had I been absolutely sure
where I put it, I would have said, “I put it in the downstairs cupboard.”
This suggests that when we think about someone’s reasons for action
in terms of explicitly represented beliefs, we are withholding judgment
as to whether or not those beliefs are true (and thereby marking a po-
tential disagreement). By contrast, we usually do not to think of our
own beliefs as beliefs. We see through them to the world, in a manner
of speaking. Summing up, a person tends to think of her own beliefs/
thoughts as unproblematic reflections of reality, whereas she is aware
that other people base their understanding of said reality on beliefs,

which may or may not be true.3
All this is unreflective, of course. I don’t actually believe that I have
infallible access to the world and others do not. I have been wrong,
I have updated my beliefs about the world, and there are certainly
aspects of it that I am unsure about. Most of the time, however, I see
right through my thoughts. My experience is of directly apprehending
the nature of things. This point cannot be stressed enough. As I am
thinking a thought, I don’t “see” the thought as such; I am focused on
the content of that thought. The belief-ness of the thought is implicit in
my attitude toward the content, but I don’t think of it as a thought un-
less I start to reflect on it.
Another asymmetry Malle and his colleagues found concerns how
we explain what people do. Philosophers have long championed the
idea that explanations of behavior are explanations in terms of reasons,
rather than causes. This is contrasted with other types of explanations
one could give of the same behavior, such as physiological or neu-
rological explanations. The latter may be fun to try to provide, but at
the current state of the art, they are hopeless when it comes to com-
plex actions. They also don’t satisfy our need for understanding why
someone acts the way they do. “She has low serotonin uptake in the
prefrontal cortex,” for instance, doesn’t even figure the person as an
agent. It helps us understand something, not about her as a person, but
about her brain chemistry. To understand the person, however, we want
to know something about her beliefs, desires, or intentions. To use a
classic example, we explain why Bob went to the pub by saying that he
wanted a pint and believed that he could get one at the pub. Notice that
we are told about both Bob’s beliefs and desires. Philosophers think that
reason explanations require information about both. Psychologists
also talk of reason explanations, but they tend to be less fussy about the
mental state structure of such reasons, as we are about to see.4
When we are asked to explain our own actions, we gravitate toward
reason explanations. Malle and his collaborators found that we give
1.5 times as many reason explanations of our own actions compared
to when we explain other people’s actions. By contrast, as observers
of other people’s actions, we are twice as likely to use what Malle calls
“causal-historical explanations,” compared to when we, as actors, ex-
plain our own. “Causal-historical explanations” are explanations that
make reference to factors external to the agent, such as her upbringing,

culture, or situation. In some cases, such explanations make reference
to facts about the person that might influence her but that bypass what
she consciously considers before or while she acts. To see what the dif-
ference amounts to, consider these ways of explaining why Ian worked
14 hours a day for the last month:5
Why did Ian work 14 hours a day for the last month?
(Reason explanation) To make more money
(Reason explanation) A project was due
(Causal-historical explanation) He is driven to achieve
(Causal-historical explanation) That’s the cultural norm
These are, of course, the psychologist’s relaxed reason explanations.

A philosophical construal would have been more cumbersome, such
as “he wanted to make more money, and he believed he could do so by
working really long hours”—same idea. As you can see, both reason
and causal-historical explanations are perfectly good explanations.
They are just different. But the way they differ is important. A reason
explanation goes with agency. Why? An agent is someone who acts,
not randomly or on a whim (at least not most of the time), but after
thinking about what they want, how to get it, how not to get it, whether
it is worth getting in the first place, and so on. In other words, agency
involves deliberating about what to do. By contrast, causal-historical
explanations are rarely the kinds of things that form part of your delib-
eration as you decide what to do.
The types of explanations we choose are important. Often others—
and sometimes our super-ego—ask us to justify our actions. Ideally
speaking, our justifications state our actual reasons for doing as we did.
However, we frequently make things up as we go or give the best ex-
planation we can think of or the one that makes us look good. Be that
as it may, what characterizes the way we think of our own actions is
that they are primarily produced by reasoned reflection, and not the
result of external influences. Even if we are sometimes better served
by blaming our circumstances, we clearly prefer to think of our own
actions this way. Nagel, whom we have met before, would say that we
think of our actions under the guise of freedom. Our subjective ex-
perience is that we are free to act, that our actions are related to our
thoughts about what we want in the right way, and therefore that we
decide what we do.6
Causal-historical explanations are almost the inverse of reason
explanations. They typically bypass a person’s agency and instead de-
scribe her actions directly in terms of external events, influences, or
parts of her nature. The person is seen more as an object in a web of
causes that she, herself, is part of, and less in terms of someone who
causes her own actions. Ian, in the earlier example, is not likely to
decide to work 14-hour days because he realizes that he is driven to
achieve or because that is the norm at his job. Such explanations can
form the basis of later reason explanations, but as they stand, they are
not the sorts of things someone would consider when deciding what to
do. Thinking of my hard work in terms of my ambition is a strange im-
personal and dissociated way of thinking about my actions. It robs me
of my responsibility for that work. Because we are doers, what stands
out to me is that I worked hard so as to complete the project on time.
However, it doesn’t seem odd to us at all to describe someone else in
terms of her ambition or drive.
This difference leads to a particular way of thinking about our own
agency, freedom, and reasonableness. Clearly, we do think of other
people as agents, because we hold them responsible for their actions,
we allow them to hold us responsible for what we do, and we reason
with them. But the fact that we think more of our own actions in terms
of reasons and more of their actions in terms of their causal-histor-
ical provenance betrays the fact that we have a tendency to think of
others as objects in the world and as profoundly influenced by their
background and environment. At some level, we understand that we
are too. We know that we are sometimes driven by external influences,
but that is not our experience. When we are in the flow of life, it is hard
to believe that our actions are determined by circumstances beyond
our control. It is only when we sit back and reflect in the proverbial
philosopher’s armchair that we realize that we too are subject to laws
of nature. But our natural, or primary, tendency is to think of ourselves
as freer than we are and of others as driven by external influences more
than we are.7
A third difference between our explanations of our own actions is
in terms of the types of reasons we give. When it comes to our own
actions, we explain them almost twice as often in terms of our beliefs

(1.0) compared to our desires (0.6). We explain our own actions in
terms of beliefs much more often than we explain the actions of others
in terms of beliefs (1.0 vs. 0.5). In other words, when it comes to our
own actions, we see them as driven by our beliefs more so than by our
desires and more driven by beliefs than are the actions of other people.
Others, we seem to assume, are driven as much by their desires (0.6)
as by their beliefs (0.5). Suppose we ask a person why she chose not
to vote in the last election, Malle says. She might respond that none
of the candidates were trustworthy. She explains her action in terms
of a reason, and one that is expressed primarily in the form of an un-
marked belief. An observer would be as likely to explain her not voting
in terms of a desire, such as not wanting to support the system. Why is
that? Malle speculates that we have a bias toward giving belief-reason
explanations of our own actions because doing so make us seem more
reasonable. This idea is supported by the fact that when people are
asked to provide explanations of another person’s action so as to pre-
sent it in a positive light, they give more reason explanations than they
otherwise would, and more reason explanations in terms of beliefs in
particular. But although an agent is likely to reference her beliefs when
explaining her actions, she is not more likely to mark them as beliefs.
She will say, “The candidates are all corrupt” rather than, “I think the
candidates are all corrupt.” The underlying assumption here seems to
be that we are acting in certain ways because of the way the world is.
I do not vote because the candidates are corrupt, not because I believe
the candidates are corrupt. My action is not based on some subjective
or particular desires that I might have—such as not wanting to sup-
port the system of corruption—but is responding directly to the world.
What could be more reasonable than that?8
Malle found one more important difference between thinking of an
action as an agent compared to as an observer. This time it concerns
what kinds of things people find more compelling to explain. When
we think of our own actions, we pay twice as much attention to our
experiences, including our feelings or involuntary bodily sensations
(such as sweating), than we do to those of others. When we think
about others, as observers of them, we are twice as likely to focus on
their actions compared to when we think of ourselves (as agents).
More precisely, we find it more urgent to look for explanations of

our experiences and feelings than of our actions. But when it comes
to others, we are more concerned with explaining what they do. The
reason is straightforward. When you are faced with others, you can
observe what they do and what feelings they express; you cannot per-
ceive what they intend, what are their unexpressed thoughts, or how
they interpret their experiences. And so, we don’t wonder as much
about what others feel because we have little evidence that they are
feeling anything unless they express it. But we are certainly in a po-
sition to tell when they are doing something, which can then become
food for thought. Conversely, we tend to be aware of what we hope to
achieve by doing what we do. Therefore, we don’t reflect much on such
intentions, whereas as observers, who do not have access to them, we
do just that.9
Again, this actor-observer asymmetry points to something pretty
important. Of course, we know intellectually that others have feelings
and experiences. But what the evidence indicates is that we pay much
less attention to those feelings and experiences than we do to our own.
In our thought space, our own feelings and sensations are supersized
compared to those of other people. The same is true, of course, of how
other people think of us. What we also know is that we tend to overes-
timate how obvious our feelings and experiences are to other people.
It is called “the illusion of transparency.” This mismatch causes a fair
amount of misunderstanding, some of which can be avoided by taking
the other person’s perspective. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The
larger point here is that Malle and his colleagues discovered four major
actor-observer asymmetries, asymmetries between how we think of
ourselves as actors and how we think of others as observers of them.
They may seem like small differences, but many small differences in
the laboratory often become magnified in everyday action. That is,
what we discover in the laboratory may not seem particularly dramatic
even if the behavior it causes is, in fact, rather noticeable. If you want
a comparison, in the laboratory the decision-making and moral un-
derstanding of psychopaths is only slightly impaired, but these impair-
ment figure prominently in their actions.10
We can add another asymmetry. It would seem that people tend
to interpret behaviors in two ways: as related to the agency, and
therefore the competence of the person, or to their community-

orientedness, or their morality or warmth. According to Bogdan
Wojciszke and colleagues, these two dimensions account for 82% of
the differences in how people conceive of everyday behaviors. And
when it comes to autobiographical past events, three-quarters of
them are framed either in community or agency terms. Now what,
exactly, is warmth? It is related to perceived intent, friendliness, help-
fulness, sincerity, trustworthiness, morality, fairness, generousness,
honesty, and tolerance. Competence, on the other hand, concerns
perceived ability, intelligence, skill, creativity, efficacy, ingenious-
ness, competence, and knowledgeableness. These two dimensions
play an important role in the evaluation of people or actions. In
evaluating political candidates, for instance, people are quick to
favor one person if they have been primed with questions about
foreign policy, but favor another if they instead have been primed
with questions about taking care of citizens. Of the two dimensions,
warmth/community is the more important one. It is judged faster
and carries more weight. The reason, psychologists speculate, is
that a person’s intent for good or ill toward us is the most impor-
tant thing to determine. Are they for us or against us? How compe-
tent, clever, or efficacious they are comes second. Warmth generally
wins out. However, when a person thinks of her own actions, she
is more likely to think of them in terms of agency or competence.
These features are also thought to be more important to her sense
of worth. However, when she thinks of other people’s actions, she
is more likely to evaluate them in terms of their communal nature,
namely in terms of the moral, social, or interpersonal value of the
actions. And here the moral aspect appears to predominate. What is
most important in the self is thought to be agency, but what is more
important in others is their communion/warmth.11
To sum up, here are the differences between the two perspectives we
have found so far:
The agent perspective

When somebody thinks about herself, she tends to
(1) think more about why she is experiencing or feeling what she is
feeling than why she is doing what she is doing;
(2) explain her actions more in terms of reasons than in terms of

how she got to have those reasons in the first place or by ref-
erence to factors external to such reasons (causal-historical
account);
(3) frame her reasons more in terms of beliefs than desires;
(4) think of her beliefs more in terms of how the world is than as
beliefs (belief marking); and
(5) think of her actions more in terms of competence, skill, or
efficacy than in terms of their moral, social, or interpersonal
consequences.
The observer perspective

When a person thinks about other people, she tends to
(6) think more about why they act the way they do than about why
they are having the experiences or feelings they are having.
(7) explain others’ actions more in terms of causal and historical
factors that influence their reasons or how they conceive of
things than in terms of their reasons for actions;
(8) explain others’ actions in terms of either what they want (de-
sire) or what they think (belief);
(9) think of others’ beliefs more as beliefs than simply as a reflec-
tion of the way the world is (belief-marking); and
(10) think of other people’s actions more in terms of their moral,
social, or interpersonal consequences than in terms of their
competence, skill, or efficacy.
As we shall see in Chapter 4, an observer perspective is not the only

way we regard others when we do not take their perspective. When
we interact with others—in a characteristically intersubjective way (to
be described later)—we see them somewhat differently. But this is al-
most exclusively the purview of interacting with someone in person.
When we are not engaged with another person, either because they are
not present or because we do not engage with them as equals, we “ob-
serve” them. In this mode, we are relatively detached from them. But,
as I have said before, a detached, or observer, view is not yet an objec-
tive view. It is just a point of view that focuses on other things than does
an immersed one.
3.2 Thinking of Oneself as Agent and as Observer
We do not simply think of others as observers. We also sometimes

think of ourselves from a place outside ourselves. This would be a
reflective way of viewing ourselves, by contrast to the pre-reflective
view we have just considered. Because a point of view is always the
point of view of someone, we must imagine ourselves from the van-
tage point of another agent, whether real or virtual. But what is it to
think of oneself from the outside? It is to think of oneself as if one
were another person; I view myself as I would view another. This is
most obvious in the visual case. Many of our thoughts have an imag-
istic element, involving what seems to be sensory or perceptual elem-
ents. We imagine or recall seeing things. When we are involved in
such thinking, how do we figure in the visual scene? David Foulkes
sought to answer that question in a thought-sampling experiment.
His subjects—all women—were asked to describe the last thought
they had, other than thoughts related to their immediate sensory ex-
perience, at the sign of a signal. If the person was “in” the scene she
reported on, she was asked to indicate whether “she could see herself
as others might or whether it was as if she were seeing through her
own eyes.”12
In 60% of the trials, the young women in his study reported visual-
izing the situation as if they were seeing it with their own eyes. Such a
perspective is typically called a “field perspective,” although some call
it a first-person perspective. It should not be surprising to find that
when we imagine or remember experiences, we do so as from the po-
sition we would occupy were we actually experiencing what we im-
agine experiencing. What is remarkable is that in a full 15% of trials,
people reported seeing themselves in the scene, as from a perspective
of someone else. These are called “observer perspectives” or “third-
person perspectives.” In one case, a woman recalled a time when she
was camping with friends and they were sitting around the campfire.
Her vantage point on this scene was not from her own eyes, but she saw
the scene “as if up in a tree, watching.” This woman is not simply imag-
ining herself doing something or other. She is recalling an event from
a perspective that she never had on herself, and one that it would be
impossible for her to have!13
Years ago, I swam the length of a lake close to my then-home in

Canada. It took almost three hours. When I recall the event, I most
often do so from a bird’s-eye view, high above the lake, seeing myself
as a tiny dot moving slowly across it. If I try harder, I can also retrieve
some field memories, such as having a brief break on a sand bar and
nervously eyeing a speedboat. It is not uncommon for one’s perspec-
tive to change in a single act of retrieving a memory.
As it turns out, these types of memories, where we recall seeing our-
selves in the scene, are not unusual. Sigmund Freud noted on it back
in his day, particularly with respect to childhood memories. He took
such observer memories as evidence that the memory had undergone
transformation. In the early 1980s, Giorgia Nigro and Ulric Neisser
reignited the exploration into the phenomenal experience of remem-
bering with their seminal paper “Point of View in Personal Memories.”
They found that although most autobiographical memories involve a
field perspective, a full third of all memories were from an observer
perspective. The perspective from which one recalls an experience, it
turns out, is not random. This is why this line of research matters to us.
A perspective is related to what is remembered, how it is remembered,
and when what was remembered occurred.14
Taking a field perspective compared to an observer perspective
makes a difference to how one thinks of one’s actions or experiences
and the type of information that is easy to access. Here is how psy-
chologist Lisa Libby and her colleagues put it (she uses “first-person
perspective” for “field perspective” and “third-person perspective” for
“observer perspective”):15
People are more likely to remember information about proximal

visual details (e.g., objects the actor is holding) when the scene is
visualized from the actor’s first-person than an observer’s third-
person perspective, but remember information about the broader
setting (e.g., layout of space) from the third-person than first-person
perspective.
Picturing an event from the third-person perspective causes
people to understand it top-down, in terms of abstractions that in-
tegrate it with its broader context. Evidence supporting this model
demonstrates that actions (e.g., “wiping up a spill”) are under-

stood in terms of constituent aspects (e.g., “using a sponge”) from
the first-person perspective but in terms of connections to causes,
consequences, traits, goals, and identities from the third-person
perspective (e.g., “cleaning up after the kids,” “being a responsible
parent” . . . ).
When actions are represented from a field perspective, they are

presented in more associative and piecemeal ways. For instance, when
imagining someone locking a door, a person is more likely to con-
ceive of the action as “turning a key.” Imagining actions from an ob-
server perspective leads to a more abstract view. So instead of thinking
of the action as “turning a key,” the person is liable to think of it as
“securing the house.” The details people recall are also connected with
perspective. They are more likely to recall close spatial relations and
objects held or touched if they take a field perspective. If they take an
observer perspective, by contrast, they typically visualize the scene
from a greater distance, and the layout of the environment is more
clearly represented. This might explain why I recall swimming across
the lake from an observer perspective. I’m recalling a feat of endur-
ance. Representing the distance swum encapsulates the significance of
the act.16
Field and observer memories differ in other respects too. Emotional
memories are generally vivid, are talked about more often, are more
accessible, are clearer when it comes to the location where the emotion
was experienced, provoke stronger emotions during recall, and are
personally more significant. Most of these memories are field mem-
ories. Support for the idea that emotional situations favor retrieval
from a field perspective also comes from neuroscience. Philip Jackson,
Andrew Meltzoff, and Jean Decety found that field perspectives
produce more activation of sensorimotor areas than do observer
perspectives. The implication of all this is, of course, that because we
most often think of people from an observer perspective, we tend to
underestimate the intensity of others’ emotional experiences com-
pared to our own, an idea that Nick Haslam and his collaborators have
also provided evidence for.17
There are some notable exceptions to the connection between a

field perspective and emotions. When a recalled event is very painful
or when it provokes strong, negative affect, people are more likely to
recall it from an observer perspective. The effect of doing so is that the
emotion is experienced less strongly, if at all. People who dissociate
more often than others also report more observer memories, as do
victims of trauma. Self-conscious emotions like shame, pride, and em-
barrassment are another exception to the rule that emotional memo-
ries are field memories. People with low self-esteem tend to remember
such emotions from an observer perspective. Overall, there is a strong
tendency to recall situations where one felt self-conscious from an ob-
server perspective, such as giving a talk, meeting important people, or
being in a social situation where one knows nobody. Socially anxious
people, unsurprisingly, have more observer memories than do less
anxious persons.18
Perspective in memory matters, then. The field perspective is more
uniquely connected with sensing, perceiving, feeling, and acting. It
places you in the moment, with all its situated characteristics: time,
location, visual impressions, sensations, and affective reactions. It is
more closely related to a seeming replay of your experience at the time.
Field perspective memories are more realistic and less likely to be con-
fused with things one is told one once did than are observer memories.
An observer perspective is related to making sense of the situation and
oneself, and to regulating one’s emotion. In simple cases, it provides a
better overall view of the situation, such as the distance one is swim-
ming or one’s location relative to people or things. In more complex
ones, it dampens the affect associated with the experience. It presents
one as one imagines one would appear. The fact that we can better make
sense of the significance of a situation when we are a little distanced
from it hardly bears mentioning. It is rather surprising, however, to
see this idea play out so concretely in the visual representation of the
situation, namely, from a distance and outside the self. Viewpoints are
molded so as to provide the best representation of what one wants to
recall. Giving a presentation is typically represented as from a place
directly in front of oneself, which gives one a better idea of how one
appeared to the audience, whereas swimming is typically from above
and slightly behind the swimmer, which gives a sense of where and
how far one swam. Points of view, then, are perfectly suited to capture
certain types of scenarios and impart certain kinds of information.19
Time affects the types of perspectives in recall also. Older memo-
ries are more likely to be observer memories than field memories.
Most psychologists take this to support the view that field memories
are characterized by their vividness and detail, and so the further one
moves back into one’s past, the harder it is to retrieve those aspects.
Hence, the observer perspective becomes the favored one. But other
factors are associated with the observer perspective, such as discrep-
ancies between the former and the current self, for instance. If we have
changed a lot, we recall our past more from an observer perspective.
Power is also related to the observer perspective, but inversely so.
People who feel in power take such a perspective on themselves less
than do people who do not. This ties in nicely with research that shows
that women are more likely to remember potentially objectifying situ-
ations from an observer perspective than are men.20
In sum, if research on memory and imagination is correct, we often
take an observer perspective on ourselves, which, as we saw, is just an-
other first-person perspective but with oneself as object. Sometimes,
we even flip back and forth between a field and an observer perspective
when recalling a single experience. Researchers suspect that the reason
we do so is because each perspective is helpful in recalling different
aspects of an event. Now, a field perspective is the perspective of an
actor immersed in the world. In other words, it is nothing but what we
called an agent perspective before. We can therefore add the following
characteristics to the list of what differentiates an agent from an ob-
server point of view:
The agent perspective is associated with

(11) representations of more concrete or low-level features of the
environment, such as the location of objects relative to the ob-
server, or specific actions performed, such as “turning a key”
or “using a sponge”;
(12) greater focus on proximal visual details, such as objects that
are held;
(13) greater focus on bodily sensations, affective reactions, and

psychological states;
(14) more precise situational representation of time and place; and
(15) greater experiential and emotional proximity to the event.
The observer perspective on oneself is associated with

(16) representations of abstract and contextualized features of
the environment, such as the larger significance of the action
(involving goals, causal relations, or values), as when the ac-
tion is thought of as “securing the house” or “cleaning up after
the kids”;
(17) greater focus on distal visual details, such as the spatial layout
of a room;
(18) greater focus on what one looks like to others (physical
appearance) or what one’s action might seem like; and
(19) greater experiential and emotional distance from the event.
3.3 Other Forms of Exceptionalisms
The asymmetries just mentioned are not the only ones; there are many
others. But for now, let’s make do with these asymmetries: the volun-
tariness of beliefs, the importance of psychological needs, degrees of
psychological understanding, and sources of psychological under-
standing. Most of these discrepancies are readily explained in terms
of what is salient to us about ourselves compared to what is salient to
us about others. Nonetheless, they are views it makes no sense for us to
hold upon reflection.
An obviously absurd view we appear to hold, unearthed by Emily
Pronin and fellow psychologists, is that we understand others and
ourselves better than others understand either us or themselves. In
other words, Bob thinks he understands George better than George
understands him. He also thinks that he understands himself better
than does George. And, even more interestingly, he thinks he
understands George better than George understands himself. Bob,
then, turns out to have quite amazing abilities. The problem is that
George thinks he understands Bob better than Bob understands him,
etc., too! Obviously, Bob and George can’t both be right. In fact, they
are both mistaken. But why did they end up with these beliefs in the
first place? Because of differential access and a high degree of confi-
dence in their own beliefs. When it comes to knowing others, it turns
out, we think that external characteristics, such as what people do, say,
or express, are more characteristic of who they really are than are in-
ternal characteristics. In our own case, however, we are quite insistent
that internal characteristics are the true determiners of who we really
are. What this asymmetry tracks, then, is access. Each person has priv-
ileged access to their own momentary thoughts and feelings. When
it comes to other people, their access to such thoughts and feelings is
more limited, whereas their access to what people express, how they
behave, and how they come across is quite good—better, in fact, than
in their own case. This doesn’t, of course, explain why they should
think they understand others particularly well. This work is done,
philosophers Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen and Mattias Skipper argue,
by our tendency to accommodate ambiguous evidence in a biased
manner.21
The thing is that behavioral evidence allows for many interpret-
ations. Once we have formed a view of another person, which we do
quite quickly, it is not too difficult to provide an interpretation of their
behavior that fits our pre-existing notions. This tendency is particu-
larly obvious if we are trying to glean people’s true beliefs or feelings
about something from what they say or do. Just think of our opening
example from Sillars. As researchers, we are faced with prodigious ev-
idence that people understand others much less well than they think
they do. This comes up again and again. I recently had my students
do group work on Sillars, and many of them blankly stated that Sillars
must be wrong because we obviously understand others, particularly
friends and family, quite well. It is a particularly insidious belief. And it
is maintained by our rarely asking for clear evidence about what we are
assuming about others (“What were your thoughts when I said . . . ?”)
and our understanding that other people sometimes have unreason-
able ways of thinking about themselves, such as overly charitable inter-
pretations of their own behavior, self-flattering construals of their
motivations, and blatantly foolish ideas about their character, which
they regularly contradict with their actions. The trouble is that we
assume that we are much less subject to this tendency than they are.
Because we hold that what is truly diagnostic of us is information only
we have privileged access to, we can hold on to the idea that we un-
derstand ourselves better than do others. What we fail to notice, how-
ever, is that we also think that behavioral evidence is more diagnostic
of others than of ourselves. This doesn’t make for good psychology. In
fact, it’s quite absurd. But it does reflect our experience. We simply do
not experience ourselves as revealed in our actions to the extent that
we experience others as revealed in theirs for the simple reason that we
experience ourselves differently (from the inside) than we do others
(from the outside).
We find a similar tendency to privilege information or feelings
that we have immediate access to in our own case, but not in the case
of others, in a recent paper by Juliana Schroeder and Nicholas Epley.
They decided to test the idea based on typical responses to marginalized
groups. People tend to assume that people belonging to these groups
mainly need their physical needs met, but that their other needs, par-
ticularly more psychological ones such as self-esteem or respect, are
not that important to them. This tendency, it turns out, is general.
Schroeder and Epley organize needs into three categories. Physiological
needs involve food, drink, and sleep. Physiological/ psychological
needs include a sense of belonging, love or affection from others, and
feeling safe. Feeling respected, being free to make one’s own choices,
realizing one’s potential, and having meaning in life are high-level psy-
chological needs. As it turns out, each person believes that their own
high-level psychological needs are more important to them than these
types of needs are to other people. This shows up in test after test. It also
manifests itself in judgments concerning intrinsic and extrinsic motiv-
ations. Intrinsic motivation includes interest, ambition, care, and so on,
whereas extrinsic motivation is typically reward or punishment driven.
Students tended to think of themselves as being driven more by intrinsic
than by extrinsic motivation, but they regarded their fellow classmates
as driven more by extrinsic than intrinsic motivation. Again, this effect
seems to be the result of salience; our own needs for belonging or re-
spect are evident to us because they are the sorts of things that we have
privileged access to, but others do not. For this reason, our experience
is of a world in which our own need for love, respect, and so on is quite
salient, whereas the need for food, shelter, and safety is more evident
when it comes to others. This experience creeps into our more consid-
ered judgments also. This is unfortunate because it means that we are
not very good at meeting other people’s needs. In the case of charity, for
instance, recipients far prefer gifts that will allow them to exercise con-
trol on how to use them than gifts that simply cover their physiological
needs. Donors, however, overwhelmingly choose these less preferred
gifts because they underestimate the importance of their recipients’
high-level psychological needs.22
The tendency to underestimate the degree to which other agents
are affected by psychological states and experiences that are not vis-
ible to us directly is also reflected in our attitudes toward pain. Loran
Nordgren, Kasia Banas, and Geoff MacDonald found that people sys-
tematically underestimate the importance of social pain in others, such
as might result from ostracism, shaming, or bullying. What is different
in this case is that they also underestimated their own psychological
pain in the past. When put in a position where they experience exclu-
sion, however, people are less likely to underestimate the seriousness of
social pain.23
Let’s just look at one more example, namely how we acquire and
maintain our beliefs. Here too we observe an interesting discrepancy.
Corey Cusimano and Geoffrey Goodwin report that people tend to be-
lieve that others have more voluntary control over what to believe than
they, themselves, do. This is due to the fact that when they reflect on
others, they tend to think of belief and belief control in a generic way,
whereas when they reflect on their own beliefs, they typically focus on
the evidential support for those beliefs. To sum up, then:24
The agent perspective
When somebody thinks about herself, she tends to think that

(20) what most characterizes her is her internal characteristics,
such as what she thinks, feels, or intends;
(21) she understands herself better than other people do and that
she understands others better than they do;
(22) her high-level psychological needs are more important than
her physiological or physiological/psychological needs;
(23) she is more driven by internal motivation than by external

motivation; and
(24) she has limited control over what she believes.
The observer perspective
When a person thinks about other people, she tends to think that
(25) what is most diagnostic of them are external characteristics,
such as what they do, say, or express;
(26) others understand themselves less well than she does and they
understand her less well than she does;
(27) their high-level psychological needs are less important to them
than their physiological or physiological/psychological needs;
(28) they are more driven by external motivation than by internal
motivation; and
(29) they have a substantial amount of control over what they
believe.
Again, what is experientially most salient to a person comes to form

part of the way he or she views the world. Although we appreciate in-
tellectually that we are no different from others, we nonetheless as-
sume that what we experience is reality. Our feelings are more intense
than the feelings of others; we have greater needs for self-realization,
meaning in life, and autonomy than do others; and so on. It is not hard
to see how all these little differences, as they accumulate, amount to a
systematically different way of viewing ourselves compared to others.
This is what is at the heart of the agent and observer asymmetry. It is
our experience of the world writ large, where inner states we are typi-
cally aware of having while we have them are supersized compared to
the inner states of others.
3.4 A World of Relations
It is pretty clear that there are different ways of thinking about people.
There is the one from the inside, which is closely connected with one’s
agency, or ability to act, and the one that is more closely connected with
observing those that act. I’ve called the immediate unreflective way of
thinking about ourselves and our actions from “inside our agency” an
agent perspective, and the natural way of thinking about others and
their actions from “outside their agency” an observer perspective. We
have seen that there are structural, or formal, differences between the
two perspectives. Experiences—such as perceptions, sensations, and
emotions—are closely connected with actor perspectives. It is not sur-
prising, of course, but notable. It is what makes empathy and perspec-
tive taking so special because both are ways of relating to the other in
the way we naturally relate to ourselves. The research helps us see the
details of what that difference consists in. Agent perspectives in recall
and imaginings are realistic ways of putting ourselves in situations
where we are connected, personally and emotionally, to the situations
or events that are brought to mind. It is as if we actually experience
what we only imagine experiencing. As a result, such a perspective
carries a transparent relation to the world. We don’t see our beliefs
as beliefs, just as we often don’t see our desires as desires. We do see
things as desirable, delicious, dangerous, or foul, however. Moreover,
since our memories seem more real and cause more affect when they
are field memories—that is, from an agent perspective—we should ex-
pect agent perspectives in other areas to be the same. The connection
with affect also means that we regard our own emotions as more in-
tense. Thinking of an event from an agent perspective, then, will make
it seem more real, more emotionally engaging, and more immediately
relevant. It will be more like being in the situation than other ways of
thinking about that situation. It is more immersive. This is further illus-
trated by the fact that we tend toward thinking of our own actions in
terms of our own competence or efficacy in carrying them out than in
terms of their consequences for other people.
Because an agent perspective is so tied to the experience of the
world, as opposed to abstract reflection on it, it is also useful in helping
us access information about the perceptual properties of things: the
way they look, feel, or operate within the space close to our bodies—
the actionable space, if you like. The agent perspective links us to the
world we inhabit as embodied beings with all its distortions relative
to our bodies and our interests. I see a key as an unlocking device, the
person walking down the street as a friend, etc.
An agent perspective is not simply closely connected with

experiences, but also with acting. We see our actions not so much as
the result of external influences or internal drives, but rather in terms
of reasons for acting. Such reasons are the kind that can figure in more
elaborate deliberation. Take, for instance, Charles Darwin’s list of the
pros and cons of marrying his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, as shown in
Table 3.2.25
Notice that desires and preferences are in the background and
facts are in the foreground. Darwin does not say, “I don’t like to be
anxious or idle or having to take care of children.” He merely points
out that having children is an expensive business, and that it will
change the way one lives and the amount of anxiety one will ex-
perience. But, more importantly, Darwin’s list represents a way of
Table 3.2 Darwin’s choice.
Marry Not Marry
Children—(if it please God)— Freedom to go where one likes—

Constant companion, (& friend choice of society and little of
in old age) who will feel interested it.—Conversation of clever men at
in one—object to be beloved and clubs—Not forced to visit relatives,
played with.—better than a dog & to bend in every trifle.—to
anyhow.—Home, & someone to take have the expense & anxiety of
care of house—Charms of music & children—perhaps quarelling—
female chit-chat.—These things good Loss of time.—cannot read in
for one’s health.—But terrible loss the Evenings—fatness idleness—
of time.— Anxiety and responsibility—less
money for books &c—if many
My God, it is intolerable to think of children forced to gain one’s
spending ones whole life, like a neuter bread.—(But then it is very bad for
bee, working, working, & nothing one’s health to work too much)
after all.–No, no won’t do.—Imagine
living all one’s day solitarily in a Perhaps my wife won’t like London;
smoky dirty London house.–Only then the sentence is banishment &
picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a degradation into indolent, idle
sofa with good fire, & books & music fool—
perhaps—Compare this vision with
the dingy reality of Gt. Marlboro St.
Marry—Marry—Marry Q.E.D.
From Darwin 1838/1985.

thinking about decision-making that is common in philosophy and

in everyday life.
Most of the time, however, we don’t write such lists. We act on the
spot with little, or no, thought of the how and the why. When queried,
we tend to assume that we had reasons, more or less equivalent to the
sorts found in the list in Table 3.2, only we were not aware of them
at the time. We may be able to reconstruct them when asked to ex-
plain why we acted as we did. But even when we were not thinking
much about what we were doing at the time we were doing it—we
were busy doing, not thinking—we readily provide explanations or
justifications along more elaborate lines. And those lines, Malle and
his collaborators have shown, are maximally focused on providing the
best kinds of explanations we can imagine. Focusing on beliefs is a way
to appear more reasonable, and that focus is enhanced in the agent per-
spective. Of course, we tend to focus not on our beliefs as such, but on
what our beliefs are about. We see through them. As a result, when we
consider the voluntary standing of our beliefs, we see right through
them to their justification, which is to say the evidence behind them.
An observer perspective is the perspective from the outside of the
person who acts or who feels, more or less. It is the prototypical way of
thinking about others. We spend less time thinking about how others
feel or why they feel as they do, compared to speculating about why
they do as they do. This is not surprising, of course, given our lim-
ited access to their sensations and feelings. But what is notable is that,
without fully realizing it, we tend to see others more in terms of their
surface features. We focus on what they say and do and pay less at-
tention to their inner life of perceptions, feelings, and sensations—the
stuff that occupies us so much when we reflect on ourselves. Surface
features, when it comes to others, are regarded as much more diag-
nostic of them than we believe they are of us. In a way, our immediate
unreflective way of seeing others is as flatter versions of ourselves.
We also tend to think of other people’s action more in terms of their
implications for other people, particularly their moral implications.
We usually prefer others to be warm than for them to be competent.
It would, of course, be absurd to suggest we think others don’t have
feelings. We do, only we think of them as less intense, less vivid, and
more tied to their expression than our own. Instead, what preoccupies
us are other people’s motivations for acting as they do. These appear
less reasonable than ours. Background influences, such as someone’s
history or previous experiences, for instance, are more salient than
their reasoned beliefs. Their actions are not as tied to facts as our own.
Others have biases, prejudices, and erroneous beliefs much more so
than we do, at least as far as we are concerned. Moreover, they are moti-
vated to a higher degree than we are by their desires and by extrinsic
rewards.
So far, it seems like an observer perspective is a somewhat unchari-
table view of others. Although it may be in some respects, in others it is
a more clearheaded one. Because we are not lost in the moment, we can
see what is done in more abstract terms. Our ways of thinking about
others’ actions tend toward context, impact on others, and greater sig-
nificance. We understand better that the way they regard the world is
a way of relating to it that can go awry. We see how powerful desires
can be in shaping a person’s actions, and we have a much better sense
of what kind of person someone else is compared to our grasp of what
kind of person we are. Our social selves—the person we are to others—
can be something of a mystery to us. Who others are, in this sense, is
usually not.
The observer perspective offers a different way of thinking about
persons, not a wrong one. This becomes very clear when we consider
observer memories. Why do people have them? Well, in some cases,
they help distance the person from very emotionally charged mem-
ories. Observer memories are not as involved and do not affect the
person as much. An observer perspective is somewhat disengaged. It
is often seen as more objective, but as you can tell from the research
here, it is merely different. It brings out some features of the person
while hiding others. When we train an observer perspective on our-
selves, we see ourselves as we see others. In fact, it may only be through
an observer perspective that we really see ourselves as people. Much of
who we are is invisible from inside the agent perspective. However, the
observer perspective is always in danger of denying a living being its
inner reality, its intrinsic value, and its agency. The further we distance
ourselves, the further the features that are so central to an agent per-
spective recede into the distance.
It is not the case that an agent perspective is my perspective whereas

an observer perspective is not. They are both perspectives had by the
same person, namely the agent or the thinker of thoughts. It is the re-
lationship between the perceiver/actor/thinker and what is perceived/
acted upon/thought about that is different. As an agent relating to
myself pre-reflectively, my primary perspective is an agent perspective;
as an agent relating to another agent pre-reflectively, my primary per-
spective is an observer perspective. There is a problem, of course. And
that is that observer perspectives do not generally describe how we re-
late to others. When I talk to you, for instance, I do not observe you. I in-
teract with you. And interaction is not entirely unlike our acting on our
environment, which is an engaged and embodied activity. That is the
topic of the next two chapters. In Chapter 4, we examine the differences
between the ways perpetrators of moral wrongs regard what they have
done and the ways victims regard the same moral wrongs. This does
not recapitulate actor and observer asymmetries exactly. Instead, it
points to a third kind of perspective. In Chapter 5, I delve deeper into
intersubjectivity and explore how, when we interact, our perspectives
are affected by the presence of others.
4
Victims and Perpetrators
Have you ever been wronged by anybody? Of course you have.

Perhaps someone stood you up for an important occasion. Perhaps
they revealed a secret about you in public or lied to you. You can com-
plete the list of suggestions as you please. Conflict is a natural, though
unfortunate, part of life, and we have all been at the receiving end of
some unpleasant, unjust, or outright immoral action on the part of
others. I bet you can think of a couple of instances right now that will
get you riled up. But let’s look at things from a different angle. Have
you ever wronged someone? Be honest. Of course you have. Perhaps
you failed to be there for a friend in need. Perhaps you ignored
someone’s plea for help, gossiped about a person you envied, or failed
to keep a promise. Well, you know better than I.
My point is that we have all committed, or been at the receiving end
of, wrongdoing. We have all been both victims and perpetrators. But
even though that is true, we don’t think about wrongdoing the same
way no matter what side we come at it from. If you are like most, you
regard wrongs committed against you to be worse than wrongs you’ve
done yourself. This tendency is exacerbated by our tendency not to
consider wrongs we have committed ourselves when we judge others
for their malfeasance. We know this is the case because people are
much more likely to forgive others if they are asked to recall having
done something similar themselves. This is probably why Jesus of
Nazareth’s admonition to the angry crowd about to stone an unfaithful
woman was so effective. “Let the one of you who is without sin cast the
first stone,” he allegedly said. And the crowd dispersed. The fact is that
we are not inclined to reflect on our own wrongs when we judge others.
It is much easier to see wrong in others than wrong in ourselves.1
As it turns out, the difficulty is principled. Just as there is a differ-
ence in the way we think of ourselves as embedded actors and the way
we think of others we merely observe, there is a difference between
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197637081.003.0005
Victims and Perpetrators 87
thinking about a wrongdoing from the point of view of the victim and
from the point of view of the perpetrator. But in the case of victims and
perpetrators the points of view are not those of actors or observers;
they are points of view of people involved with one another. Someone’s
position in an interaction affects how she experiences it. Again, this
difference seems to be formal; it is relatively invariant across different
people and different situations. Our perspective on a situation depends
on whether we are involved actors, distanced observers, or engaged
interactors. The next two chapters develop this interactive perspective.
As we shall see, it admits of degrees as a function of the particular rela-
tionship with the other person.
I first present a somewhat extreme example of different perspect
ives on the same action. This serves to illustrate the idea that
perspectives can be surprisingly different depending on whose it is.
The differences are not simply due to the psychological background
of the person but owe much to the particular role he or she occupies
in an interaction. I then go on to present the evidence from social
psychology about how victims and perpetrators regard an action and
finish by illustrating these differences by returning to Hermia and
her father from our opening story.
4.1 Rashomon, or: Who Did What to Whom?
Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s movie Rashomon is a cult classic.

It introduced a range of innovative techniques, including flashbacks
that present the protagonists’ points of view, not reality itself. How?
By presenting no less than four different flashbacks on a crime—one
for each person. A samurai and his wife travel through a wood. They
are surprised by a bandit, who captures the samurai and has sex with
his wife. Afterward, the wife runs away, and the samurai is found dead.
Somewhere in the kafuffle, the wife’s valuable knife goes missing. At
the resulting trial, all the parties testify, the wife and the bandit in
person, and the husband through a medium. But their stories differ in
all relevant details: whether the wife was actually raped and who killed
the husband. The last flashback is that of a woodcutter, who discovered
the samurai’s body.
The movie opens at the Rashomon gate between Kyoto and Nara.
A priest and a woodcutter are sheltering from the rain. They have just
returned from the trial of the bandit. They are joined by a commoner,
eager to escape the downpour. They chat for a while and then tell him
what is foremost on their minds: the wildly conflicting testimonies
of the bandit, the wife, and the spirit of the dead samurai. But this is
not all. After recounting the story of the trial, the woodcutter admits
to knowing more than he has let on. Instead of merely finding the
samurai’s body, he witnessed the whole thing. The samurai, his wife,
and the bandit were all lying, he says. But he knows the truth. He didn’t
tell his story at the trial because he did not want to get involved. Or so
he says. Here are the stories of each of the protagonists:
The Bandit’s Tale: As he walks through the forest, he spots the sam-
urai and his wife. He catches the samurai and ties him up. Then,
he persuades the wife to have sex with him. She resists at first but
quickly succumbs to his charms. Afterward, he asks her to leave her
husband behind and join him in his travels. She agrees on one condi-
tion. He must fight her husband for her. He releases the samurai and
they go on to duel honorably. Eventually, he gains the upper hand
and kills the samurai. But instead of joining him, the wife runs away.
The Wife’s Story: As she and her husband are traveling through
the woods, they are set upon by a bandit. He overpowers her hus-
band and ties him up. He then rapes her. Afterward, he takes off. She
rushes to untie her husband. He, however, will have nothing to do
with her on account of the rape. In his eyes, she has been defiled.
This distresses her so that she begs him to kill her with her own, quite
valuable, knife. When he fails to respond to her, she faints. When she
comes to, she finds her husband dead with her knife in his chest.
The Samurai’s Testimony (through a Medium): As he is traveling

through the woods with his wife, a bandit attacks them. The bandit
ties him up and rapes his wife. Afterward, the bandit asks his wife to
travel with him. She agrees on the condition that he kills her husband
so that only one man is alive to know of her dishonor. The bandit is
horrified by her demand. He grabs her and offers the samurai to ei-
ther kill her or set her free. Hearing this, the wife manages to liberate
herself and run away. The bandit cannot catch her. He returns to the
samurai, unties him and leaves. Subsequently, the samurai commits
suicide to save his honor.
The Woodcutter’s Confession: The bandit rapes the wife while the
samurai is tied up. Afterward, he begs her to marry him. She, how-
ever, is not interested. Instead, she frees her husband. The bandit
assumes she wants them to duel, but the husband is uninterested in
fighting for her now that she has been dishonored. They circle each
other aimlessly, seemingly at a loss of what to do, until the wife eggs
them on to a fight. They duel pathetically and reluctantly. The bandit
gets lucky, defeats the samurai, and kills him. The wife runs away.
And this is how the woodcutter came to find the samurai’s body.
The genius of Rashomon is presenting the conflicting stories in the

form of flashbacks. Flashbacks are almost invariably used to show
the past as it was, although, technically speaking, they stand in for
someone’s memories. Rashomon shows that memories aren’t windows
onto the past. Instead, the best we can hope for is an accurate portrayal
of the past as experienced by the person who remembers. Although
this is hardly surprising, we might not have suspected just how much
experiences can differ between people engaged in the same transac-
tion. At the end of the trial, we are left as confused as the woodcutter
and the priest. When the woodcutter finally speaks out and insists
that the bandit, samurai, and wife are all lying, it is impossible not feel
relieved. Finally, we will get to the bottom of things. But that hope is
squashed once it becomes clear that he stole the wife’s valuable knife
from the crime scene. At this point, we suspect that somebody is lying.
But who? Possibly everybody.
But are they really? The problem with this interpretation is that each
person implicates him-or herself in the killing of the samurai. The
bandit admits he killed him in a duel, the samurai insists he killed him-
self, and the wife suggests that she killed him with her own knife in a
disassociated state. If you were to lie in court, wouldn’t you make up a
story that would exonerate you? In this light, the idea that each char-
acter presents the story as he or she experienced it, more or less, doesn’t
seem so bad.
While the characters each implicate themselves in the murder (how

did the woodcutter comes across that knife?), each of their perspectives
presents them in a favorable light. They each act honorably in their
own way. Consider first the bandit. The only really bad thing he does is
tying up the samurai. He seduces the wife. While not great in itself, it is
certainly better than raping her. Afterward, rather than just leaving her
in the lurch, which is what the wife insists he did, he offers to take her
with him. And when he finally kills the samurai, he does so honorably
in a duel. Killing a samurai is no mean feat, certainly not for a common
thief. And, in the end, he is a victim of the wife’s broken promise to
come with him if he vanquishes her husband. The bandit is really not
so bad after all; in fact, he’s quite the character.
From the wife’s point of view, she is victimized not once, but twice,
and the second time by her husband no less. She, however, acts honor-
ably by requesting that he kill her to save his honor. When he refuses,
she falls into a swoon. If she killed him, it was after heavy provoca-
tion and in an altered state of consciousness. The husband too ends up
looking quite honorable. Instead of casting his wife off after she was
“defiled” through no fault of her own, but rather due to his inability to
protect her, he is the victim of evil scheming to kill him on her part. So
instead of his inability to protect her standing out, he highlights her
duplicitous nature. In the end, he is not vanquished by a mere bandit,
but he kills himself to save his honor. The woodcutter presents himself
as an innocent and objective observer, who was afraid to get involved.
This is clearly better than lurking in the bushes while a woman is raped,
then stealing a knife left behind. Did he kill the husband to get it? We
never learn.
The samurai, the bandit, the wife, and the woodcutter understand
the events in the forest in a way that minimizes the degree to which
they acted badly and maximizes the wrong that was done to them. They
also ignore the most incriminating information. Honor seems central
to the story. Japan, after all, has a long history of placing honor at the
center of morality. It is therefore hard to believe that these characters
weren’t driven by an underlying, though perhaps unconscious, mo-
tive to see themselves in the best possible light. And this is, in fact,
what the psychological data show. When we are in conflict, our con-
flicting views tend to align with the best possible interpretation of our
role in the events. Even when we agree about who is the main culprit,
our opinions diverge about how badly that person acted and why they
acted that way. This is what we come to next.
4.2 The Victim and the Perpetrator
Roy Baumeister works on evil, among other things. Like Socrates be-
fore him, he thinks that evil actions do not usually spring from a de-
sire to violate moral norms but are usually justified in the eyes of the
perpetrator. As Socrates said, no one does wrong willingly. Socrates
didn’t think it was in our human nature to desire something bad. On
his view, people who do something bad do not do so with the under-
standing that it is bad. Rather, desire naturally aims at the good. The
problem is that we can be mistaken about what is good and bad. What
wrongdoers come up against is their own ignorance. This ignorance is
the cause of their wrongdoing. What is actually wrong was thought to
be good or right (at the time). A similar idea was expressed by Jesus in
his prayer regarding the Roman soldiers who crucified him: “Father
forgive them, for they know not what they do.”2
Baumeister doesn’t quite believe that all evildoing is based in igno-
rance, but he certainly believes that wrongdoers have very different
thoughts about what they are doing compared to the people who are
affected by their actions. Most murderers, he claims in his book Evil,
do not actually regret their actions, but instead believe they were justi-
fied in committing them. Many avow that they would do it again given
the chance. Exploring whether this attitude is a general feature of the
way people—and not just violent criminals—think of wrongdoing,
Baumeister and his collaborators studied university students’ attitudes
toward wrongdoing.
Baumeister first asked students to think about a time when someone
angered them, figuring that people would be more forthcoming about
such incidents than situations that involve more profound hurt or
shame. He also thought that most of those situations would involve
wrongdoing. He was right on both counts. The student participants
were then asked to provide the full story of the incident. To deter-
mine whether certain ways of thinking and feeling are characteristic of
being the victim of a wrongdoing, we need a contrast class, of course.

Perpetrators are the obvious complement to victims. So, Baumeister
also asked the students to recall an incident where they angered
someone else. Once they did, they were, once again, asked to tell the
full story. Consequently, Baumeister and his collaborators ended up
with two stories from each student: one in which they were angered by
someone and one in which they had angered someone else. The stories
varied significantly, of course, but they were similar when it came to
the severity of the wrong. Nonetheless, the students regarded wrongs
they committed quite differently from wrongs done to them.3
When asked to describe an incident where they hurt or angered
someone, students downplayed its negative consequences and
maintained that their actions were justified, that the victim helped
provoke the incident, that there were mitigating circumstances, and
that the victim was overreacting. As perpetrators, students were also
more likely to think that their actions could not have been helped and
to deny that they had lasting negative consequences. Nonetheless, they
did tend to regret the incident and blamed themselves for it.
The very same students told stories that differed in many of these
respects when it came to their being angered by someone else. As
victims, they considered the other person’s actions to be far worse than
their own when they were the perpetrators. This was true even though
independent judges deemed the transgressions to be equally severe.
Students also reported finding the angering action incomprehensible
and inconsistent with the situation and their relationship with the
perpetrator. They were also more likely to regard it as being positively
immoral. As victims, the wrongdoing was more likely to be the culmi-
nation of a series of provocations than a one-off event. When recalling
the incident, the students reported that they remained angry about it,
and that their anger was justified.
The same way of thinking about wrongdoing has been found in
other studies. Jill Kearns and Frank Fincham asked students to recall
situations where someone hurt or wronged them and where they hurt
or wronged someone else. They found the same pattern of thought and
feeling I just reported. Jeanne Zechmeister and Catherine Romero
asked students to report on events where they were a victim or a perpe-
trator specifically, and again replicated many of Baumeister’s findings.4
If these student reports are representative, then it seems that the very
same person magnifies an offense when he is the victim but minimizes
it when he is the offender. This cannot be because people tend to recall
more serious transgressions when they see themselves in the role of the
victim than the perpetrator, for recall that the incidents reported on
were similar in regard to severity. More likely, it is another manifesta-
tion of the self-serving way of thinking I have emphasized in previous
chapters. This is not to say that the different access people have to their
own thoughts and feelings compared to those of other people is not
significant also. A perpetrator typically knows what he or she felt and
thought at the time of the action, whereas victims are often left to infer
that from the action as they experience it. Conversely, a perpetrator
often has to work at understanding the impact his or her actions have
had or will have on the persons affected by them. What takes work is
often ignored.
Baumeister and his colleagues speculate that conflict is often the re-
sult of a basic failure to understand the other person. One of the points
that stands out is that whereas victims see the transgression they are
concerned with as more of what they have already been exposed to in
the past but have patiently put up with, perpetrators tend to see their
actions as more singular and less connected to previous events. This, in
turn, suggests that they were not aware of the victim’s reaction to these
previous events. Victims, however, were clearly already upset by the
pattern of behavior that they finally see as a wrong worth reporting on.
But they also often report not reacting. A typical conflict, then, might
have this shape. The one person repeatedly engages in a particular kind
of behavior, but often in a milder form than the one that finally makes
the other person react. The other person sucks it up without making
their displeasure felt. But turning the other cheek is hard work, par-
ticularly when it becomes a repeated activity. It usually makes people
angry. When, therefore, the same kind of action is repeated or a worse
version occurs, the victim experiences the impact not only of that ac-
tion but also of the ones that went before it and reacts accordingly. The
perpetrator, who is unaware of having provoked the victim in the past,
is therefore liable to think the victim is overreacting. As far as the per-
petrator is concerned, they committed a wrong, not many. From the
point of view of the victim, it is incomprehensible how the perpetrator
could just continue to act in this upsetting way, particularly after how
nice she has been about other mishaps in the past. The perpetrator,
however, thinks of the isolated incident and has no problem explaining
it in terms of his being busy, preoccupied, or something like that.
It is somewhat intriguing that even though the study required
students to recall their attitudes as victims and as perpetrators back
to back, it did not make them any more aware of the fact that, in each
recalled event, their perspective was likely to differ from that of the
other person.
Not every difference in point of view on a wrongdoing can be
explained in terms of what information is readily available to whom.
The tendency to implicate victims in the wrong that was done to them
cannot, for instance. This is more readily ascribable to our tendency to
see our actions in the best possible light. Victims tend to absolve them-
selves of responsibility in the wrongdoing; perpetrators also do so, al-
beit in a slightly different way. Because they cannot disown their own
actions, they tend to focus on extenuating circumstances, such as being
busy or stressed, or on how their actions naturally flowed from the situ-
ation, their character, and/or the victim’s actions. Put concisely, victims
tend to maximize the wrong done to them, whereas perpetrators tend
to minimize it. This general pattern is broken by people who are in rela-
tively satisfying romantic relationships. Here, victims of transgressions
do not maximize the wrong, but the perpetrators continue to mini-
mize it, only not as much as perpetrators who are not romantically in-
volved with victims. It is easy to tell a story about how these tendencies
also spring from self-interested motives: to maintain a positive view of
the relationship, for instance.5
The pattern here holds of everyday wrongdoing. Baumeister also
believes it is true of more serious crimes. But there are obviously many
other factors at play in such cases, so we should be a bit careful about
simply extending these results to understanding interpersonal crime
generally. Nonetheless, the pattern demonstrates something important
about perspectives. Your view of an event is a function of the nature of
it and the relation you bear to it: Were you the one who did something
that upset another or were you the one who was upset? Acknowledging
the existence of distinctive victim and perpetrator perspectives puts us
on the path of solving the puzzle at the heart of Rashomon.
4.3 Imagining Being the Victim or the Perpetrator
Although the Baumeister studies are intriguing, it is hard not to wonder

whether they show as much as I have claimed for them. Are there re-
ally systematic differences between how victims and perpetrators see
things? Might these differences not be a function of what people recall
when they are given certain instructions? After all, they are extracted
from stories where we are presented with just one side of the story. We
don’t know how the victim experienced the situation in the perpetrator
account or how the perpetrator thought of it in the victim stories.
Perhaps the victims chose stories where the perpetrator’s motives were
particularly obscure or problematic, and the perpetrators chose stories
where their actions were at least somewhat justified.
This is where research on victims and perpetrators using a different
research methodology comes in. Instead of asking people to recall ac-
tual wrongdoings, they are asked to imagine being a victim or a perpe-
trator. These studies, it turns out, show much the same asymmetries
as real victim and perpetrator studies do. People who imagine being
the villain of the piece think of their actions as less serious, more jus-
tifiable, etc., than if they imagine being the victim. If, on the other
hand, they imagine being the victim, they think the action was worse
than they would have had they imagined being the perpetrator. The
majority of laboratory studies on victim-perpetrator narratives are
carried out with people who simply imagine being a victim or a perpe-
trator. The advantages to such studies are twofold. First, it is hard to get
an ethics board to approve studies that involve provoking genuinely
aggressive behavior in the laboratory. Second, in these types of studies,
you can ensure that (imagined) victims and perpetrators are presented
with exactly the same information. Typically, you show people a video
of an interaction or give them a story describing what happened. Note
that in the autobiographical accounts we just discussed, we only ever
hear one side of the story. So, we cannot compare with the report of the
other person involved. In studies where you rely on people imagining
being the victim or the perpetrator, we can compare people’s concep-
tion of the very same interaction.
Some of the earliest studies of victim and perpetrator perspec-
tive taking came out of Germany. By contrast to US studies, whose
main subject pool is university students, Amélie Mummendey and

colleagues studied school children and teenagers (age 13 to 16). They
showed participants videos of aggressive interchanges between two
boys at school and instructed them to imagine that they were either
one of them. Mummendey and colleagues found that teenagers who
imagined themselves as perpetrators of aggressive actions and those
who supposed themselves to be victims differed in their evaluation of
“their” actions. Perpetrators tended to think their actions were more
appropriate than did the victims of these actions. In fact, it seems that
perpetrators thought their actions were really neither good nor bad—
not a big deal, if you will—whereas victims tended to regard those
actions as at least somewhat inappropriate. The result was more pro-
nounced when the video showed a sequence of interactions where it
was unclear whether the provoking event was intentional or not. Here
is a description of such a video.6
Two boys, Adam and Brian, arrive at school on their bicycles.

They park them, but as Adam walks past Brian, he brushes
against his bag, which is balanced on his bike, and it falls off.
Brian picks up his bag angrily, blames Adam for throwing it on
the ground, and pushes him. Adam pushes back and throws Brian
to the ground. When Brian gets up, he bumps against Adam, who
throws his bag on the ground. When they get to the school en-
trance, Brian bumps up against Adam, who pushes him off the
main stairs. Adam then goes on to hold both the front door and
the classroom door shut so that Brian cannot get in. Once he
manages get in, Brian bumps up against Adam, pushes him, and
pulls at his pullover. Brian gestures derogatively at Adam, indi-
cating that he thinks he’s stupid.
Overall, Mummendey and her collaborators did not find great

differences between perspectives, but the ones they found were signif-
icant. When evaluating their “own” actions, people assigned much less
intentionality to the action that set off the hostilities. In the story, it is
unclear whether Adam knocked Brian’s bag off his bike intentionally.
In such ambiguous cases, people who imagined being Brian almost
unanimously agreed that Adam “started it” (initiated the aggressive
interaction), whereas those who imagined being Adam had a more

mixed response. Close to half of them thought Brian started it, whereas
the rest maintained Adam did. This number falls somewhat for Adam
pretenders when it comes to the more neutral question about what
event started the aggression. The disagreement, then, is not so much
about who caused what, but about whether Adam intended to do what
he did. Although most Adam pretenders agreed that Adam caused
Brian’s bag to fall to the ground, only half of them thought Adam in-
tended to do so.7
This does not quite lead us down the slippery slope of Rashomon
yet, because when the youngsters were shown a clip where the initial
action was pretty unambiguously hostile, there was no disagreement
no matter whose perspective they took. It is good news for people en-
gaged in unambiguous conflict. Unfortunately, many, perhaps most,
actions are much more ambiguous. Have a look at the following story,
which Arlene Stillwell and Roy Baumeister used to determine whether
the victim-perpetrator asymmetry was replicated when people merely
imagined interpersonal conflict:8
Harold and Arthur were suite mates here at CWRU. They knew
each other fairly well but did not consider each other to be “best
friends.” One fall semester, Arthur was enrolled in an upper-level
engineering class that Harold had completed the previous spring.
Harold had prepared very thoroughly for this class and, as a result,
had done very well (A+, quite an accomplishment!). One day, he
made a vague sort of offer to assist Arthur on any course work in
that particular class. As it turned out, there were to be no exams,
rather a final paper that counted as 75% of the grade. The paper was
due Wednesday before the reading days started.
The semester passed without incident, as both suite mates
attended classes, prepared assignments, and tried to squeeze in some
fun as well. One week before the paper was due, Arthur reminded
Harold of his earlier offer, stating, “I need you to help me write this
paper.” Harold responded, “No, I said I would help you with exams
in the class.” Arthur replied, “But there are no exams this semester,
just this big paper!” Harold sighed, “Oh, well I guess I can help you.”
(Harold didn’t mind helping Arthur with an exam, just not a paper.)
The two suite mates decided to get together to work on the paper the
Tuesday afternoon before it was due.
On the designated day, 1 week later, Harold did not show up for
his appointment. He stumbled in 2 hours later, drunk and a bit surly.
It seems that he forgot about having promised to assist Arthur with
the paper and made plans to go out drinking with his buddies. (It
was “$2 pitcher night” for margaritas.) As you might expect, Harold
was of little help to Arthur. To add to the pressure, Arthur’s computer
was on the blink, making it difficult to get any work done. While in
his inebriated state, Harold again promised to help Arthur with the
paper, although not until Thursday. Arthur was forced to ask his pro-
fessor for an extension (due supposedly to his computer problems).
The professor was not happy with the request, but he agreed to the
extension.
On Thursday afternoon, Arthur went looking for Harold and
found him in his suite. Harold now refused to help Arthur, as he
had too much to do and time was running out. He did apologize for
the situation but was firm in his refusal to help. Later on that night,
Arthur hit a snag in his paper and stopped by Harold’s room to ask
a quick question. Harold was on the phone and motioned to Arthur
to come back later. Arthur stopped back at 11:45 pm and again at
12:15 am, but Harold was still on the phone. (Arthur found out
later that he was talking long distance to his girlfriend. It seems that
they were discussing a change in their Christmas vacation plans
because their relationship had not been going well.) After a time,
Arthur gave up and returned to his room to complete his paper on
his own.
This particular class was central to Arthur’s major. Before the
paper, he had a B in the class. After turning in the paper, his grade
dropped to a C, as he received only a C on the paper. The TA who
graded the paper made comments that included “Good ideas, but
where is the theory?” and “Your reasoning is faulty. What are you
trying to say?” As a result of this experience, Arthur ended up
majoring in English at another university.
Here the situation is less cut and dried vis-à-vis wrongdoing. Imagine
yourself as either Arthur or Harold and read through the story again.
If the aforementioned studies are representative, your own reflections

should match the typical victim vs. perpetrator pattern. Personally,
when I imagine being Arthur, I focus on the importance of this as-
signment to “my” degree, and on the fact that Harold misled me into
thinking that he would help me, thus preventing me from doing things
differently. As Harold, it seems to me that Arthur is relying far too
much on me to get this paper done. He shouldn’t have pressured me
into helping him in the first place, but when I did agree I did so hon-
estly, only stuff got in the way. And I can’t reasonably be held respon-
sible for Arthur not getting more than a C.
In addition to replicating Mummendey and colleagues’ findings,
Baumeister and Stillwell report that victim perspective takers are more
likely to add materials to or alter materials in the story so as to exac-
erbate the offense and increase its severity. For instance, the person
might suppose that Harold knew exactly how much time he had for
his own work between Tuesday night and Thursday afternoon, so he
should not have promised to help. By contrast, when asked to take the
perspective of the perpetrator, people lean toward adding or altering
material so as to indicate (other) good being done by the perpetrator,
or so as to mitigate the wrong. For example, Harold did offer to help
early on in the semester, and if Arthur can’t get more than a C on his
own, one suspects he hasn’t worked hard enough. As it turns out, how-
ever, the most common way of altering accounts is by leaving out infor-
mation. So, when one imagines being Arthur, one might fail to notice
that Harold was having a “state of the union” conversation with his
girlfriend when Arthur needed his help. Both victim and perpetrator
perspective takers tend to better recall aspects of the story that are to
their advantage. Pretend victims remember incriminating informa-
tion better and pretend perpetrators remember excusing information
better. Here is pretty direct evidence that the perspective one takes on a
situation influences the way one thinks of it.
If we are reasonable, most of our conflicts will look more like that be-
tween Harold and Arthur than an unambiguous version of the Adam
and Brian scenario. In all these situations, it seems that interpretations
get skewed in such a way as to favor the innocence of the victim or the
inoffensiveness of the perpetrator. Adding up the results from the var-
ious studies, here is what the evidence shows.9
Victim perspective
The victim tends to

(1) maximize the seriousness of the action (it is more serious than
she would describe her own actions as perpetrator);
(2) regard the action as immoral;
(3) regard the perpetrator’s intentions as incoherent, inconsistent,
incomprehensible, arbitrary, or senseless;
(4) connect the action with other, similar, provocations by the
perpetrator;
(5) regard the action as angering (justified anger); and
(6) continue to be angered when thinking about the action.
Perpetrator perspective
The perpetrator tends to

(7) minimize the seriousness of the action (it is less bad than if it
had been done to her);
(8) believe that the action did not have negative consequences;
(9) think that the action was justified;
(10) believe that the action could not be helped;
(11) maintain that there were extenuating circumstances;
(12) believe the victim helped provoke the action;
(13) think the victim is overreacting; and
(14) feel regret and self-blame.
We can summarize the basic idea this way. Victims tend to max-
imize the wrong done to them, be it via condemnation of the action
or the actor’s intentions or in terms of their emotional reaction to it.
Perpetrators, on the other hand, usually minimize the wrong they
have done, whether by implicating the victim as partial culprit, pro-
viding justifications, or minimizing the negative consequences of their
actions. In their own way, these are expressions of the egocentricity
that, we have seen, characterizes the agent perspective. The relativizing
that we saw dominating the visual perspective—everything seen in
terms of where I am in relation to it (big, small, far away, flat, etc.)—
expresses itself here in a relativizing to the interests of the person in
question. It is evidently in the interest of the perpetrator to minimize

his offense so as to maintain a positive image and reduce the burden
of restorative action. On the other hand, the victim gains from magni-
fying the wrong in terms of sympathy from others and possible restor-
ative behavior from the perpetrator and/or gets revenge by tarnishing
the other person’s reputation.
Not all of this needs to be as conspiratorial as it might seem. Each
party’s focus is clearly self-interested. With a focus on oneself, every-
thing else falls into place. The victim probably does not deliberately
ignore all the good the perpetrator has done in the past, his or her good
intentions, or the fact that they have already apologized. Focusing on
the wrongdoing, one might not easily bring to mind other positive
aspects of the relationship or the perpetrator. Moreover, if recalling
the event evokes anger, the victim’s attention is on the wrongdoing
and similar themes, and she will be unlikely to recall more positive
interactions with the perpetrator. This is the way attention works, par-
ticularly affect-driven attention. Observers do not seem to get caught
in the same blind spots, but more deftly navigate their focus from the
situation the victim finds herself in and the circumstances surrounding
the perpetrator’s actions.
4.4 Observing and Interacting
What relationship do the victim and perpetrator perspectives bear to

the agent and observer perspectives we discussed in the last chapter?
Although it is tempting to think that the victim regards the perpetrator
from an observer mode, and vice versa, this can’t be right. Why? As
I have hinted, some of the victim vs. perpetrator studies have a third
condition in which people are instructed to simply observe an inter-
action and then report on it. The result is neither a victim nor a per-
petrator perspective. Observers sometimes agree more with victims
than with perpetrators, and sometimes more with perpetrators than
with victims. The pattern is not entirely consistent. For instance, re-
call the two fighting boys. Mummendey and her colleagues included
an observer condition to control for personal bias. Observers fell in
the middle when it came to assigning responsibility for initiating
hostile actions. But they agreed more with the Adam pretenders that
Brian started it than with the Brian pretenders, who insisted that
Adam started it. In other studies, observers agree more with victims.
But usually they agree with victims about certain things, agree with
perpetrators about others, and disagree with both about yet other
things. Observers recognize the severity of the action for the victim
while at the same time acknowledging the perpetrator’s extenuating
circumstances, apologies, and other mitigating factors.10
If observers agree neither with victims nor with perpetrators, then
it can’t be that if I am the victim and you are the perpetrator, I occupy
an agent perspective on myself and an observer perspective on you.
I can’t view both of us from the agent perspective either. So, we need
a third category, one where people are interactors. For lack of a better
word, we can think of it as an interactor perspective. Such a perspec-
tive characterizes a person’s way of thinking of someone whose actions
directly affect her and who is affected by her actions. When we interact
with others, they are more intimately tied up with us and our interests
than are people we merely observe. They are sucked into our sphere
of interests, and we into theirs. A victim doesn’t just observe a perpe-
trator. He is directly impacted by the perpetrator’s actions. Similarly,
the perpetrator does not observe the wrong; he commits it. However
fractious, victims and perpetrators are involved with each other in a
way that agents and observers are not.
The victim and perpetrator literature supports the idea that our per-
spective on the world is very much a function of how we relate to it.
The agent point of view is one that sees things in terms of how they
relate to our interests, our bodies, or our needs. But such relationships
vary depending on the object. We relate to all animate creatures dif-
ferently than we would relate to physical objects like sticks and stones.
We relate to human beings and to people who are close to us in yet
different ways. When we are involved with other people, we think
of them as owing certain things to us and ourselves as owing them
something. What matters for us now is the fact that when we interact
with others, it changes the way we relate to them. This is true even in
conflicts, where our own interests very much color our interpretations
of our interactions. The victim is usually not simply an object to us, nor
is the perpetrator. We are not observers because our interests are too
tightly intermingled with that of the other person. We are interactors.

The nature and importance of such a perspective becomes even clearer
when we move on to less conflict-driven interactions. But let us first
see how applying the victim and perpetrator framework makes sense
of Rashomon and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
4.5 Victim and Perpetrator Perspectives in Action
In Rashomon, we have one clear perpetrator, namely the bandit, but

neither the samurai nor his wife is only an innocent victim. Depending
on what “really” happened, all of the protagonists are victims in some
respects, perpetrators in others. In what follows, the number in the pa-
renthesis corresponds to the number on the list of what characterizes
a victim or a perpetrator perspective. Let us begin with the bandit. He
shows a clear minimization of wrongdoing: he did not rape the wife but
merely seduced her (7); to make up for her subsequent loss of honor in
her husband’s eyes, he offers to take her with him on his travels (11);
and he did not simply murder her husband but killed him in a fair
fight (9). Not that bad, right? The two victims demonstrate clear ten-
dencies toward maximizing the wrong done to them, though in quite
different ways. The samurai blames both the bandit and his wife. The
bandit dishonors him by dishonoring his wife (1, 2). But, after his wife
is raped, the samurai says, she agrees to travel with the bandit on the
condition that he kills him (2, 5). The bandit refuses and leaves the hus-
band in the lucky position to take his own life to save his honor. So,
instead of his failing to protect his wife against a common bandit, then
losing a duel to said bandit, he is blameless, and the two others are at
fault (12). Poor man! His own reluctance to fight the bandit, mentioned
in more than one story, is entirely passed over. The most certain part of
this whole story is, in fact, that the wife was raped. But, according to
her story, she is also betrayed by her husband, who refuses to have an-
ything to do with her after the rape (1). In her exasperation, she faints.
But notice that in the woodcutter’s story, she eggs the men on to fight,
and it is during this fight that her husband is killed. Supposing this is
true, it is left out of the story. Instead, she’s out cold in a swoon while
her husband is killed. In this story, the wife is the perfect victim and
she had no hand in her husband’s dying (10, 11). If the woodcutter is
right about how the duel started, she dissimulates by leaving out in-
formation. Rashomon shows some of the ways victim and perpetrator
perspectives work, and how each person’s view on the events serves
his or her interests. It also teaches us is that there is no single partici-
pant who is a perfectly objective observer. The woodcutter is probably
better than the three protagonists, but his perspective too is a function
of his interests. There are only people and their perspectives. There is
no God’s point of view.
For those who find the radically different perspectives of Rashomon
hard to swallow, Shakespeare’s summer play may be more congenial.
At the start of the play, Egeus presents himself as the victim. He has
been wronged, not only by Lysander, who randomly decided to seduce
his daughter, but also by Hermia, who has “hardened her heart” against
him. Lysander and Hermia’s conspiracy of the heart has caused him
such vexation that he has been forced to bring his case to the powers
that be, to ask permission to have Hermia put to death. This request
is not unreasonable at all; it is more than justified by the situation.
Evidently, Egeus magnifies the wrong he has suffered (since Lysander
is as eligible as Demetrius) (1), finds it incomprehensible (seduction
out of nowhere, Hermia’s hardened heart) (3), and believes that con-
tinued anger is justified (punishing his daughter with death) (5).
But Egeus is not the only one with a skewed view of things. The main
culprit, Lysander, has a bad attitude too. Instead of showing contri-
tion for his behavior, or any understanding of Egeus’s predicament, he
mockingly tells Egeus to marry Demetrius himself, since he loves him
so (7, 13). He then goes on to enumerate his own virtues, throwing in a
slight of Demetrius for good measure (Act I, Scene 1):
I am, my Lord, as well deriv’d as he,

As well possess’d; my love is more than his;
My fortunes every way as fairly rank’d
If not with vantage, as Demetrius’;
And, which is more than all these boasts can be,
I am belov’d of beauteous Hermia.
Why should I not then prosecute my right?
Demetrius, I’ll avouch it to his head,
Made love to Nedeus’ daughter, Helena,

And won her soul; and she, sweet lady, dotes,
Devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry,
Upon this spotted and inconstant mind.
In other words, Lysander did no wrong (7, 9). He is only pursuing his
right, a right generated by Hermia’s love (no doubt to everyone’s sur-
prise) (9–11). Not only that, but his fortunes are as good as, though
most likely superior to, those of Demetrius, who at any rate is a lady’s
man and completely unreliable. Note that at no point does he respond
to Egeus’s charge that he seduced Hermia. That part is ignored, and
the other noble aspects of his character paraded in front of the Duke.
He refers to “his right” as a way to either justify his action (Hermia’s
love commands him, perhaps) or mitigate its wrongness (but Hermia
loves me!). He points to all his other excellent qualities and, to top it
all off, gets people to focus on Demetrius’s seduction of Helena, mean-
while leaving his own unaddressed. It is all rather clever, and very
much in keeping with the perspective of a perpetrator.
For being the protagonist of all this drama, Hermia has precious
little to say. Perhaps she found the Duke comparing her father to a
god—“To you, your father should be as a god . . . ”—perplexing. Her
only response to her father’s charge is that Lysander is as eligible as
Demetrius, “whose unwished yoke my soul consents not to give sov-
ereignty” (9–11). In effect, she references mitigating circumstances
and, like Lysander, does not directly address her father’s accusation of
disobedience.
You are in an observer role with regard to this drama. What do you
think? It is hard to find either Egeus or Lysander entirely agreeable as
they each present their case with bombast. But knowing what we know
now, it is easy to see why they act as they do. They are merely giving
expression to their points of view. These viewpoints are not the result
of devious machinations on their part, but a natural way of focusing on
the parts of the world of particular relevance to them in their situation.
Later on we will examine how switching perspectives helps transcend
these partial interpretations of events. But first, let’s look more at the
interactive point of view.
5
Getting Interpersonal
A common complaint from philosophers working within the phe-

nomenological tradition against analytic philosophy is that it ignores
the rather obvious datum that when we are faced with another person,
we experience their mindedness directly. Dan Zahavi makes this point
frequently and presumably with mounting irritation. And he is not the
only one. Philosophers like Dan Hutto, Shaun Gallagher, and Matthew
Ratcliffe have all protested against traditional conceptions of how we
think of other minds—including perspective-taking accounts. They
are partly right, of course. It is absurd to suggest that we regard other
people with whom we interact as if we were scientists trying to discern
their thoughts or motives. We do not study other people when we are
with them—or at least, most of us don’t. And yet the great majority of
philosophy in the analytic tradition has not yet recovered from some
form of Cartesianism and is happy to insist that a central problem of
philosophy is the existence of other minds. On this view, we posit the
existence of mental states much as we would posit the existence of such
things as centers of gravity or dark matter. There have even been those
who defend the idea that we posit the existence of our own mental
states. It is hard to believe, of course, that we are not directly aware of
our sensations, perceptions, needs, or fleeting thoughts, but that we
instead infer them on the basis of the state of our environment or our
behaviors. But once you are in the grips of an ideology, it rather tends
to bend your perception of reality. If you think about it, however, does
it really make sense that you infer that a person is happy when he greets
you with smiles and laughter?1
The answer is, of course, that it depends on what you mean by “infer.”
In his book on sympathy, Max Scheler takes an intermediate position,
where he grants the inevitable privacy of certain types of experiences
but also opens the door to the transparency of others:2
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197637081.003.0006
Getting Interpersonal 107
The other person has—like ourselves—a sphere of absolute personal

privacy, which can never be given to us. But that “experiences” occur
there is given for us in expressive phenomena—again, not by infer-
ence, but directly, as a sort of primary “perception.” It is in the blush
that we perceive shame, in the laughter joy. To say that “our only in-
itial datum is the body” is completely erroneous. This is true only
for the doctor or the scientist, i.e. for man in so far as he abstracts
artificially from the expressive phenomena, which have an altogether
primary givenness.
Scheler is saying that there is something special about being with an-
other person, which is quite different from thinking about them in a
more clinical or distanced way, as an observer of them. Such being with
gives us access to their feelings—and perhaps other mental states as
well—in a special way. This, in turn, affects our perspective. In the pre-
vious chapter, we saw how victims and perpetrators regard each other
differently than do actors and observers because they are interactors.
But there are many other ways of being with others that profoundly af-
fect our perspective on them. In extreme cases, our own perspective
may be obliterated by those of others. Scheler notes: “It is certainly true
that in judging our own case we all too often succumb to the infection,
as it were, which is transmitted by the attitude of other people towards
us; their estimate of us seems to displace the immediately given value of
our own self-appraisal and hides it from us.” In many other cases, our
perspective takes into account features of the perspectives of the person
with whom we are interacting. How this works is what we turn to now.3
There is little systematic empirical research on what I call “the
interactor perspective” that can mirror our actor-observer or victim-
perpetrator asymmetries, but there is plenty of evidence that others’
perspectives influence our own when we are with them. First, let’s look
at the simple case of how the presence of someone else’s perspective
influences our own. We can then move on to our tendency to “catch”
other people’s emotions, our propensity for mimicking their bodily
posture, movement, speech pattern, and, apparently, brain activity.
It seems that in many cases, we co-create a mental space between us
that reflects neither my nor your perspective, but a sort of “third” one.
Lastly, the psychological category “personal distress” reveals just how
enmeshed our emotions are with those of other people. These are
all examples of interactivity, which is its own particular perspective
heavily influenced by those of others. The step beyond that is perspec-
tive taking, which is the subject of Part II.
5.1 Infected by What Others See
In 2010, Dana Samson published a paper in the Journal of

Experimental Psychology along with a number of other psychologists
that showed that the presence of other people interferes with visual
perspective tasks. This, the psychologists argued, is evidence that we
quickly, but unconsciously, compute the perspective of other people
present in our visual field. The original experiment tested whether
the presence of a human avatar in a computer display would affect
someone’s judgment of what could be seen. People were looking into a
cartoon-like room from eye level, seeing a wall ahead of them and one
on either side (see Figure 5.1). The walls had between zero and three
Figure 5.1 In this picture, the person in the room sees only once disc. You,
however, see two. Illustration by Peter Bruce from Samson et al. 2010.
discs on them. Inside the room was an avatar facing either of the three
walls. Sometimes the avatar was facing the same wall as the person in
the experiment. In other words, sometimes there was an overlap of
visual perspectives, and sometimes there was not. The experimental
subjects were then asked how many discs either they or the avatar
could see. Samson and her collaborators were interested in whether
it made a difference that the person and the avatar had the same per-
spective. If it did, then we have evidence that the visual perspective,
other than the one the person is being asked to take, interferes with
completing the task. It turns out that when the avatar and the viewer
see different numbers of discs, the viewer takes longer to respond than
when they see the same number of discs. So, for instance, suppose the
viewer sees three discs, but the avatar faces another wall where there
is only one. The viewer is asked to report how many discs she sees.
Easy, right? Perhaps, but people take longer to give the right response
(three) when the avatar sees one disc than when the avatar faces in the
same direction as them and sees three discs. It works the same way
the other way around too. If, faced with the same room layout, the
viewer is instead asked how many discs the avatar sees, she also takes
longer to respond. Why? Presumably because of the conflict between
the two perspectives, for in cases where the perspectives did not differ,
people were quicker to respond. This means that the subjects must be
aware, at some level, of what both they and the avatar see. When asked
about one or the other, they must disregard the information about the
other perspective they computed, and that takes time—roughly 700
milliseconds.4
What does this mean? Well, it means that the presence of other
perceivers changes our perspective. What they see becomes part of our
experience. Samson and her collaborators conducted another study
to determine whether we automatically take into consideration how
others see things as well. We don’t. Whether someone can see some-
thing can be determined by a relatively simple process of tracing a
line between their vision and the object of interest. This is often called
“Level 1 perspective taking.” How someone sees something is often
called “Level 2 perspective taking,” and it does require perspective
change proper. More precisely, studies indicate that the person has
to imagine herself physically located where the other person is. Our
immediate and automatic awareness of what others can see is therefore

not already a form of perspective taking.5
As it turns out, the fact that other people are present and are paying
attention to us changes our experience in all sorts of ways. Here is
a basic way in which this is true. When people are aware of being
observed, in addition to being in the presence of others, they gravitate
toward higher-level construals of objects. What does that mean? Well,
suppose you are presented with four triangles organized together
in such a way that it looks like a square of triangles. In this case, the
low-level feature of what you see is a bunch of triangles. The way in
which they are organized, namely as a square, constitutes a higher-
level feature of what you see. Now suppose you are asked to match
the shape at the bottom of (Figure 5.2) with either one consisting of
three squares organized as a triangle (Group B) or one made up of
four triangles organized as a square (Group A). The one you choose
Figure 5.2 Which of the smaller groups of objects does the large square
belong to? If you focus on the local or low-level features, then it belongs
to the group on the right, but if you focus on the global or higher-level
features, then it belongs to the group on the left. Illustration by Peter
Bruce from Luan and Li 2020.
reveals the way you have construed the object you have seen. Alone,
people gravitate toward the low-level construal, but when observed by
others, they gravitate toward the high-level features. Does this sound
familiar? It should. Remember Libby’s work on recollection from a
field or from an observer perspective? It follows the same logic. When
we recall from a field perspective, the lower-level features of objects,
situations, or activities stand out; when we recall from an observer
perspective, the higher-level ones do.6
Social psychologists talk about “social facilitation and impairment.”
Put briefly, it is a phenomenon wherein the presence of others affects
performance. Sometimes it facilitates it; at other times it hinders it.
It is the result of our paying a certain amount of attention to these
people. Split attention makes us perform better on simple tasks be-
cause it forces us to pay attention only to the most salient features of
a task, an object, or another person. But when it comes to complex
tasks, the presence of others reduces our ability to perform well. For
instance, we tend to ignore less obvious, but nonetheless crucial, in-
formation, as well as anything at the periphery or outside the cen-
tral task we are performing. The presence of someone in charge, a
respected individual, or simply a dominant person also tends to make
people “choke.” That is, even someone who is excellent at a task, say
mathematical puzzles or chess, is more likely to freeze up and under-
perform in the presence of an authority figure. This may be because
while they are performing our task, they are also considering how
they look to others, and that extra load interferes with performance.7
In general, we are more alert or aroused when we are with other
people than when we are alone. But when others are able to see us, we
get the effect Samson and colleagues talk about. We automatically no-
tice what they can see, and their presence has an effect on object cat-
egorization: we tend toward higher-level characterizations. It will be
interesting to see what other differences we find in how people view
their world when in the presence of others compared to when being
alone. Although this research is still in its infancy, it does rather seem
to support the phenomenologists when they insist on the importance
of the personal encounter. The presence of others—and the way we re-
late to, or interact with, them—makes a difference to how we see things
and our ability to act. It also affects how we feel.
5.2 Infected by What Others Feel
People taking care of young children know that one infant’s crying can
unleash a flood of tears in others. And most of us know that watching
someone cry in the movies can set off the waterworks. Crying is con-
tagious; so is yawning—in both humans and chimpanzees. All you
need to get your dog barking is another dog barking. It’s hard not to
automatically smile when someone smiles at you, or to laugh when
someone else does. This is not just hearsay; we have hard evidence—
well, as hard as psychological evidence gets.8
Contagious crying is not just a behavior. There is feeling behind
it or, if you like, in it. You don’t simply cry when you catch another’s
sadness; you also feel it. Similarly, when you yawn as a result of an-
other yawning, you begin to feel tired. Dogs likely don’t just bark, but
they also experience the affect connected with the bark. Unless people
are faking it—to manipulate you, for instance, or because they are ac-
tors—the same goes for their emotional expressions. The person who
cries is sad (or, in some cases, overwhelmed with positive feelings), the
dog that whimpers is in pain, and the child who cries is distressed. So,
when we mirror each other’s emotional expressions, we usually come
to feel the same emotion as the person we mirror. I feel sad with the
person who is sad, I am joyful with the person who is happy, etc. We
don’t just catch expressions; we also catch emotions. We usually do so
through expressions, although, as we shall see, there are other ways of
catching affect. The fact that we catch others’ emotions is not always
obvious, however. More about that in a minute.
Quick aside: Remember the opening quote from Scheler? He
implies that it is a mistake to think that there is the emotion and then
the expression of it, where the latter is just a way of communicating
the emotion to others. Instead, we should understand the expression of
emotion as part of the emotion itself, even if it is sometimes possible to
fake an emotion or to suppress its expression. The expression of emo-
tion and the experiencing of it are much more tightly linked than this
“faking picture” would have it. Scheler’s contention is supported by the
fact that if you ask someone to exaggerate the way she expresses her
emotion, she comes to feel that emotion more strongly. If, instead, you
ask her to inhibit the expression of what she feels, it reduces the degree
to which she experiences it. People commonly use suppression of emo-

tion expression as a way to regulate their emotions. To feel less of an
emotion, one can prevent oneself from expressing it.9
In their seminal book Emotional Contagion, Elaine Hatfield, John
Cacioppo, and Richard Rapson argue that we are able to quickly and
automatically mimic or synchronize our own bodily expressions and
our speech with the expressions of people we interact with. They call
it “primitive emotional contagion.” Such bodily adjustments affect
how we feel. When we mimic the types of expressions that are typi-
cally associated with certain emotions, we come to feel these emotions
as a result. This helps us figure out how it feels to experience them.
One version of this idea is known as the facial feedback hypothesis,
which holds that emotions can be caused or modulated by the person
adopting the facial expressions associated with these emotions. Fritz
Strack, Leonard Martin, and Sabine Stepper asked student volunteers
to hold a pencil between their teeth with their mouths slightly open
while watching a funny cartoon. This activates the muscles used for
smiling or laughing. Students holding the pencil found the cartoon
funnier than students who simply watched the cartoon. This was taken
to show that our facial expressions affect the way we feel. When we
laugh—or assume the expression of laughing—we find things funnier.
A recent large study of undergraduates achieved the same results as the
Strack, Martin, and Stepper study.10
There are many ways to determine whether people facially mimic
the expressions of other people. In some studies, widely regarded as
being more accurate, electrodes are placed on people’s faces to finely
measure muscle activity while they watch pictures or videos of people
expressing emotions. For instance, the corrugator supercilia and the
zygomaticus major are studied to determine whether their activation
affects the experience of positive vs. negative affect. The zygomaticus
major muscles elevate the lips when we smile, and the corrugator
contracts our eyebrows in a frown. There is pretty good evidence that
people mimic both positive and negative affect. But the best evidence
comes from studies that show that facial mimicry creates a feedback
loop whereby a person can come to feel an emotion or change his
emotion as a result of mimicking or failing to mimic someone’s fa-
cially expressed affect. This goes for both poles of affect—positive and
negative—and for particular emotions. An examination of results

from 138 studies found evidence for the facial feedback hypothesis
for most types of emotions, including happiness, love, anger, disgust,
and sadness. Fear and surprise were excluded, perhaps because they
are rarely studied in this context. Whether the subjects were aware
of why they experienced the emotions they did made no difference.
In other words, we catch other people’s emotions by mimicking their
facial expressions, whether we know it or not.11
This is good news, but perhaps not as good as Hatfield, Cacioppo,
and Rapson would want. The effect size is small, meaning that although
there is an effect, it is not very strong. A couple of things stand out,
however. First, we do not mimic everybody’s emotions, such as those
of people we dislike. In fact, we often feel the opposite of what they feel
(sad when they are happy, say). Second, we are also rather sensitive to
the context in which an emotion is expressed, the reason the person is
expressing it, and its significance in that situation. It therefore seems
that we respond to the wider context and significance of a person’s ex-
pression, and not simply to facial muscle movements. If mimicry is au-
tomatic, it is very a sophisticated automatic process. It is, however, a
very quick one. Usually, mimicry occurs within 3 to 500 milliseconds.
Our reactions, then, cannot be the result of careful discursive thinking
but must be somewhat rote. And third, there are interesting individual
differences. Some people mimic others more readily than do others.
Those that do are also more empathic.12
The vast majority of studies of emotional contagion are conducted
in the context of people seeing other people express emotion. But
there are some studies that show contagion through smell. That’s
right. You can catch another person’s emotion from how they smell.
Can you guess the types of emotions we are talking about? Probably.
“I can smell the fear on you,” people say, at least in the movies. As it
turns out, it is true, although most of us are unaware of it. Alexander
Prehn-Kristensen and colleagues collected sweat from people under
two conditions: when they were exercising and when they anxiously
awaited an exam. The chemical composition of sweat is different under
the two circumstances. To see whether people could tell the differ-
ence, Prehn-Kristensen exposed a group of them to the sweat samples.
They could. Only when exposed to sweat from anxious people did the
experimental subjects become anxious themselves. Sweat from the

same donors while exercising did not have that effect. We can smell
anxiety. And when we do, it makes us anxious too! But here’s the
kicker: The people didn’t know they could tell. Although they reacted
to one sample of sweat but not the other, they could not tell them apart.
Their conscious mind lagged behind.13
Additional examples come from neuroscience. An experiment
headed by Bruno Wicker and Christian Keysers was the first to show
that when people are exposed to another’s emotion, they experience
the same emotion, and much as they would have had they experienced
the emotion directly (and not in response to the other). Wicker and
Keysers imaged the brain activity of 14 men under two conditions.
In the first, the men watched movies of people’s facial reactions to
smelling disgusting, pleasant, and neutral substances. In the second,
they were themselves exposed to disgusting odors. The scans of their
brain activities under the two conditions were then compared, and a
partial, but nonetheless substantial, overlap was found especially in
the anterior insula. This particular area has previously been associ-
ated with feelings of disgust. Here, then, is more evidence that one
emotion, disgust, expressed by one person is responded to by another
with an emotion, which shows up in his brain much like his own dis-
gust would.14
Disgust is not the only emotion that behaves this way. Pain does too.
If you show people pictures of others in painful situations, such as their
getting their hands stuck in car doors, for instance, you will observe a
pronounced reaction in what neuroscientists call “the pain matrix” of
the brain. This is the matrix that is activated when someone is in pain
herself. These studies, directed by Jean Decety, found overlapping ac-
tivation in the anterior insula, the anterior cingulate cortex, the infe-
rior frontal gyrus, and the amygdala. Fear, anxiety, anger, sadness, and
embarrassment all show similar features: There is overlap between the
first-person and the vicarious experience of these emotions.15
Emotion transfers like these show that when we are with others,
what they feel affects how we feel. And how we feel affects the way we
experience the world and the other person. I will discuss this in more
detail in Chapter 6, where we will see that empathizing with others
is a way of taking their perspective. Emotional contagion is similar.
It is a way of aligning ourselves with others, whether we are aware of

it or not. People who experience similar emotions have similar brain
activations, studies show. And we are beginning to learn that brain
synchrony is associated with improved interaction, cooperation, and
joint carrying out of a variety of tasks. Incidentally, people who date or
who live together also begin to converge in their emotional responses.
And the greater the convergence, the better the relationship. But it is
not just in the area of emotions that basic imitation or imitation-like
behavior is common, as we are about to see.16
5.3 Mimicry, Entrainment, and Synergies
Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson called their book Emotional

Contagion, but they were concerned with mimicry and imitation of
more than just affective states. As it turns out, we commonly change
our behaviors so as to fit those of people around us, whether we are
aware of it or not. Doing so facilitates learning and liking, causes attrac-
tion, and greases the wheel of social interaction. Take a phenomenon
like entrainment. One system is entrained by another if the former
alters its oscillations so that they coincide with the latter’s oscillations.
Our circadian rhythm is an example. This internal clock regulates our
wakefulness and sleepiness. It sets to the ambient light, which is to say
that it is entrained by the sun. When we fly across the world, it is reset
to the new time zone, though often through a slow and painful process.
Jetlag is our circadian clock momentarily unmoored from the environ-
mental conditions that set it. Entrainment is a way of synchronizing
naturally occurring rhythms to each other. It happens at all levels of
nature.
We are used to thinking of rhythms as a musical phenomenon. But
rhythms are everywhere: in the blinking of fireflies, the waves of the
ocean, the change of the seasons, neuronal firing, plants flowering, and
so on. Many of these rhythms are synchronized—flowering with the
season, for instance. Sometimes, systems of the same kind synchro-
nize to each other. We do. Women who live together tend to men-
struate together. The brain waves of musicians that improvise together
oscillate together, and their hearts start beating at the same rate. The
degree to which people are able to synchronize their natural rhythms

seems to play a large role in their sense of connectedness and in their
performing together. Something you might not know is that a secret
to smooth interactions with others is mutual entrainment of speech
rhythms. Yes, you’ve read correctly. The rhythm with which you speak
relative to your conversation partner is foundational to the quality of
your conversation. If you speak quickly and I speak slowly and out of
sync with you, we won’t have a good conversation. It will be awkward
and halting. Chances are that you will dominate the conversation and
will find it uninspiring. I will feel overwhelmed and unable to get a
word in.17
But in communication, speed is not all that matters. The intensity
with which a person speaks, her accent, the pitch of her voice (fre-
quency), how long she speaks at a time, how often and for how long she
pauses, and how long it takes her to respond when the other person has
spoken are all aspects of linguistic communication that can be modi-
fied and that are central to being “on the same wavelength” with a con-
versation partner. What is interesting about such speech modulation
is that it involves a very subtle and largely unconscious process of co-
ordination in which two people come to “sound the same,” which then
forms the basis of something else, namely productive communication.
In successful cases, the conversation partners eventually occupy the
same tonal and vocal space, which greatly facilitates exchange of infor-
mation and is experienced as pleasurable. You connect. This tendency
to synchronize one’s speech pattern falls away, however, if one has pre-
existing reasons not to affiliate with one’s conversation partner.18
According to my colleague Tony Chemero, people are no different
from other objects that temporarily form a system and jointly operate
together, such as the water molecules in a whirlpool, photons forming a
laser, or the separate elements that make up a cell. These coupled elem-
ents he calls “synergies.” Chemero thinks that when we are together
with others, interacting in the right way, we form a synergy with those
people, so that something arises from our interaction that goes beyond
the sum of our respective contributions. We form not a whirlpool, but
a band, a pair of dancers, or a mob. He calls it “sensorimotor empathy.”
It is a low-level and basic form of intersubjectivity. It typically operates
below the level of consciousness. We may be aware of coordinating our
activity with the other in some way but are often unaware of the way
we do it.19
I don’t think Chemero knows how we create synergies with others;
he simply observes that we do. And the fact that we do it so well shows
that we are better at discerning the fine details of how others move,
talk, and express affect than we are aware of. We are equally unaware of
mimicking others or synchronizing our behaviors with them. But, by
contrast to Hatfield and colleagues, Chemero maintains that our coor-
dination with others is skillful, not automatic. Why? Perhaps because
the activities he is interested in are ones where people have to learn to
do things together. Improvising together and herding sheep are activi-
ties that take place within a certain context with another person. We re-
spond to our environment in ways that enable synergistic relationships
by our learning to modify our behavior in rhythm with it. This is not
a reflective activity. It is immediate and thoughtless and yet extremely
sophisticated and complex. The larger point of Chemero’s suggestion is
that there is what we might call true intersubjectivity, whereby we come
to form part of a larger whole with the other, however momentary. In
certain types of skillful interactions with others, we become entrained
with one another so that although we are two separate persons, in this
moment we form one system. Notice this is different from saying that
we become one with the other, as in becoming fully identified with him
or coming to form part of him. We are both absorbed by this larger
unity we form together, as it were. And our ability to affect the world
as part of this larger unit often goes beyond anything we could do on
our own.
This evidence about how we act together, feel together, or simply
are together contrasts with more traditional ways of thinking about
human interaction. When I was a philosophical baby, the common
wisdom was that we were able to interact with others well only because
we ascribe mental states to one another. I am able to figure out what
to do because I have certain beliefs about your beliefs, desires, and
intentions, and vice versa. The problem with such accounts, though,
is that they quickly involve us in a series of increasingly complex
ascriptions of knowledge to people, which makes any type of interac-
tion seem, if not impossible, then at least like a towering intellectual
achievement. Consider what would be involved in being able to act in
concert with someone else. Does our partner not also need to know
that we know what he is to do (so he can do his part), which in turn he
can only know if he knows what we are to do (so we know our part)?
Moreover, to know that he knows that we will do our part so that he
can do his part, will we not also need to know that he knows that we
know that he knows that we will do our part? The story now becomes
so dizzyingly complex that it is hard to believe that coordinated human
interaction is possible at all, as Adam Morton once pointed out. And
yet, here we are in the Anthropocene. Synergistic accounts don’t seem
so silly against this background.20
It turns out that there is another thing that tends to synchronize
people’s brain activities, namely sharing emotions. So, we are back to
the idea of emotional contagion. Only now we are beginning to sus-
pect that it is more ubiquitous than we thought. In the words of Lauri
Nummenmaa, who led the study that found that experiencing similar
emotions synchronizes brain activity, “by enhancing the synchrony of
brain activity across individuals, emotions may promote social inter-
action and facilitate interpersonal understanding.”21
5.4 The Analytic Third, and Other

Psychoanalytic Ideas
If we are in fact so sensitive to others, a gateway to understanding them

better may be to pay more attention to how we feel or think when we
are with them. This is not news to psychoanalysts or psychotherapists,
who have long suggested that the boundaries between people’s
thoughts and feelings are more fluid than their academic colleagues
think. Unfortunately, academic psychology has not taken psycho-
therapeutic, and particularly psychoanalytic, practices very seriously.
That is a shame, as many interesting ideas have been ignored by the
very people in a position to experimentally test them. One exception is
Roy Baumeister, whom we met in Chapter 4, who has done important
work to legitimize a number of psychoanalytic ideas, such as projec-
tion, denial, and reaction formation. But with the rising prominence of
synergistic ways of thinking about human interaction, which provides
evidence for these approaches, one can hope the trend will be reversed.
Here, I want to consider a handful of psychoanalytic ideas that provide

insight into human interconnectivity.22
Psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden has long operated on the assumption
that when a psychoanalyst and his client are together, they form a pair,
which he calls “the analytic third.” In essence, the analytic third is the
therapeutic version of a synergy. Ogden describes it as “the intersub-
jectively generated experience of the analytic pair.” According to him, a
good analyst takes into account the experiences of the analysand, him-
self, and the co-created experience of the pair. The latter is important
because what happens in the analytic environment is not reducible to
either the experiences of the analyst or those of the patient. Instead,
their interaction constitutes a type of dialectic through which each
creates, negates, and preserves the subjectivity of the other. There is
something special about being with others.
In his influential paper, “The Analytic Third: Working with
Intersubjective Clinical Facts,” Ogden uses a session with a patient,
Mr. L, to illustrates his idea. Mr. L is working hard at being a good pa-
tient. He is free-associating, but his heart isn’t in it. He sounds weary
and hopeless. He is struggling not to detach emotionally. Ogden’s
thoughts start to wander. He first notices a stamp on an envelope next
to his phone, which is not cancelled. He suddenly suspects that what he
thought was a personal letter is, in fact, a bulk letter. He feels regretful,
and somehow duped. His thoughts now drift to the phone message his
answering machine picked up earlier and wonders when he can hear a
“new, crisp voice.” Suddenly, he is gripped with anxiety and angry im-
potence as he recalls that he must rush to pick up his car from the ga-
rage, thus having to end his last session exactly on time. Despite having
gone to the same garage for years, the owner refuses to stay open even
five minutes longer despite knowing that Ogden has difficulties picking
his car up before 6 p.m.23
Normally, a therapist would put such thoughts aside as irrelevant
transferences of his own, but Ogden thinks otherwise. He points out
that the letter has been lying next to his phone for weeks and that he
had known, from the beginning of the day, that he would have to rush
to pick up his car. It is therefore worth considering why he only thought
about these things during this session. What stands out about his pat-
tern of thinking is a sense of being suffocated in a process that isn’t
going anywhere, a sense of being treated in an entirely impersonal and

mechanical way (letter, garage), and a longing for a fresh and personal
connection (message). These thoughts he communicates to his patient,
who agrees that they express, in their own way, his feelings about where
they are in the analysis. He says he has often felt suffocated by the hot
air in the consulting room, but he is only now aware of it. He is appalled
by how disconnected he is from his own experiences, so that he needs
Ogden’s comments to notice that he is physically uncomfortable. As he
speaks, his voice becomes loud and full. The session ends with a long,
comfortable silence.
What Ogden is trying to illustrate with this example is the idea that
his own thoughts during the analytic hour are by no means simply his
thoughts. Instead, they should be understood from inside “the context
of the specific (and continually shifting) intersubjectivity created by
the analysand and the analyst.” Something occurs between the two that
is communicated to Ogden by his own fixation on, respectively, the en-
velope, the phone message, and the garage. These things do, of course,
exist outside the analytic context, but their significance has changed
under the influence of the patient in this particular setting. Ogden’s
so-called reveries reveal to him something about the patient and about
their relationship. As he puts it:24
When I refocused my attention on Mr L after the series of thoughts

and feelings concerning the envelope, I was more receptive to the
schizoid quality of his experience and to the hollowness of both his
and my attempts to create something together that felt real. I was
more keenly aware of the feeling of arbitrariness associated with his
feeling of his place in his family and the world, as well as the feeling of
emptiness associated with my own efforts at being an analyst for him.
Notice how Ogden’s thoughts concern (1) his own feelings of empti-
ness, (2) the patient’s feelings about his place in the world, and (3) the
co-created experience of the hollowness of their attempts. The three
are interweaved in an overall experience of the self and other within
the context of being together.
This is, of course, somewhat vague. And it would be desirable to
have a more precise and tangible description of the process. We do not.
And I don’t think this is because it is a wishy-washy topic that is impos-

sible to research in any detail, or with any rigor. The fact is that our sci-
entific world picture is a reductive one. We chop complex phenomena
into smaller parts; we only regard the smallest parts as truly existing;
and we believe that only the science of the small is true science (such
as particle physics). This is also called “smallism.” The same applies to
human science, where everything becomes reduced to the individual
and the actions of the individual. We may aptly call this “individu-
alism,” and it goes along with the social and political attitudes asso-
ciated with that word. Our research methods presuppose smallism.
Anti-individualistic approaches are hampered by this fact. It requires
something of a revolution in our ideas of experiments, experimental
methods, and interpretation of results to get to the same level of rigor
as smallist approaches currently have. But some progress is made par-
ticularly in genetics and microbiology, where the coordinated actions
of the many micro-organisms that form part of us are increasingly
explored. Another problem expressing intersubjective truths is that
the language we use is the product of a fundamentally individualistic
worldview. An additional issue may be that the mechanisms that tune
us into others are evolutionarily old and basic and have a lot to do with
how we feel. We are typically not conscious of such processes. Notice
that Ogden’s emotional evaluations are what drives the analytic work
and the realizations related to the co-created experiences. Whereas
we are very good at theorizing about beliefs and desires, we typically
downplay and ignore our background feelings unless they erupt into
anything more spectacular. Luckily, the work of Antonio Damasio has
made something of a difference to how people think of emotion, but
there is a long way to go for the importance, and reasonableness, of
emotions to be fully recognized. In sum, there are reasons research
on interpersonal phenomena is hard and is difficult to express at the
level of accuracy we are accustomed to. This is no reason to despair,
however.25
Psychoanalysis is famous for introducing the ideas of projection
and introjection, which are also relevant within the context of thinking
more carefully about the shared experience of individuals. According
to Sigmund Freud, projection is a common defensive maneuver
whereby unwanted ideas, desires, or feelings are ascribed to someone
other than oneself. The problem is that desires or ideas that we don’t
want to have don’t just go away because we don’t like them. We retain
some degree of awareness of them. A way to relieve the anxiety that
results from having such desires or ideas is to make it appear that our
awareness of them is a result of others having them. Projection helps
maintain a stable, nonconflicted, and relatively anxiety-free self by
disowning unwanted psychic states. A classic example of projection is
that of the spouse who defends against her own nonconjugal sexual
urges by suspecting that her partner is unfaithful. Although first intro-
duced by psychoanalytic theory, projection, as a defense mechanism, is
now an undisputed psychological phenomenon. It turns out that if you
lead people to believe they have characteristics that they find threat-
ening, they are much more likely to see such characteristics in other
people.26
Projective identification, or introjection, describes the act of
accepting another person’s projections. An example of projection is
when someone feels intensely angry with you, but because they are
unwilling to recognize their anger, they deny experiencing it and see
you as the one who’s angry. In this case, projective identification is
when you internalize that projection and you also come to see your-
self as angry. From a highly individualistic view of people, which sees
each person as an island, such flagrant errors about the true source of
emotions seem bizarre. However, once we realize how deeply coupled
we often are, the mysteriousness of projection and projective identi-
fication starts to dissolve. The issue comes down to who is willing to
acknowledge and take ownership of the emotions that flow between
us. The irony of this is that people who are willing to take ownership
and be empathic are vulnerable to the very damaging experience of
having others’ unwanted emotions foisted upon them. Thus, empathic
perspective taking can be harmful to the individual, causing them to
carry the burdens of others as well as their own. It is an issue I return to
in Chapter 9.
The phenomena of projection and introjection show that the lines
between who thinks, wants, or feels what are actually more blurred
than our individualistic psychology would have us believe. The fact
that we project so easily indicates something rather fundamental about
the thoughts that occur to us. If we were aware that we were, say, sexist
and then went on to believe anyone in sight was too, it wouldn’t make
much sense. But what if thoughts and desires sometimes occur to us
in the absence of a clear owner, for instance, when we are with other
people? Then we have to consider whether the thoughts, feelings, or
desires originated with us or with someone else. If this sounds crazy,
consider that this is exactly what we do when we catch other people’s
emotions. We can either own them, and they become truly ours, or we
can disown them, in a manner of speaking, and they become someone
else’s. The latter is the recipe for empathy. But what happens in the
former case is worth dwelling on for a moment.
5.5 Whose Emotion Is It?
When discussing empathy, psychologists often talk of the emotional

phenomenon “personal distress.” When people are exposed to a person
who is either distressed or in need, they commonly experience distress
themselves. Mostly, psychologists think of this distress as personal.
Whereas there is little argument that being exposed to others in need
typically distresses us, the interesting question is why it is called “per-
sonal.” After all, it is caused by another person’s distress or distressing
situation. Why is it not empathic distress? One reason to think it isn’t
is this. Daniel Batson has found, in study upon study, that a person
who feels as much distress as sympathy, or more distress than sym-
pathy, is more likely to act so as to reduce her own distress than she is
to do something to reduce the distress of the person in need, should it
be easier to do the former than the latter. Usually this means leaving
the experiment instead of helping the other person. In a typical Batson
experiment, the experimental subject is told that Batson is studying
the effects of mild electric shocks. They are then led into a room where
they watch someone—one of Batson’s collaborators—receive these
shocks. This person reacts quite strongly. The subject is then told that
this is due to early childhood experiences, but that the shocks really
aren’t so bad. They are then offered to take the place of the person being
shocked or told they can leave. People who experience a high degree of
personal distress are more likely to leave than they are to take the place
of the other person. This suggests that someone’s distress is associated
with what he calls egoistic motivation, wherefore we should assume

that the emotion itself is egoistic or self-directed. Hence, this kind of
distress is personal.27
The consequences of distress being personal may seem a little ab-
stract when we are simply looking at laboratory data. So, let me in-
stead present you with a real-life example. Years ago, a dear friend of
mine flew to New York City to hear Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle at
the Metropolitan Opera. On her way there, a reinfected root canal
began to hurt. She took painkillers. After a couple of days, they stopped
working. She says it’s the single most painful experience she’s had. She
got antibiotics, but they took a while to kick in. She spent one end-
less night with unimaginable pain alone in a hotel room somewhere
in Brooklyn, ready to run into the lobby in her pajamas screaming,
“Make it stop.” Her boyfriend at the time listened nicely to the story of
her woes the following morning. But by the second day, he said, “Stop
talking about the pain that you are in. Yesterday, after talking to you,
I was upset all day. And I don’t want to feel that way today. So, could
you please talk about something that’ll make me feel good?” I am not
kidding!
What we have here is a classic failure—not uncommon, going by
the psychology literature—to draw a clear enough distinction between
one’s own distress and another’s. The person in need here was not my
friend’s ex-boyfriend, but her. And yet he acted as if it were the other
way around. Why? It won’t surprise you to know that she soon discov-
ered that her boyfriend was quite the narcissist. But even people who
are not often end up doing as he did: focusing on their own distress and
on how to relieve it over the distress of the target. Might this be because
the distress feels both personal and other? People who leave the situ-
ation where they are exposed to another’s distress, instead of helping
them, are unlikely to say that their distress was simply for themselves.
My friend’s ex actually said, “I was upset all day at the thought of you
being in such pain.” He knew who was in need. But he was nonetheless
incapable—or unwilling, who knows—of acting accordingly. This fits
well with the evidence from social psychology, which shows that, when
asked about the nature of their distress, people report that it is felt per-
sonally and for the other person. What seems to make the difference
when it comes to helping is the degree to which it is personally felt, and
how easy it is to escape the cause of the distress, namely the other’s
need. If it is hard to escape exposure to the other’s distressing situation,
even people who report experiencing as much distress for themselves
as for the other person help.28
Distress at others’ distress is interesting and strange in ways that
have been underestimated by philosophers and psychologists alike.
Psychologists tend to insist that it is personal, namely that it is distress
that has as its object yourself and your situation. Philosophers, on the
other hand, tend to maintain that distress at someone else’s distress can
at least sometimes be empathic, that is, be distress that is about the other
person or her situation. But what if, instead of focusing on whether dis-
tress at others’ distress is personal or empathic, we asked ourselves why
it is so difficult to figure out?
When we ask this question, what stands out is just how weird and in-
teresting contagious and empathic emotions are. It is truly as if people
are sometimes confused about what to do about the emotion. They
might decide either, with my friend’s ex, that the other person is making
them feel bad, or that they feel what the other person feels, after which
they might come to the other person’s aid. But, and this is the impor-
tant point, in many cases it is one and the same emotional state that
sets them off in one direction or another. This is not usually true of our
emotions. If a bear frightens me, it is not because I caught its fear and
then decided it was making me afraid. Instead, I am afraid because the
bear constitutes a threat to my physical integrity. That affect can turn
either personal or altruistic is rather unique to contagious emotions. If
we were not ideologically wedded to an individualistic way of thinking
about thoughts and feelings, we might conclude that contagious affect
is neither clearly yours nor clearly mine. When I feel sad because you
feel sad, my sadness is a window onto your sadness. I only feel it be-
cause you feel it. So, the sadness I feel is experienced in part as yours.
But, at the same time, it is also mine because I feel it. If I focus on you,
then what I feel is really empathic sadness. But if I focus on me, then
what I feel is just sadness. It is, at one and the same time, your sadness,
my sadness, and our sadness.
Some think the idea that we can share in others’ experiences is ab-
surd. Max Scheler, for instance, insists that although we can take
another’s perspective and thereby understand what she is going
through, any emotion we may feel during this event, or as a result of it,
is always simply our own. Scheler is particularly concerned to discredit
the idea that we ever share the other person’s emotions. Recently, Dan
Zahavi and Philippe Rochat have reiterated this view. Sharing is a re-
ciprocal relation that requires mutual awareness that the one person
feels what the other feels. In other words, the empathizer must know
that the target feels what he feels, and the target must know that the
empathizer feels what he feels. Sharing in this sense rests on a pre-ex-
isting self-other differentiation.29
Whether there really is such an unbridgeable self-other gap be-
tween people as Zahavi and Rochat suggest or not, emotions can be
experienced as not clearly being your own, but possibly those of an-
other person, even if you are neither schizophrenic nor paranoid. For
instance, enjoying an interaction with another person, we are not al-
ways aware of where our own enjoyment stops and another’s begins.
In emotional contagion, as we have seen, the person catching the other
person’s affect may be similarly confused. It is possible to experience
something as yours that is not. This isn’t just true of emotions. You
might have heard of the rubber hand illusion. This illusion illustrates
my point because even if you are a purist about self-other boundaries
in one sense, you might still accept that you can experience something
as yours that is not and that you also know is not yours.30
So, what is the rubber hand illusion? Once upon a time in a lab-
oratory far away, Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen invited
some ordinary people into their laboratory for some safe psycholog-
ical experimenting. They were seated at a desk on which were placed a
screen and a rubber hand. They were then asked to rest their hands on
the surface of the desk, but in such a way that their left hand was con-
cealed behind the screen. As a result, when they looked to the left, what
they saw was the (left) rubber hand instead of their own left hand. An
aid of the experimenter would then sit down opposite them and stroke
the visible rubber hand and the unseen left hand simultaneously. The
effect of this simple manipulation was nothing short of astounding.
After a short period, of around a minute, the person in the experiment
suddenly began to feel the rubber hand being stroked. In other words,
the rubber hand was experienced as his hand. This rather extraordi-
nary feat is a result of how the brain constructs our body map. It does
so on the fly by using input from our visual and tactile systems. On
the basis of statistical correlations, the synchronicity of the seen and
the felt strokes is detected, and the brain produces a representation of
the body, which includes the rubber hand but not, it seems, the actual
hand.31
Just as you can feel the rubber hand as your own, you can feel an-
other person’s emotion as your own. When I say, “I feel your pain,” it
may well seem to me that I am. Or perhaps I experience the affect in a
relatively undifferentiated way, which might be why most people say
they experience it directly as if they were distressed, but also empathi-
cally, namely for the other person. If, or when, I see my distress as dis-
tress for you, I adopt your perspective because I react to your situation
as if I were you. Deciding that I feel what you feel is a form of perspec-
tive taking, as we are about to see.
5.6 Interactor Perspective
The variety of ways in which either the mere presence or the attention
of others affects how we experience them and our common world is
quite complex, and the overview here merely scratches the surface. But
the context in which we are with others, how we relate to them, and
what sorts of mental occurrences erupt all play a role in how we are af-
fected. Let us look at a couple here.
Our perceptual experience of the world. When we are with others,

our overall experience of objects in our environment is in terms of
their more abstract or superordinate qualities. Because more ab-
stract ways of regarding activities is associated with an observer per-
spective, this suggests that our perspective is no longer a pure field
perspective but is moving toward an observer perspective. Perhaps
we implicitly take both and split the difference. The details of this
story are not yet available. But it is fairly clear that our awareness of
how an observer would see things helps our interaction with others
if, indeed, we get it right. But, of course, the other person is also going
to adopt a mixed perspective, and so we should expect a fair degree
of overlap at least on the observer perspective front: representation

in terms of more abstract properties.
Our affective experience of the world. Emotions represent objects

and beings in the world in terms of their relevance to us. They are
evaluative. Fear, for instance, signals danger. When we catch other
people’s emotions, we catch their evaluations of whatever caused
their emotions. When catching fear, we sense danger. Should we de-
termine that we feel afraid because the other person does, our fear
transforms into empathic fear. Moving on from emotions to moods,
Ogden’s account of his session with Mr. L makes it clear that moods
too can travel between people or be cocreated by people being to-
gether in certain transfigurations. This synergistic atmosphere then
gives rise to a way of experiencing the situation that one would not
if one were alone. One might feel suffocated or boxed in. As a re-
sult, the world seems to afford few options for action or change.
Emotions and moods, as we are about to see, have certain ways of
presenting the world that remain relatively constant for the many
different people who experience them. This is another version of the
formal, or relatively invariable, characteristics we are looking for in
perspectives.
These are both ways in which we are affected by what is going on

with other people—and they by us, of course—but without our
fully taking their perspective. It seems more like we are just having
their perspective or, even better, we are both occupying a similar
perspective. The line between the two is thin, admittedly. But, as
husband and wife interactions show, simply being with another
person is not sufficient for us to take their perspective. When we
are in conflict, our natural tendency is to become entrenched in
our own. Moreover, the evidence from visual perspective taking
suggests that full-on perspective taking, which would be Level 2
visual perspective taking, is not an automatic process like Level 1
perspective taking is. Generalizing from that, we might suppose
that more work is needed for us to be said to take another’s psycho-
logical perspective also. This is what we move to now.
We have reached the end of Part I. Hopefully, you now have a sense
of what a perspective is. As agents, we regard ourselves in a way that
differs subtly, but significantly, from the way we regard others as obser-
vers. When we are engaged with others—in collaboration or conflict—
we take an interactive perspective. This is also true of the interpersonal
encounter where we are affected by the mere presence of another
person.
PART II
HOW TO TA KE A NOT H E R
P OIN T OF V IEW
6
Perspective Taking
In season five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy is battling an extra-

terrestrial god banished to Earth and currently residing in a human
body. Unsurprisingly, this god, called Glory by Its followers, has
retained quite an arsenal of superpowers. This might not have been
such a problem were it not for the fact that Glory is looking for a key
to open all dimensions—human and demon—so she can return to
her own dimension to wreak havoc on those who displaced her. The
key, we soon discover, is embodied in Buffy’s sister Dawn. As Glory
closes in, she begins to drain the brains of Buffy’s friends to find her
key. Her first victim is Tara, Buffy’s oldest and dearest friend Willow’s
girlfriend. Unsurprisingly, Willow wants revenge. But it’s hard for a
mere human to wreak vengeance on a god, even if she is a witch. So,
Buffy tells her not to. Later, she explains the situation to Dawn, who
is being watched over by Spike. “Willow was looking for revenge, but
I calmed her down,” says Buffy. Spike interjects. “Really,” he muses. “So,
you are telling me that a mightily powerful witch is not going to seek
revenge because you, well, explained?” “Well, it would be like suicide,”
says Buffy. “I’d do it,” retorts Spike, “for the right person.” Here Buffy
begins to lose her confidence. Then Dawn chimes in. “Think, Buffy. If
Glory had done that to me . . . ” Now she gets it. She rushes out to save
Willow, who is about to be annihilated.
This is an example of perspective shifting. Spike and Dawn help Buffy
shift her perspective away from her own to Willow’s. It is a shift in eval-
uation. Objectively speaking, it makes no sense for Willow to attempt
to wreak vengeance on a god who is bound to defeat her quickly and
decisively. But in matters of the heart, reason works differently. History
is full of people dying for what or whom they love. This should be no
surprise to Buffy, who is risking her own life and the lives of others to
keep her beloved sister safe. But Buffy doesn’t really understand be-
cause she sees Willow’s loss from her own perspective. Tara already
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197637081.003.0007
134 How to Take Another Point of View
had her brain zapped, and going after Glory cannot change that. It can,
however, get you killed. Her perspective on what has happened is an
observer perspective. Once she recenters her evaluative framework on
Willow, things change. How does she achieve this change of perspec-
tive? By imagining that Glory has done to Dawn what she has done to
Tara. With this move, a flood of realizations come upon her. And she
understands perfectly what Willow will do.
Now, it is common knowledge that people who feel wronged will
often seek revenge. But even if Buffy hadn’t known this, she would
still have arrived at the same conclusion by imagining that she had
been wronged in a similar way. This is what Dawn realizes as she tries
to persuade Buffy to take Spike’s and her concern seriously. But how
does Buffy recognize that she wants revenge? One way is through
emotion. She thinks of Glory draining Dawn’s brain and leaving her
a vegetable and it angers her, after which the motive for revenge nat-
urally presents itself. Revenge is the natural complement to anger, as
we are about to see. Other than coming to feel what Willow feels—or
something close to it, at any rate—Buffy doesn’t need to do anything.
She doesn’t have to speculate about human psychology. Why? Because
she is human psychology incarnate. All of us are. By empathizing with
Willow, Buffy realizes how she feels, what she’s thinking about, and
what she is about to do.1
This chapter is about perspective taking in the form of empathy. First,
I discuss what it is to change one’s perspective, and I give examples
of the particular transformation that is typical of imagining being in
another’s situation. It does not involve imagining being the other person
in any substantial sense, but it does involve recapitulating their web of
relationships in our own psychology. Second, I give a quick overview
of what emotions are. That overview serves to make clear that when
an organism experiences an emotion, it adopts a certain perspective
on the world, which affects not only what it feels but also how it thinks
about the world, what it attends to, and what it is motivated to do. In
section 6.3, I show how empathizing with someone makes us adopt
their perspective. To make that claim stick, however, I have to show that
emotions are not simply the result of already thinking about the world
a certain way, but that they actually cause us to see the world differently
when we experience them. In section 6.4, I present a couple of literary
Perspective Taking 135
examples to illustrate the power of emotions in shaping how we see the

world, followed by data from psychological research. The upshot is that
affective empathy gives you for free what you might otherwise struggle
greatly to achieve: to see the world as someone else sees it.
6.1 Changing Your Perspective
The simplest possible illustration of perspective taking is, again, visual.

Look at Figure 6.1, which I found online. Two guys are looking at the
numeral 6 or 9 from two different sides, so that it looks like a 6 to the
one person but a 9 to the other. One imagines that they have argued for
a while, cartoon-style, getting increasingly agitated over the enormous
stupidity of the other person who cannot see what is right in front of
his eyes. What makes it all so comical is that from our perspective as
observers it is obvious that they are both right. Moreover, it is easy to
see that if they were only to consider the other person’s point of view,
they would realize this deeper truth. The drawing is meant to illustrate
our tendency to ignore the fact that each person in an interaction sees
Figure 6.1 Number 6 or number 9? Illustration by Peter Bruce

things a certain way that may or may not conform to how the other
person sees them. Instead of arguing about who is right, it may be far
more useful to adopt the other person’s point of view to try to under-
stand how they see things. The drawing suggests that if we do this,
we may come to see that we are both right, although perhaps in dif-
ferent ways.
The illustration seems simple, but it is actually quite clever. Consider
the numeral. It seems fair to say that it must either be a 6 or a 9. It cannot
be both at the same time. But now we have to ask, who decides which
numeral it is? Perhaps it is the one who drew it. But, of course, the one
who drew it drew it precisely so that it would be a 6 to the one person
and a 9 to the other. So, who gets to decide? The illustration draws our
attention to the fact that it is indeterminate whether the numeral is a 6
or a 9. There is no ultimate fact of the matter. Facts about experience
are much like this.
To change our visual perspective, we imagine seeing whatever the
person whose perspective we want to take sees from their position. This
is what I called Level 2 perspective taking in earlier chapters. Doing so
reveals how the thing looks to them. It gives us the object’s aspectual
shape, as philosophers of perception like to say. Put in terms of our
example, the man to the left in Figure 6.1 will now see the 6 from the
other side, where it looks like a 9. Its appearing like a 9 is the numeral’s
aspectual shape. Imagining seeing an object from another angle is, as
we have seen, realized by our visual system performing gradual shifts
to its current visual image in a process that is best described as mental
rotation. It’s a neat trick to be sure.
It may seem that there is no clear psychological equivalent of taking
up the visual perspective of another. But there is, of course, and we
have already been introduced to it. Remember our discussion of auto-
biographical memory? When we recall a scene visually, we can either
recall it as we saw it, from a field perspective, or from a perspective
outside ourselves, namely an observer perspective. Not only are we
able to take these different perspectives on experiences in our past, but
people can also be made to switch back and forth. A person who nat-
urally recalls an experience from a field perspective can be induced to
recall it from an observer perspective. And when she does, the experi-
ence is recalled in slightly different ways along the lines we discussed in
Chapter 4. Its more abstract features, its meaning-making features, and

so on are going to stand out. A person can also switch a memory from
an observer perspective to a field perspective, but this process appears
to be harder to accomplish. It may be because field perspectives are
usually more vivid and emotionally engaging, and observer memories
lack these features. So, what must be inserted into them is the imme-
diacy of perception and the richness of emotion, which is more diffi-
cult than going in the other direction, where we subtract these vivid
features. This is relevant for us, because it is quite plausible that it is
difficult to imagine being in the other person’s situation with the sort of
vivid richness that would be required to do a good job of it.2
What perspective change amounts to is switching one’s natural and
unreflective perspectives with regard to people. For instance, I take an
agent perspective on you, or I take an observer perspective on myself.
As a victim, I take a perpetrator perspective or an observer perspec-
tive, and as a perpetrator, I take a victim perspective or an observer
perspective. As an observer . . . You get my point. It may also be pos-
sible to switch interactive perspectives around so that you imagine
being your conversation partner. However, one of the few experiments
that has tested whether people change the ascriptions from observer-
based to agent-based ones when instructed to take the perspective of
someone they are currently conversing with found that agent-observer
asymmetries were neither eliminated nor reversed. This is not as bad
as it seems because people also reported being less aware of their own
thoughts and feelings and more concerned with the other person’s
actions and experiences. So, although there was no reversal, there was
still an effect. Moreover, the subjects in this experiment also told the
experimenters, Bertram Malle and Gale Pearce, that they found it re-
ally hard to do. Either you listen to, and are with, the other person, or
you take their perspective, in which case you can’t also pay attention to
what they are saying and doing. One needs at least a pause.3
Now you might think that our propensity to automatically take into
account what others can see suggests that we also automatically con-
sider what others think or feel. But recall that what we automatically
compute is what someone sees—Level 1 perspective taking—not how
they see it, or Level 2 perspective taking. The equivalent for perspec-
tive taking might be this. We understand that others have a perspective
(Level 1), but we don’t yet know what it is (Level 2). This suggests that
going from an observer perspective to a field or agent perspective is
hard work. It requires attention and cannot be carried out well if we are
otherwise engaged in listening to a person, carrying out another task,
or thinking about what we see. Nevertheless, life is full of examples of
people managing to do so.
In our Buffy example, Buffy takes Willow’s perspective, but not by
going through the hard imaginative work of mentally transposing her-
self into Willow. Dawn does the work for her. All Buffy has to do is im-
agine that what happened to Tara happened to Dawn. And off she goes.
It is at one and the same time quite simple and extraordinarily clever.
Buffy takes Willow’s perspective without imagining being Willow at
all. She does it by instead reflecting on a relationship of her own of
comparable significance to Tara and Willow’s. Julie does much the
same in our earlier example. As she tries to understand my backseat-
driverism, she doesn’t imagine being me, Heidi Maibom. Instead, she
imagines herself in the passenger seat, while someone else is driving her
car, someone she cares about, and who cares about her. She thereby
replicates two of my “relationships,” namely that between me and my
car and that between her and me. Since she owns a car, the first is easy.
And she chooses her husband for the guest role of offending driver so
as to replicate a relationship of mutual warmth and care.
Let us return to A Midsummer Night’s Dream for a moment. Suppose
our good man Egeus decides to do what Hermia wants him to: see with
her eyes. Okay. So, there’s this young man outside my window, offering
me sweetmeats and locks of his hair, holding forth about his undying
love for me, etc. Seriously? You get my point. This type of projection
clearly doesn’t work. But it would also be absurd to suggest that Egeus
should imagine that he has the body of a teenage girl, that he thinks of
the sorts of things teenage girls think of, etc. We rejected this type of
self-transformation as a model of perspective taking back in Chapter 1.
Instead, what Egeus must do is imagine something that has the same
charge for him as the situation with Lysander and Demetrius has for
Hermia. He can then mentally substitute his resultant response for
Hermia’s. In this way he can adopt Hermia’s perspective on the situ-
ation without imagining being her, but also without simply projecting
himself into her situation. Whereas visual perspective taking captures
the spatial relations between a seer and the world he sees and the spa-
tial relations between the objects within it, psychological perspective
taking captures interest relations.
Taking up another’s perspective, then, involves adopting an agent
perspective on the world as opposed to our more usual way of thinking
about that person from an observer or an interactor perspective. This
involves replicating the agent’s relationship to his or her world. If you
want to imagine how I might feel about someone scratching my car,
imagine someone scratching your car. If you want to imagine how
I might feel about my wife betraying me, imagine that your wife is
betraying you or, even better, if she has already betrayed you, think of
how you felt then. If you don’t have a wife, imagine your husband, your
lover, or your best friend. Or you might just empathize with what I feel.
It is this approach I want to focus on now. In order for such a simple
approach to work, however, it must be true that emotions present us
with a psychological perspective on the world; they must instantiate
powerful human interests all on their own. Consequently, by feeling
one, we come to embody those very interests. To see whether this is the
case, we have to look at what emotions are.
6.2 Emotions as Perspectives
An emotion is a complex psychological state, perhaps one of the most

complex ones. It is much more than a feeling. It is a comprehensive
way of regarding the world in relation to one’s interests in a particular
situation, usually in a time-limited way. Whereas emotion theorists
happily argue over whether emotions are foremost feelings or foremost
cognitive evaluations, most agree that the following features charac-
terize them.
Emotions
(1) are triggered by a relatively narrow range of situations or events
(elicitation conditions);
(2) involve a value- laden way of thinking about the eliciting
conditions (appraisals);
(3) involve changes of the body;
(4) typically feel like something;

(5) induce motivations to act;
(6) focus the attention on certain features of the environment; and
(7) encourage certain styles of thinking.
Although we sometimes experience different emotions when we

are in the same situation, certain situations are liable to evoke the
same types of emotion in creatures of the same kind. Fear is elicited
in situations that pose a danger to us. For instance, on a hike I turn a
corner and come face to face with a bear. I am immediately gripped
with fear. Had I instead come face to face with an old friend, I would
have been surprised and pleased. I am afraid of the bear because bears
are dangerous to humans. Had the bear been a fox, I would have been
delighted, not afraid. But foxes are dangerous too, just not to me. Had
I been a rabbit and encountered a fox, I imagine I would have been
quite scared. My emotions respond to the world, not in isolation from
who I am or the way I am situated in it, but as a result of it.
Emotions involve what is sometimes called appraisals or value
judgments. When I am afraid of the bear, I see it as dangerous. When
I am angry, I regard the person or event as being insulting or offensive,
and when I am happy, I regard what I am doing as going well. Some
think such evaluations necessarily precede the emotions, others that
they are part of the emotion. The reason this is debated is that some-
times appraisals are required for us to experience an emotion, but at
other times they are unlikely to have occurred. For instance, in order
to be afraid that you have failed the exam, you must have judged that
failing the exam is a bad thing to happen to you. On the other hand,
we often startle immediately upon hearing loud claps of thunder. It
happens so fast that it is implausible that we judged the clap of thunder
to be a threat before we startled. There simply is not enough time.
Moreover, requiring a preceding judgment would rather defeat the
very purpose of startle. Fear, like startle, can be evoked in largely au-
tomatic ways that implicate few, if any, cognitive areas in the brain. It
appears that there are two fear pathways in the brain. One connects
our sensory areas more or less directly to the amygdala through sub-
cortical areas. Another involves cortical areas but also sends signals
to the amygdala. The cortex houses what we have called discursive
thought and conscious cognition. As it turns out, information about

danger in the environment reaches us the fastest through the pathway
that bypasses conscious or higher-level thought altogether. Moreover,
examining brain physiology, we find that there are often very short
pathways from the perceptual systems, such as the retina, to systems
we know play a central role in the arousal and expression of emo-
tion (e.g., the hypothalamus). This suggests that a cognitive judgment
doesn’t have to precede an emotion. Instead, the experiencing of an
emotion can change the way we think about things. Once you have
imitated someone’s sad face, perhaps unconsciously, you are liable to
feel a bit sad yourself. When you do, you feel (suppose/judge) as if you
have incurred a loss of a sort. You might wonder what that loss is. Once
you start looking, it is usually easy to find a candidate.4
The most salient aspect of an emotion is, of course, the way it feels.
In this respect emotions are quite different from thinking, which
doesn’t feel like much at all. When you are afraid, your heart pounds,
your muscles tighten, and you become extremely alert. The feelings
that are characteristic of an emotion are the feelings of such changes.
As William James once said, emotion is the feeling of bodily changes.
Even if you are unwilling to grant that this is all there is to emotion, it is
hard to deny that feelings are central to something being an emotion in
the first place. If our bodies do not feel like anything, it is unlikely that
we are experiencing an emotion.5
Emotions impel us to act. The way an emotion feels is sometimes
the result of what is happening in our bodies to prepare them for ac-
tion. The pounding heart in fear prepares us for speedy flight, for in-
stance, by pumping blood into our muscles. And when we are startled,
we sometimes jump, duck, or scream. But, of course, much of the
time emotions do not make us do anything. Instead, they make cer-
tain actions seem more compelling than others. They limit, as Antonio
Damasio would say, our space of options. Anger has a way of making
attractive the prospect of hurting, harming, or otherwise retaliating
against the person who angered us. Of course, we may never act on
such motives. Depending on who we are angry with, what our relation
is to that person, what the tactical situation is, and so on, we might
simply vent on the way home in the car. We might send a vitriolic email
or plan their demise. Even so, emotion focuses our thoughts on what
to do in a relatively single-minded way. I am not, for instance, preoccu-

pied by thinking about how to make it up to the other person, planning
a pleasant surprise for him or her, or cowering in the corner. These are
not interesting options in the context of my anger.6
Emotions sharpen and direct our attention. Psychologists recog-
nize the importance of this component of affect. Returning to fear,
when we are afraid, things that are irrelevant to our safety are ignored.
What stands out, however, is the rustling in the leaves, the creaking
floorboards, someone else’s breathing. We become hypersensitive to
sound and touch. We startle more easily. And the way our attention
goes, our thoughts go too. We think repeatedly about how to avoid the
dangerous situation we are in, what to do if we are discovered, and so
on. Of course, emotions differ in the degree to which they capture our
attention and our thoughts. Fear and anger have powerful effects, par-
ticularly when felt strongly. Happiness, however, does not. This may be
because feeling happy is not closely associated with any particular mo-
tive. It may have more to do with signaling to us that things are going
well, that there is no need for change.
A number of psychologists argue that positive and negative moods
affect people’s way of thinking about events. Roughly speaking, happy
moods are associated with ways of thinking that are more general,
schematic, and heuristic. One is more likely to use rules of thumb and
to think of what is happening in broader or superordinate terms. By
contrast, negative moods (read: sad moods) induce people to think
more in terms of particulars. Such thinking tends to be more ana-
lytic, focused on details, and systematic. This does not mean that
sad thinking is necessarily more useful. It depends on the situation.
Analytic and detail-oriented thinking is better suited for getting in-
formation about the particular situation at hand than seeing it as an
instance of something we are already familiar with. The advantage of
the style of thinking that characterizes positive moods is that it is less
labor-intensive, and therefore frees up energy that may be expended
on thinking about the event or one’s situation in a more creative or un-
orthodox way. It should not necessarily be understood as being lazier.7
Psychologists like Norbert Schwartz and Klaus Fiedler think that we
see the mood effects we do because of what moods signal about our
situation. Negative moods signal that things are not going well, that we
are in a problematic situation, and that special effort is required to get

out of it. Perhaps negative moods also signal a failure of our standard
categorizations to get good results, wherefore we must move to a new
way of thinking about the situation. Positive moods, by contrast, sug-
gest that all is well and that our reflexive ways of thinking about the
world are successful. There are some problems with this way of con-
ceptualizing things, however. Most of the studies are carried out on
people in happy or sad moods. However, an angry, irritable, or anx-
ious mood is also negative (and may have the same arousal level), but it
does not have the effect of inducing more analytical thinking. Rather,
the opposite is true.8
Moods differ from emotions in their antecedents (elicitation
conditions), duration, and content. They are extended in time, whereas
emotions are episodic. Emotions typically have specific and identifi-
able causes, whereas the causes of moods are more difficult to deter-
mine and perhaps more diffuse. As a result, emotions are typically
associated with a particular content or object—you are angry with
some particular person about some particular thing—whereas when
you are irritable it is much less clear why you are irritable or what the
object of your irritation is. Despite these differences, many theorists
think that mood effects are signs that emotions similarly affect styles
of thinking. There is some reason to think that emotions are less likely
to have the same effects on thought as moods, however. Why? Because
when people are aware of their emotions, they are less likely to let them
influence their thinking. Moods, however, tend to be the sorts of things
that people are less aware of, and so they are more apt to influence their
thinking under the radar, as it were.9
In sum, emotions are triggered by a relatively narrow range of
situations or events; they involve certain ways of thinking about
what caused them, changes of the body, motives to act, and styles of
thinking; they feel like something; and they focus the attention on cer-
tain features of the environment. Another way of putting the same
idea is that emotions constitute comprehensive perspectives on (aspects
of) the world. The features I have just described are relatively invar-
iant features of emotions. They characterize how an emotion is expe-
rienced by people in general. You might be afraid of spiders whereas
I am not, but the fact remains that when we are both afraid, we have
similar ways of thinking about the eliciting event, we experience sim-

ilar bodily changes, and so on.
What does the nature of emotions have to do with perspective
taking? Just this. If you can get yourself into the same affective space
that another person inhabits with a similar object, you are taking his or
her perspective. You do so by embodying or inhabiting the perspective
he or she inhabits. Or, if we want to be more modest, we might say you
are inhabiting a very similar or overlapping perspective.
6.3 Empathy as Perspective Taking
In 2012, Lauri Nummenmaa and her colleagues scanned the brains

of 16 people while they watched scenes from When Harry Met Sally
and The Godfather. The clips were chosen to induce pleasant and un-
pleasant emotional states. Comparing the subjects’ reports and their
neural activity, the researchers found that both showed a high degree
of overlap across subjects. In particular, activation was similar in sen-
sory and limbic areas. Limbic areas are associated with emotion pro-
cessing. As a result, Nummenmaa and colleagues maintained that10
emotions enhance intersubject synchronization of brain activity

and thus tune-in specific brain networks across individuals to sup-
port similar perceptions, experiencing, and prediction of the world.
Our findings suggest that such synchronization of emotions across
individuals provides an attentional and affective framework for
interpreting others’ actions.
Does the study actually show synchronization? Not really, but it

provides enticing evidence that people respond similarly to emotion-
evoking situations, at least when they are not differentially involved in
them. And it does suggest that such similarity in response underlies
understanding. You might have guessed that this is pretty much what
I am about to argue. I will not rely on brain evidence very much, how-
ever. I’ll mainly focus on what I have called perspective.
It should come as no surprise that the link between perspec-
tive taking and emotion is empathy or, to be more precise, affective
empathy. Perspective taking has traditionally been taken to be indic-

ative of cognitive, not affective, empathy. Often perspective taking is
thought of in terms of a way of thinking about the world. It is a more
cerebral enterprise. But, once we consider the nature of emotions and
the nature of a perspective as a way of seeing the world as a reflection of
our interests, it is easy to see that emotions are perspectives and, there-
fore, that empathy is a form of perspective taking. And, naturally, the
way our emotions signal the impact on us of what is happening around
us gives rise to thoughts, thoughts evoked by our affect or in the con-
text of our affect.
It is easy to see how empathy can affect our understanding of others
when it is caused by knowing what someone feels about something.
Suppose your good friend John is upset that he has been furloughed
indefinitely due to the Covid-19 crisis. When he tells you about how
upset he is, you become upset too. You are upset for the same reason
John is upset, namely that he has been furloughed, and you are upset
because he is upset. Thus upset, you are in sync with John and not just
in terms of feeling upset, but also when it comes to other reactions. You
become focused on what you might do to end the crisis, you speculate
about what might be done to help John and people like him through
this tough time, you experience shallower breathing (for instance),
and you feel something very similar to what John feels. Your thoughts
flip more rapidly from one to another about the consequences of no
longer having an income or healthcare (if you live in the United States),
and you find it hard to concentrate on any one thing for a long time.
If you are generally knowledgeable about emotions, you might be
able to deduce a number of things about the effect being upset has
on John. You might recognize that his attitude to closing schools and
businesses down is going to be more ambivalent than someone else’s,
who is safely working from home. But there are a number of differences
between simply knowing that someone is upset and feeling upset with
him, as in an empathic reaction. Only feeling with John resets your per-
spective to overlap with his. Yes, you’ve read correctly. Empathizing
with someone resets our perspective so that it overlaps with the target’s.
How? Because of the nature of empathy.
Empathy is different from sympathy. When we sympathize with
someone it is usually someone in need, and we feel warm, concerned,
and compassionate toward that person. These emotions are firmly

other-directed. We do not typically sympathize with ourselves. Should
we happen to, it is always from an observer, not an agent, perspective.
Empathy is different. Empathy is a way of feeling emotions. This might
sound odd, particularly since people usually talk as if there were just
one way of experiencing emotions, namely directly or for ourselves.
Most of the emotion literature concerns this way of experiencing
an emotion, and therefore suggests it is the only one. But if empathy
exists—and there is plenty of evidence that it does—then this cannot
be true. There must be a way of experiencing emotions for others, and
not simply in the way of sympathy, where the object of our emotion is
another person. Instead, we must experience the emotion as if we were
experiencing what the other person feels. How? When you experience
sadness for someone else, you nonetheless experience sadness your-
self. You feel sad that the target feels sad, but not in the way of sympa-
thizing with her, where your own emotion is clearly distinct from what
she experiences. When you empathize with someone’s sadness, what
has happened to her affects you as if your well-being was affected in
the same way as hers. In other words, in that empathic episode, you are
identified with the other person. Her egocentric map of relevance—at
least with respect to the particular object of sadness—is your egocen-
tric map of relevance.
Let us return to compassion for a moment to see how it differs from
empathy. If we go along with the orthodoxy of emotion research and
assume that all emotions contain information about how the world
affects our welfare, then in the very act of experiencing compassion
or sympathy for someone, we embody concern for someone other
than ourselves. Their welfare matters to our welfare. This is powerful
stuff. But compassion does not give you another person’s perspective
because, as we have seen, when you feel compassion for him, he is un-
likely to feel compassion himself. Instead, emotions, such as sadness,
anger, joy, or disgust, are all ways of feeling that we are most familiar
with when we feel them for ourselves. They are paradigmatically self-
directed emotions. Make them empathic and then what happens?
We become affected emotionally as if what is happening to the other
person were happening to us. This is why people who feel distress
when exposed to someone in need report that they feel distress both
for themselves and for the victim. If, therefore, we can experience the
same emotion, perhaps even the same mood, as someone else, we are
de facto adopting their perspective as long, of course, as we are aware
that we experience the emotion because the other person experiences
it and don’t simply take the emotion to be our own.
Why empathizing with others can be such a powerful engine of un-
derstanding cannot be appreciated without first seeing how emotions
affect the way we view the world. Only then will it become obvious
why empathic emotions help us understand others. In the next section,
I begin with some literary examples to bring out the force of emotions,
and then I move on to empirical data. The aim is to show that emotions
aren’t simply the result of seeing the world a certain way, but that when
we are in the sway of them, they affect the way we view it. When, there-
fore, we empathize with someone, we don’t first have to know what she
thought before the emotional episode, but we can content ourselves
with considering her situation from the point of view of someone who
feels an emotion very similar to hers.
6.4 How Emotions Affect the Way We See the World
In his book, On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan describes a disastrous wed-

ding night. Florence and Edward are having dinner at the hotel where
they are to spend their first night together as man and wife. Florence is
apprehensive of the wedding night because she does not enjoy phys-
ical intimacy. Though she loves Edward, she views the sexual act and
what leads up to it as a necessary evil. It is part of the price of being in
a relationship with a man. She thinks to herself, “Anything but this.”
Edward, on the other hand, can hardly wait to consummate the mar-
riage. And his desire colors his every thought of her. He sees passion in
her anxiety.11
Something about her arms, he remembered thinking later, slender

and vulnerable, and soon to be looped adoringly around his neck.
And her beautiful light brown eyes, bright with undeniable passion,
and the faint trembling in her lower lip, which even now she wetted
with her tongue.
This view of her sensuality is turned on its head shortly after. They are
both inexperienced, and their fumbling first full encounter ends with
Edward prematurely ejaculating on her leg. Florence is shocked and
disgusted, and after manically drying herself off with a pillow, she runs
from the room. Edward is left alone and confused. “With his thoughts
no longer softened or blurred by longing, he was capable of registering
an insult with forensic objectivity.” And he then gives in to anger. For
a moment, when he reflects on her touch, “fresh sharp-edged arousal
began to distract him, enticing him from these hardening thoughts,
tempting him to start forgiving her. But he resisted.” He thinks: “She
is unsensual, utterly without desire. She could never feel what he felt.
Edward took the next steps with fatal ease: she had known all this—
how could she not?—and she had deceived him.”12
Edward’s thoughts are a powerful demonstration of how affect
colors our thoughts of others. Florence is sensual and sexually ex-
cited when he is longing to possess her. Once his desire dissipates,
he “understands” that he has been insulted. And as he gets angry, it is
clear to him that Florence deceived him. Her actions change with his
affect. Because McEwan chooses to give us access to both Edward’s
and Florence’s first-person perspectives, we know that Florence never
meant to deceive him; we understand that his quickness to judge her
is the culmination of a long history of unrequited passion; and we see
clearly how these characters are ensconced in their own view of things
enhanced by the strong feelings they experience.
A similar distortion of facts takes place in Herman Melville’s Moby
Dick. Captain Ahab sails the world seas seeking to kill the eponymous
whale that once took off his leg as he was trying to kill it. When his chief
mate accuses him of being “enraged with a dumb thing,” he responds:13
All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each
event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown
but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from
behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through
the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting
through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near
to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough.
He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an
inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what

I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal,
I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man;
I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.
In some sense, of course, Ahab understands that whales do not insult

whalers. They might, however, fight for their lives. None of this seems
to matter to him, however, moved as he is by hatred and anger.
Edward and Ahab both see the world in a way driven by their
emotions. Edward’s anger turns Florence into a deceiver, and Ahab’s
makes the white whale he failed to kill malicious. We see this clearly
because in both cases we have good reasons to doubt their interpret-
ations. There is little point in Florence building her marriage on deceit.
She does not marry Edward to be married, as it were. After their failed
wedding night, she goes on to have a satisfying musical career and
never remarries. As for Moby Dick, it is hard to see a whale that injures
a whaler in self-defense as malicious. Yet, both Edward and Ahab are
swayed by their emotions to see things differently. If someone were to
empathize with Edward’s or Ahab’s anger, they ought to be swayed by
the anger in similar ways.
Literary examples only go so far. I don’t expect you to be con-
vinced of my view on the basis of a couple of carefully chosen fictional
examples. But as luck would have it, we have psychological evidence
for the effect emotions have on thinking also. Exhibit A, as it were, is
a set of experiments conducted by Dacher Keltner, Phoebe Ellsworth,
and Kari Edwards on the effects of feeling angry or sad on thinking.
Anger and sadness have quite different appraisal patterns. Sadness is
more typically the result of some external, situational, and relatively
uncontrollable event occurring. The appraisal pattern related to sad-
ness, therefore, reflects a tendency to give more weight to situational
factors. By contrast, anger is generally caused by other people acting in
ways we find offensive or annoying or that interfere with our plans and
projects in some way. The appraisal in anger, then, privileges respon-
sible agency over situational factors. To test this hypothesis, Keltner,
Ellsworth and Edwards made the people participating in the exper-
iment feel sad or angry. They then asked them to list how probable
certain events were or explain ambiguous social events. Some events
were situationally caused, and others were caused by an agent. People

who were sad regarded situationally caused events more likely than
did angry subjects. The effect was most pronounced in more ambig-
uous cases. Imagine you run into a very attractive acquaintance in
your local coffee shop where you sometimes go to work (to make this
work, you have to imagine yourself as a young person). You get into
a conversation with her (substitute your favorite pronoun at will and
throughout). You have a really great conversation; it is lively and in-
teresting. Moreover, your partner seems really engaged and interested
in you. So, you invite her over for a party. Unwisely, it turns out, you
have shared your excitement about the romantic possibilities with this
person with your friends, because when your love interest turns up, she
has a partner in tow. Your friends start to tease, which makes it clear to
everybody what you had been hoping for. If you are like the subjects in
the experiment, then you are more likely to blame the mishap on other
people if you were angry when you imagined the scenario. If, on the
other hand, you were sad, you’ll tend to think of the situation as being
unfortunate and really nobody’s fault. Sad people also thought the situ-
ation was more hopeless than did angry people.14
The next experiment that favors the idea that emotions affect the
way we see the world was conducted by psychologists Keith Oatley
and Laurette Laroque. It is a diary study and really quite different from
your typical laboratory experiment. In these studies, people are asked
to keep a structured diary of everyday incidents of things gone wrong
in arrangements with other people, such as meeting at a certain time
and place. They found that the most common emotion experienced in
these circumstances is anger. Subjects also reported feeling a sense of
diminishment of the self, and tended to believe that the other person
was to blame. The diary entries demonstrate that many people as-
cribe rather undesirable qualities to others. For instance, Oatley and
Laroque’s subjects described others as “unthoughtful, untrustworthy,
unreliable, disrespectful, dishonest, irresponsible, inconsiderate, in-
sensitive, incompetent, indecisive, careless, selfish, self- involved,
stupid, lazy, superficial, scatterbrained, childish, an idiot, a hypocrite, a
bitch, and so forth.” The tendency to think this way correlated heavily
with whether or not the person was angered by the failed arrangement.
Forty-three out of 60 angry people ascribed negative characteristics to
the social partner compared to only 7 out of 47 who were not angry.
We cannot exclude that there was something about the cases that made
people particularly angry, nor can we exclude that the anger was based
on a prior appraisal of stupidity or self-involvement. Nonetheless, the
results are rather suggestive: Anger makes us think rather poorly of the
person who angers us.15
In a similar vein, Jon Maner and colleagues made their subjects feel
certain emotions in order to see what effects it would have on their as-
cription of emotional states to others. The guiding idea here was that
people would see others in terms consistent with their emotion-in-
duced motivational state. For instance, if someone felt afraid or defen-
sive, they would be more likely to experience others as being angry.
After all, someone being angry with us is a threat. What they found
partially supported that idea. If someone or something was already
associated with threat, and the person was made to feel afraid, then
they overascribed anger to that someone or something. Interestingly,
the experimenters also found that men, but not women, who are ei-
ther “romantically” or sexually aroused (due to watching a film clip
of a romantic date) overattribute sexual arousal to attractive female
faces. Other men had previously rated the faces as having a neutral ex-
pression. Thus, men who were not aroused did not think these faces
expressed sexual interest or arousal. And so, this study provides fur-
ther support for the idea that what we feel affects how we perceive
the world around us. Consequently, it affects how we think of other
people. When McEwan has Edward see Florence as sexually aroused
one minute and completely frigid and scheming the next as a result of
his emotions changing, he is correct about human psychology.16
Christopher Hsee, Elaine Hatfield, and Claude Chemtob also found
evidence that people’s emotions affect their view of things. They were
interested in how people would react to a person who reported one
emotion but expressed another. To explore this, they made up a story
about a company trying out computer software to dub foreign movies
into English. The people who had volunteered for the study—all psy-
chology students at the University of Hawaii—were asked to listen to
a tape of the translation and a separate clip of the person whose voice
was translated. They then rated the degree to which the person was
happy or sad and the degree to which they felt happy or sad. The audio
clips were translated by a person of the opposite sex and read in a
monotone computer tone so as not to betray any affect. The clips were
sometimes matched in terms of what the person said they felt and
the emotion they expressed on their faces. But sometimes they were
mismatched, so that a person who looked sad claimed to be happy,
and a person who looked happy claimed to be sad. In these cases, the
person said things like “although I did not look happy, I was actu-
ally extremely happy.” What the other person said they felt influenced
people’s beliefs more than did the emotion they expressed. Despite
this, they thought the other person’s emotion was less intense than
they claimed it was. When it came to their own emotions, subjects
were affected equally by the other person’s facial expression and what
they said they felt. That is, they did not experience as much happiness
when the person who looked sad said they were extremely happy as
they did when the person both looked happy and claimed to be happy.
This evidence is preliminary, but it does give us an indication that our
feelings really do influence how we think about things. In the exper-
iment, it seems that people’s evaluations of others’ happiness or sad-
ness were affected by what they felt in response to these other people’s
feelings.17
Emotions affect the way we see the world, then. They affect our goals
or motives. This is true even if we have not previously evaluated the sit-
uation in that emotion-congruent way. In fact, at least some of the time
our thoughts are the result of the feelings we have. As we shall see, what
we feel affects us and our outlook in many other ways as well. If, there-
fore, we are interested in understanding how another sees the world,
we do well to take that into consideration. And what better way to do
so than to feel what she feels? Although experience teaches us that cer-
tain types of affect are associated with certain types of action, our ex-
plicit knowledge of what affect goes with what outlook, motivation, or
ways of thinking is usually quite limited. This is why psychologists get
paid to unearth it. But if you empathize with someone, that informa-
tion comes for free. Empathy presents someone’s motives from the in-
side, because being in a consonant emotional state yourself, you feel
the pull of those motives. Philosopher Karsten Stueber has said that
empathy is needed for you to understand a reason as a reason. I don’t
know that we should go that far, but empathy certainly helps you see
from the inside—from an agent perspective, that is—why someone is
moved to do or think as they do.18
6.5 Where We Are and Where We’re Going
This is where we are. Perspective taking can be so powerful because

each of us has a natural and distinctive way of thinking about the
world and our own actions, which differs from the way we think of
other people and their actions. The first, I have called an agent per-
spective, and the second, an observer perspective. If we switch these
perspectives, we gain a powerful understanding of other people be-
cause in doing so we capture their relationships and interests. As we
shall see, we can also switch perspectives on ourselves, so that we see
ourselves from an observer perspective instead of from our usual agent
perspective. Victims and perpetrators can switch perspectives too.
But switching our perspective is no easy matter. Most of our
examples were ones in which we, or someone at any rate, had figured
out what the central relationship that needed to be replicated was. How
to do that work is another matter, and no easier. The concern will al-
ways be this. Other people have different upbringings, experiences,
and demands on them than I do. In those cases, if I simply imagine
myself in their situation, it is far from clear that I will capture those
important relationships, which are the ones I need to understand to
simulate the other person’s experience. We move to that issue in the
next chapter. But before we do, let’s remind ourselves why emotions
and empathy are important in this context.
Emotions are reactions to our environment, and they signal to us
the importance of what is happening to us. They also, very helpfully,
focus our attention on relevant facts and make us motivated to act in
ways that address the situation we are in. Now, although judgments are
typically involved in our emotions, it does not seem to be true that we
have to first make certain judgments about the world for our emotions
to follow. It seems like, at least some of the time, we see the world a
certain way as a result of feeling what we do. Edward doesn’t first think
that Florence is aroused and then become aroused himself. He thinks
she’s aroused because he is. What made him aroused in the first place
is, of course, a different matter, and presumably has something to do
with what he judged the situation to be like. But his specific thoughts
about Florence’s arousal appear to be the result of what he feels. We also
saw evidence that there is a correlation between what a person feels
and how they think about a situation or other people. What that means
for us is that when we empathize with another person’s emotions, we
are apt to experience the world in a similar way—as aggravating, won-
derful, or what have you. And along with that comes the way we at-
tend to certain things, what we feel motivated to do, and so on. Because
emotions are such expansive clusters of interests involving everything
from attention to motivation, they are some of the most powerful
tools for understanding others. Nonaffective ways of putting ourselves
in others’ shoes are great also, but they don’t give us as much as em-
pathy does.
7
Knowing You
When it first became known that the United States’ military was using
waterboarding on so-called enemy combatants, a heated discussion
followed about whether or not it was torture. Christopher Hitchens
and Erich Mancow were on the side of those who thought it wasn’t.
They were convinced it couldn’t be that bad and voluntarily underwent
waterboarding themselves to prove it. To their dismay, they both real-
ized that waterboarding is, in fact, that bad. Here is what Hitchens had
to say about his experience:
You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which
is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You
feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather,
being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and
at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure.
The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being
boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home
to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes
of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of
enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head down-
ward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water
going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my
navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my
breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might ex-
pect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight
against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and
annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether
I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than
with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the un-
believable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197637081.003.0008
stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little
time I lasted.
Afterward Hitchens wrote, “if waterboarding does not constitute tor-

ture, then there is no such thing as torture.”1
Later, Mancow subjected himself to the same procedure, but under
more cozy conditions. Instead of being handcuffed, hooded, and
hoisted onto a board in some unknown location, he was in his Chicago
WLS radio studio surrounded by colleagues. Even under those
circumstances, the experience was torturous.2
“It is way worse than I thought it could be, and that’s no joke,”
Mancow said, likening it to a time when he nearly drowned as a
child. “It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose
with your head back. . . . It was instantaneous . . . and I don’t want to
say this: absolutely torture.”
Neither Hitchens nor Mancow was able to imagine how bad water-
boarding was. Their actual experience did not match their imagined
experience. This should have surprised no one. After all, the ability
to imagine an experience must rely, in large part, on recalling similar
experiences in the past. But who has had experiences similar to water-
boarding? It is here that things become strange, because both Hitchens
and Mancow had had such experiences. They almost drowned as chil-
dren and found the experience traumatic. But waterboarding just is
controlled drowning of a person. Could Hitchens and Mancow have
missed this fact? Unlikely. Look up any definition of the term, and
you will find it described as simulating the experience of drowning. It
therefore seems that having had the relevant experience did not help
them imagine what waterboarding is like.
These examples highlight a charge that is commonly made against
perspective taking. It simply doesn’t work. Once we are faced with
people different from us or with different experiences, we are incapable
of imagining their experiences correctly, or even remotely correctly.
You might have heard people insist that they can’t imagine stealing if
they had nothing to eat, or not protesting loudly if sexually harassed.
And yet we have evidence that most people do the opposite. The issue
Knowing You 157
has become even more fraught with people from disenfranchised

groups insisting that people from other groups, particularly domi-
nant ones, cannot possibly understand what they are going through.
Hitchens’s and Mancow’s experiences seem to show that the situa-
tion is even worse. Even when we have similar experiences, we don’t
use them when we attempt to take other people’s point of view. Both
thought waterboarding was no big deal before they tried it themselves.
Afterward, they insisted it is torture. That is quite a reversal. They are
both spectacularly wrong about what it is like to be waterboarded. In
light of all this, is there hope of understanding much about a person’s
thoughts, feelings, and experiences using perspective taking?
In Chapter 6, we looked at how we change our perspective, and how
empathy is a way of doing so. Because perspectives have formal and
relatively invariant features, changing our perspective gives us unique
insight into another person’s experiences. But shifting our perspec-
tive is not enough, of course. We must adopt someone’s perspective
on something. And although a person’s particular perspective is related
to interests that are pretty universally human, people do differ in their
attachments and experiences. This chapter is about how we capture
those. First, I discuss various barriers to understanding others based
on our own experiences. There is no denying that perspective taking
won’t help if we are poorly positioned to do it properly. The way we
imagine things, the structure of autobiographical recall, and the nature
of visceral affect all contribute to a somewhat distorted picture of ac-
tual experiences. Adding to this, we are often biased toward thinking
of ourselves well and reluctant to experience negative affect, both of
which are barriers to good perspective taking. Second, I show that de-
spite these obstacles, perspective taking still plays a powerful role. The
mistake is to think we can use it willy-nilly to predict people’s particular
opinions, tastes, and so on. Although perspective taking can be helpful
in predicting how someone might react in a certain situation, it is par-
ticularly useful in providing understanding of why someone reacts as
they do, the significance of what is happening to them, what matters to
them, and their attitude towards people and the world. This need not
involve a detailed understanding of another person’s specific thoughts,
feelings, or intentions. Instead, it often simply provides information
about the other person’s general attitude and their valuations. This may
not seem impressive, but it is a fact that figuring out another’s attitude
toward us—are they hostile, belittling, friendly, or supportive—is one
of the most important tasks we have, and one that occupies a great deal
of our thinking about other people.
7.1 Learning from Experience
Hitchens’s and Mancow’s experiences show that there is not always a

simple or straightforward relationship between experiences in the past
and our imagining experiences similar to them. Often, we fail to make
the connection. This is clear in experiments that pitch perspective
taking against straightforward recall of previous experiences. Being in-
terested in the effects of apology on forgiveness, Seiji Takaku, Bernard
Weiner, and Ken-Ichi Ohbuchi decided to test whether it made a differ-
ence to have people shift their perspectives or recall a personal wrong-
doing. They wrote out a story about one student lending her study
notes to another student shortly before an exam, and the other student
taking hours to return them, despite promising to get them right back
to her. In the experiment, people were asked to read the story under
one of three different conditions. People in the first condition were
asked to imagine being the victim (the notes lender), and people in the
second were told to imagine how the perpetrator (the notes borrower)
felt as they confronted him. By contrast, the recall group was encour-
aged to remember a situation where they had done wrong to someone
else. Subsequently, all groups read an apology from the offending stu-
dent and were asked to rate how likely they were to forgive him. As we
would expect from the victim-perpetrator literature, imagining being
the victim does not increase someone’s tendency to forgive the other
person. In fact, victim imaginers were the least likely to forgive the
perpetrator and the ones who harbored the most negative emotions
toward him. The people most likely to forgive were the people who
recalled a previous wrongdoing of their own. This suggests that such
recall played no role in the perspective-taking conditions.3
We cannot conclude that people don’t use personal experience
when taking another’s perspective, however. Why? Because people
weren’t asked to take the perpetrator’s perspective, but merely asked
Knowing You 159
to consider his feelings. As we saw in Chapter 1, an imagine-other

instruction merely encourages you to think about the other person’s
thoughts and feelings, but not necessarily from a first-person point
of view. This opens up the possibility that the person in the experi-
ment isn’t imagining being the perpetrator at all. This interpretation
is further supported by evidence I will present later that perspective
taking makes you more likely to forgive a person who transgresses
against you.
There are, however, problems with relying on autobiographical
memory. It turns out that people often underestimate the impact of
emotional distress in the past. Moreover, when they have endured
a difficult situation in the past, they sympathize less with people
undergoing a similar experience, particularly if they have difficul-
ties dealing with it, as Rachel Ruttan, Mary-Hunter McDowell, and
Loran Nordgren have demonstrated. Before them, Dan Batson found
similar results, but only for men, not women. If, in order to take
people’s perspective we must rely on having had similar experiences
in the past, this is bad news. And this is certainly what it typically
argued by empathy enthusiasts. For instance, in his Empathy: Why It
Matters, and How to Get It, Roman Krznaric insists that having direct
experiences with a variety of different situations is key to being more
empathic.4
To understand the limitations of perspective taking we must, there-
fore, understand the limitations of episodic memory. We face two
obstacles when we rely on memory of previous experiences to figure
out how we would feel in a certain situation. The first is that recalling
a visceral experience does not actually activate our viscera. Even if it
is quite unpleasant, you don’t feel pain when recalling a painful expe-
rience. The second is that memory is structured in such a way that it
creates unrealistically focused recall of previous experiences.
Let’s begin with visceral experiences. By contrast to emotional
experiences, which can be remembered vividly and tend to trigger
similar emotions later, we do not recall visceral experiences, such as
pain, hunger, or thirst, as they were experienced at the time. According
to George Loewenstein, we have no visceral reactions to recalling, and
therefore also no such reactions to imagining, being hungry, thirsty, or
in pain:5
With certain important exceptions, it appears that people can

remember visceral sensations at a cognitive level, but cannot
reproduce them, even at diminished levels of intensity. It seems
that the human brain is not well equipped for storing informa-
tion about pain, emotions, or other types of visceral influences,
in the same way that visual, verbal, and semantic information is
stored.
Imagine being really tired. Help yourself to as many memories as you

like. For me it does relatively little. That is, I know what it is to be tired,
but what I’m working with is a relatively abstract conception of tired-
ness, nothing at all like the rich phenomenological experience of being
tired. These difficulties imagining such experiences get worse the more
visceral they are. As Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert say, “Mental
simulations are mere cardboard cut-outs of reality.” You will notice
Loewenstein includes emotions as being the types of experiences we
have difficulties recalling vividly. As we have seen, memory research
suggests otherwise. There may be particularly visceral emotions that
are difficult to recall, but it seems a mistake to assume that all emotions
are as difficult to recall as are pain or hunger.6
Another problem with visceral desire and affect is that they are
difficult to set aside when we imagine what we might do in a situa-
tion. If I am hungry when I imagine what I might eat later, I imagine
eating more unhealthy stuff than if I am not hungry when I imagine it.
If, however, I decide, when not hungry, not to eat that bag of chips in
my cupboard later, I am quite likely to eat it anyway once I’m hungry.
Loewenstein studied this type of behavior and found essentially what
I have reported. Imagining being hungry alone does not make us
choose what we would in fact choose were we in the actual situation.
This is why one should never store cookies, cakes, or chips for some
later social occasion. Thirst is similar. If you imagine having hiked
for a day with little water or food, you predict that you would rather
drink than eat if you are thirsty when you imagine this scenario. If you
imagine it when you are hungry, you predict you would rather eat. It
seems we are bad at “quarantining” our current visceral affect when we
imagine ourselves in a different situation. Our hunger or thirst seeps
through our simulation, as it were.7
Knowing You 161
It is reasonable to suppose that desires that have a strong visceral

component, such as sexual desire, are also quite difficult to simulate.
But visceral experiences are not the only things people have problems
remembering. Episodic memory itself—that is, the personal memo-
ries we have of our experiences—is fallible, in part as a result of how
it is structured. We do not store personal memories so that we are able
to retrieve them wholesale later. Episodic memories fade fast, some-
times in a matter of hours. As if this wasn’t bad enough, it turns out that
new memories sometimes affect old ones. That’s right: What happens
to us later in life affects the way we recall what happened to us earlier!
Moreover, what we remember depends in part on how, when, and why
we are recalling the experience. If we feel depressed, we will remember
the most depressing aspects of past events. To add to that, we recall our
past ideas, values, and attitudes as being more in line with our current
ones than we reported them being in the past. Sometimes we can only
recall our experiences when we are in similar situations. These types of
memories are typically called “implicit memories.”8
Memory researcher Daniel Schacter thinks that the most personally
important aspects of a memory are usually accurate. That’s the good
news. The bad news is that we only store bits of information about the
original experience and fill in the rest on the spot on the basis of other
available information, such as semantic memory. Semantic memories
concern conceptual and factual information, such as Rome being the
capital of Italy. It is really just another term for general and conceptual
knowledge. This means that even our most intimate recollections are
cobbled together from shards of the original experience and abstract
and quite general information. This process is then infused with our
current values and evaluations. If what is stored of the original experi-
ence are its central parts (the ones most significant to the person at the
time), it is a rather brilliant way to create memories. After all, storing
information about all the original features of our experience would
overload our minds and allow us to use them for little else. By contrast,
storing links to general information, which can fill the gaps in what is
recollected, is extraordinarily efficient. However, a side effect of this ef-
ficiency is that it is a design feature of memory that we recollect objects
and people as being much more stereotypical than they were perceived
to be at the time. No matter how vivid, and therefore persuasive, our
recall of previous events may be, it can still be fairly inaccurate. Recall
the story in Chapter 1 about my friend who had fallen down the stairs
as a child, but remembered it as taking place in the house that his
family moved to after the fall? Despite his knowing this, he still viv-
idly remembers falling down those stairs. We should still keep in mind,
however, that the fall and its impact is most likely recalled correctly.
It is the location that is wrong. This is comforting since when we rely
on memories in perspective taking it is usually the significance of the
event, emotional and otherwise, we are trying to access.
Our reliance on semantic memories leads to what psychologists
call “focalizing” or “the focusing illusion.” When we focalize,
we focus almost exclusively on the central feature of a situation.
Suppose, for instance, that you recall going to the dentist. You
home in on something like the following scenario. You are lying
prostrate on an old reclining chair in a white, clinical room with
bright lights, completely defenseless with your mouth open and
a person rummaging around in it with sharp implements, while
you are trying to breathe. As you lie there, you worry about bad
news from the frontlines. Do you have a new cavity? Do you need
a root canal or, God forbid, an implant? Going to the dentist, how-
ever, involves many other things, such as getting there, whether
by foot, bicycle, car, or public transit; encounters along the way;
a wait in the waiting room; a chat with the receptionist; and so
on. Focalizing can make things seem better or worse depending
on what is in focus. In the dentist case, it typically seems worse
than it is.9
When our thinking is focalized, then, we represent a certain situa-
tion in a de-contextualized fashion. But the context in which an event
takes place makes a difference to someone’s response to it. Imagine
eating a plate of spaghetti with meat sauce (if you are a vegetarian, im-
agine a plate of risotto). It’s good, right? If you are like the students
Wilson and colleagues asked, your imagining how delightful that plate
of food is won’t be affected by whether you imagine eating it in the
morning or in the evening. However, when the students actually did
eat the plate of spaghetti, they enjoyed doing so more in the evening
than in the morning. Why? Because they focalize, Wilson writes. They
think merely of eating the spaghetti, not the context in which they are
Knowing You 163
eating it. 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.10
Our tendency to focalize tells us something important about the im-
agination. We do not typically imagine expansive scenarios. Imagined
situations tend to be denuded, populated only by the main actors and
events. It resembles a modern play with minimal stage setting more
than a lavishly set ballet or opera. We probably imagine things as they
never are: isolated from their usual setting. This may not be too dif-
ferent from how we imagine seeing or hearing things. When I imagine
hearing someone sing, I imagine hearing it, but in a void of silence.
In real life, I almost invariably hear other sounds too, even if I do not
focus on them. The difference between not focusing on something and
not representing it at all is crucial. In real life, what we do not focus
on sometimes influences our thoughts and actions in ways we do not
foresee. We can also direct our attention to it almost effortlessly. What
we do not imagine can have no such effect.
Focalizing is the price we pay for having effective episodic memo-
ries. It is no doubt a price worth paying. But the fact that we focalize
must be taken into consideration when we simulate being in someone
else’s situation. The personal experiences we hope will teach us impor-
tant lessons about life, and help us understand others, involve fairly
abstract and stylized representations that may also be affected by
our current evaluations and sense-making. But things are not as bad
as they seem. Gilbert’s results mainly find that focalizing prevents us
from getting the degree and duration of affect right. If your favorite
sports team wins an important tournament, you will not be as happy
for as long as you predict. You will, however, still be happy. Similarly,
even if you are wrong about the particular stairs on which you fell, the
experience of falling is likely still correct. Put differently, imagination
and memory faulty, but they are not that faulty.
Let us return to the Mancow and Hitchens case because we are now
in a better position to answer the question why they didn’t think wa-
terboarding was that bad despite their childhood near- drowning
experiences. A first pass at an explanation is that since the experience
is visceral, it is difficult to re-create in the imagination, if possible at all.
As such, it could have left them ignoring just how awful drowning was.
This probably isn’t the right explanation, though. Notice that Hitchens
stresses that he was being “watered,” not “boarded.” This suggests
he didn’t connect waterboarding with his drowning experiences.
Moreover, even though visceral experiences cannot be retrieved vis-
cerally, they are certainly recalled as deeply unpleasant, something that
should have given both pause when it came to volunteering to try it
out. It is, of course, a possibility that having survived drowning, they
may be like the subjects we met before, who thought less of people
having difficulties overcoming what they had overcome. But this is
doubtful. There is no reason to suppose they took the perspective of
a suspected terrorist, and every reason to suspect they didn’t. People
tend not to take the perspective of those they dislike and certainly
not the one of the villain in the piece. Part of the reason is lack of re-
ward. Several studies have found that when people are rewarded for
accurately understanding others or for emotionally empathizing with
them, they do better than when there is no reward. This suggests that
there is a tight relationship between empathic success and reward. If
people are better at taking others’ perspective when they are rewarded
for getting it right, they are probably worse at doing so if it is likely to
make them feel bad. In the case of waterboarding, both Hitchens and
Mancow had a vested interest in waterboarding not being “that bad,”
because they supported the practice as an interrogation technique. It
is, however, hard to defend torture—better to insist that the interroga-
tion technique isn’t “that bad.”11
This leaves us with the option that Hitchens and Mancow
most likely didn’t connect waterboarding with their own pre-
vious experiences of drowning at all. They failed to connect these
experiences with anything they imagined a suspected terrorist going
through. Looking at evidence from psychology, this is not at all an
uncommon mistake. Just think of how oblivious people were to the
fact that they, too, had let other people down, when they recalled
been let down themselves, as we saw in Chapter 4.
What are the implications for perspective taking of such failures
of memory? Well, we can’t assume that people will automatically re-
call a similar experience when they try to take someone’s perspec-
tive in a certain situation. And even if they do, they will not be able
to conjure up the visceral impact of the experience. Moreover, they
Knowing You 165
are likely to focalize when they imagine what an experience might be

like. These are shortcomings of perspective taking that we must take
into consideration. They are not a deathblow to the utility of this prac-
tice, however. Why? Even though we cannot capture the viscerality
of an experience, we can still recall its pleasantness or unpleasant-
ness. Although memory is inaccurate, the core of what is recalled is
more likely to be correct than the context. Moreover, psychologists
have found that the errors due to focalizing disappear if you explicitly
draw a person’s attention to other features of the situation. This means
we could do so ourselves, if we put the effort into figuring out what
to focus on. None of this is helpful, of course, if we do not connect
with relevant memories at all. We are not doomed not to do so. We
just need to put more effort into it. This highlights a feature of per-
spective taking that is really important. Perspective taking is a skill.
It is something that can be done better or worse. We can train our-
selves to do better. This is where psychological research is so helpful
because it teaches us what are the common pitfalls. Unfortunately, the
psychological literature is often read in a more deterministic sense as
if the capacities measured were unalterable. It seems worth noting
that my friend Julie spent years in a Buddhist monastery, meditating,
and reflecting. She is a person who has trained herself to think more
carefully about herself and others.12
7.2 What Imagining Being Someone Else Does
Given the widespread criticism of the potential of perspective taking, it

might surprise you to find how much evidence there is of its usefulness
in what we might call human affairs, such as relationships, coopera-
tion, morality, and justice. And these are factors beyond what is called
empathic accuracy, namely getting what others think, feel, or want
right. Here’s a partial list:
Perspective taking increases (or enables)

(1) empathic accuracy;
(2) liking of the target and the target’s liking of the perspective
taker (if she knows the other is taking her perspective);
(3) the perspective taker’s helping of others generally and of

out-group members specifically, and the target’s helping
the perspective taker (if she knows the other is taking her
perspective);
(4) identification with, or felt similarity to, the target and the
perspective taker (if the target knows the other is taking her
perspective);
(5) performance in competitive games and in negotiating more
generally;
(6) desire for justice;
(7) tendency to make prosocial moral judgments;
(8) moral reasoning;
(9) romantic partners’ willingness to accommodate the other;
(10) relationship satisfaction;
(11) forgiveness; and
(12) empathy in people with narcissistic personality disorder.
Perspective taking reduces

(13) stereotyping;
(14) bias and prejudice;
(15) anger and interpersonal aggression; and
(16) the spotlight effect (tendency to think others notice things
about oneself more than they do).
And:
(17) people who have impaired ability to take another’s perspective
or to empathize with them experience a range of interpersonal
problems, e.g., people with psychopathy or autism.13
This is an impressive list. It makes clear that perspective taking is in-

timately connected with being prosocial: liking and helping others,
being concerned with justice and morality, and being accommo-
dating to others or forgiving of them. These are all things we could
do with more of, particularly in these troubling times. And so, it does
seem rather absurd that people should be so insistent that perspective
taking—and empathy—does no good.
Knowing You 167
But much of the opposition to perspective taking is more subtle.

Perspective taking may do some good, we are told, but on balance it
is worse than using other methods. What other methods? We should
simply ask people how they feel, what they think, what they want, etc.,
and then trust them when they respond. This is empathy foe Nicholas
Epley’s approach. His pet peeve is Christmas presents. It is no good,
his studies show, to imagine what someone would like by imagining
that we are them. We just get it wrong. Instead, we should just ask
people what they want. The main problem for Epley is lack of accu-
racy. In Chapter 3, when discussing the work of Sillars, we saw ev-
idence that people are not very accurate in their beliefs about what
others think or feel. But Sillars, at least, thought this was because
people don’t take each other’s perspective. Together with Tal Eyal and
Mary Steffel, Epley examined 25 studies to see whether perspective
taking aids empathic accuracy and found no support for it. That’s
right. Being instructed to take another person’s perspective makes no
difference to accuracy in divining a person’s mental states. If anything,
Epley argues, perspective taking makes people less accurate. If he is
right, we have a problem. But is he?14
Flatfooted though it may seem, asking others what’s on their
minds is doubtless the gold standard for understanding them,
at least if you think you can trust what they say. It is hard to deny
that if we spent more time verifying our assumptions about others
this way, we would get closer to getting things right. Nonetheless,
Epleys’s proposal is problematic as it stands. First of all, there are
very good reasons we don’t always ask people what they think, want,
etc. If we took the idea to its extreme, it would be impossibly time
consuming (Did you mean to swing your arm in that way? If so,
why did you do so? Etc.). Alternatively, we might not want others to
know that we are speculating about their motives, or we might want
to surprise them with a present, something it’s difficult to do if you
first ask them what they want. Looked at from the other side, there
are many reasons why people wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell us the truth
(are you planning to attack me when I turn my back? Etc.). So why
should we not avail ourselves of some perspective taking in these
types of situations?15
Second, the results that Epley point to may not show that much
about perspective taking in the end. More than half the studies he
considers were classical theory of mind tests that we wouldn’t expect
to show much about perspective taking. As I have been at pains to point
out earlier, taking another person’s perspective is not the only way to
understand others. It is a first-person way of doing so distinct from
other methods. This means that it may be useful for a certain kind of
understanding, but not any kind. For recognition of emotions on faces
shown in photographs or videos, we shouldn’t expect change of per-
spective to do much at all With no contextual information—either
about the person or the situation they are in—the perspective takers
won’t have anything useful to go on. It is no coincidence, therefore, that
perspective takers reported the task to be more difficult and their con-
fidence being right lower than did people who were only asked to iden-
tify the emotion expression.
The other group of studies Epley considered were more promising.
Here, he asked partners to take each other’s perspectives and had them
predict preferences. This seems more in line with what someone like
Sillars has been advocating. But here, too, people were no more ac-
curate than people who were merely asked to predict their partner’s
preferences. They were, however, more confident about being right
(but so were the controls). This may seem to present quite a challenge
to perspective taking, but there are reasons to be cautious about such
studies. One might, for instance, be skeptical about perspective taking
being useful in our predicting what our partner might want to eat in
a Chinese restaurant or what movie he wants to watch. That’s usually
why people ask!16
Epley is right in pointing out that there are a number of limitations
to perspective taking. It may not always be helpful in predicting spe-
cific opinions, tastes, or predilections although, as we saw in our Buffy
example, it can help us predict how someone will react in a certain sit-
uation. But the real strength of perspective taking may be that it helps
us understand why someone reacts as they do. In our original story in
Chapter 1, Hermia wants Egeus to understand how vehemently she
opposes her proposed marriage to Demetrius, and how invested she
is in marrying Lysander. Egeus doesn’t have to predict whether she
Knowing You 169
wants to marry Demetrius or whether she is in love with Lysander.

She has already told him how she feels and what she wants. Instead,
she needs him to understand her interests, concerns, attachments, and
beliefs, and not simply in terms of their implication for him. Egeus
fails to understand Hermia not because he does not possess accurate
information about how she feels about Lysander, Demetrius, and the
proposed marriage. He has all the information he needs. He doesn’t
understand the relevance or importance of the situation to Hermia.
He doesn’t understand it mattering to her the way that it does. Why?
Because he doesn’t put himself in that situation. This suggests that un-
derstanding cannot be reduced to being able to make some accurate
statements about what another person thinks or feels. Egeus fails to
get that Hermia’s resistance and Lysander’s persistence are not about
them dishonoring him. He doesn’t understand the larger context or
the implications of Hermia’s thoughts and feelings for his relationships
with her. And some of those facts may be understood without his
knowing her precise thoughts or feelings.
Let me give you an example. A couple of months ago, I was about to
go to Cleveland to visit friends, when one of them asked me to quaran-
tine even more than I already did. The only person I saw at the time was
my therapist. But I was asked not to see her in person before visiting.
Initially, it irritated me. I had recovered from Covid-19 just a couple
of months before and so was unlikely to contract it again so soon after.
And my therapist was the only person I saw. I even had my groceries
delivered. As I was ruminating, I thought: How would I feel if I were
in my friend’s position? I imagined knowing someone (me) who had
been seriously ill for five weeks. I thought about how badly I wanted
not to get infected, and then imagined a guest who was indoors with a
therapist an hour a week. Hmmm. I got it. My irritation dissipated and
I rearranged my appointment with my therapist to see her online. Now,
did I think my thoughts, feelings, and desires were just like those of my
friend? Not really. In fact, my reasoning happened so fast that apart
from a vague feeling of discomfort and my conclusion that I wouldn’t
like it either, I was unaware of any particular beliefs running through
my head. I simply felt that I got it. What did I get, more precisely? I got
a sense of what mattered to my friend. And this is hard to express in
words because if I say she wanted to keep safe, I already knew that be-
fore taking her perspective. But I understood it now from the position
of someone (myself) wanting to keep safe. Part of that involved the rec-
ognition that I, too, might ask a friend to stay fairly isolated for a while
before a visit. Doing so, it was now clear to me, had no implications for
our friendship, or my eagerness to see her. I did not quite see this be-
fore taking her perspective.
Often what we are trying to understand about others is not what
are their exact thoughts or feelings as from the outside. Instead, we are
interested in why they think or feel that way, what implications it has
for them. Another thing that evidently is very important also is un-
derstanding their attitude, whether towards the situation, towards us
specifically, or towards other people. To see this, consider another ex-
ample from my exciting life speculating about other people’s motiv-
ations. While I was writing this book and using the example of Julie
taking my perspective to understand why I got so upset about the way
she drove my car, I had a small epiphany. I used to go out with a man
who was quite possessive about his car. I was rarely allowed to drive it,
and when I was, I was under close scrutiny. Needless to say, that makes
you drive worse than you would have were you left alone. I resented
him for it. I thought his attitude expressed poor confidence in me and
a lack of respect. As I reflected on how I acted toward Julie, I suddenly
realized that perhaps he had felt the same as I had when she drove my
car. I had read too much into it. I had a feeling that I “got” it finally
and felt quite forgiving as a result. Our respective reactions to others’
driving our cars were not reasonable if by that we mean “rational.” But
they were certainly understandable.
My understanding my ex’s backseat-driverism wasn’t an under-
standing of why he felt that way. I didn’t understand why I got so
exercised when Julie drove my car either. Instead, what became clear
to me is that you can come to feel inordinately insistent that your car
be driven as you drive it, and that any underlying respect for the person
doing the driving need not be implicated at all. I understand it be-
cause I experienced it myself. This is part of the magic of perspective
taking. I may not be able to put into words exactly what I understand.
Sometimes all I can say is that “that’s what it was like,” where “that”
refers to some experience of mine. Of course, I don’t know for sure
Knowing You 171
whether what my ex felt was what I felt when Julie failed to downshift
taking the corners. And in a way it doesn’t matter. What is important is
that I realized that the hostility or lack of respect I assumed was behind
the haranguing was probably not there at all. Here, perspective taking
opens up a new space of possibilities. I see that there is at least one al-
ternative explanation of my ex’s behavior. In fact, there are probably
many. However, let’s suppose I got things almost right. We can then see
that there is a functional equivalence between my simulation and his
attitudes at the time, meaning that similar things made both him and
me react in similar ways without implying anything sinister about our
relationship to the offending driver.
In my story, I am concerned about what my ex’s complaining im-
plied about his attitude toward me, the state of our relationship, and my
own sense of efficacy. As long as I get these things right, the particulars
are largely irrelevant. I am not saying that it is irrelevant to me pre-
cisely what others think. But what I am saying is that that is often not
our main concern. We worry about the quality of their intentions: Are
they good or bad, friendly or hostile? To see this better, let us return to
Sillars’s relationship research, discussed in Chapter 3. Sillars points out
that, although the most obvious way of achieving an understanding
of your partner, parent, or child is to communicate your thoughts
directly,17
available evidence suggests that direct talk does not guarantee un-
derstanding. A few studies have considered the connection between
directness and understanding within the empathic accuracy par-
adigm. Simpson et al. (2003) reported nonsignificant correlations
between empathic accuracy and conflict avoidance in marital
problem-solving discussions. Further, there was no relationship be-
tween empathic accuracy and perceivers’ ratings of how clearly part-
ners conveyed their thoughts and feelings.
This explains a lot, right? And it does more than that. It suggests that
Epley’s insistence that we simply ask others what they want, or think,
is not as great a solution as he makes it seem. Because a person must
inevitably interpret what the other person says. And that interpretation
takes place against his or her own interests, goals, and concerns. This
is why it is so important to take the other person’s perspective, so that

we can actually hear what they say! Or, at the very least, we get to hear
something other than ourselves.
Part of the problem is that communication is much more difficult
and taxing than we give it credit for. Boaz Keysar and his colleagues
begin their article on perspective taking and communication with
these words: “Language is inherently ambiguous—every linguistic
expression can convey more than one intention.” Decoding diffi-
culties are particularly evident when we communicate directly with
another person because in addition to processing the sentence and
extracting its overall meaning, we also need to plan our response.
Listening exercises meant to enhance interpersonal understanding
typically involve the listener being asked not to think of what they
are going to say, because in doing so, they miss much pertinent infor-
mation. Talking to another may be relatively straightforward; but as
many of us have learned, it is much harder to be heard. The same goes
for hearing, of course. Really understanding what another person
is telling you takes work, and it appears to be something we often
don’t do.18
When people talk among themselves, the meaning of what is said
with respect to the relationship plays an important role. In some of
Sillars’s studies a full third of the participants’ reports concerned re-
lational meanings. In other words, a third of the thoughts and feelings
that conversation partners had were about the bearing of what the
other said on their relationship, the quality of his attitudes toward
them, and other overarching concerns. As Sillars reports, people think
of communication19
as an act of avoidance (e.g., “She just wanted to blow the whole

thing off and not argue about it anymore.”), confrontation (“She
wants to verbally attack me instead of talking to me like a human
being.”), or constructive engagement (“He’s being very coopera-
tive.”). . . . Moreover, these spontaneous attributions for communi-
cation showed distinct biases. For example, both wives and husbands
attributed confrontation to the partner more often than to self,
whereas they attributed constructive engagement more to self than
the partner.
Knowing You 173
Notice that the interactions Sillars observes are unlikely to involve

perspective taking because of their relative rapidity. Instead, the
evaluations reflect the person’s own perspective on the situation. What
is clear, then, is that we are quite concerned about the quality of our
relationships to others. This is true even in nonintimate relationships.
In these relationships, people are highly sensitive to perceived insults
or slights. It is true that Sillars works with couples in trouble and that
these couples are therefore likely to be quite occupied by thoughts
about the relationship. A good deal of the time, perspective taking has
less to do with figuring out the other’s precise thoughts and feelings
than with relational meanings. This might also explain why people
working on empathic accuracy have found that people feel under-
stood when their partner takes their perspective. This is true even if the
partner is inaccurate.20
Thinking back to the line of research concerning the two central
dimensions of social evaluation, namely warmth and competence,
which we discussed in Chapter 3, we find further support of the idea
that what matters to us about others is often more diffuse than their
particular mental states. What is most important is another person’s
warmth. That is, we are greatly concerned with perceived intent,
friendliness, helpfulness, sincerity, trustworthiness, morality, fair-
ness, generosity, honesty, and tolerance. These are all characteristics
of a person or their actions that are highly diagnostic of what we can
hope for from any relationship, cooperation, or other joint venture
with them. They are also predictive of how that person relates to other
people and the world around them. Are they trustworthy, for instance.
We are often, in other words, preoccupied with how others relate to
us, not in terms of their specific thoughts or feelings, but in terms of
their more general attitude. Is the other person a friend or foe, is he a
decent person, can he be trusted, and so on? This dovetails nicely with
Sillars’s observations that his couples spend a good one-third of the
time reflecting on the overall meaning of their interactions. We should
therefore expect perspective taking to be especially useful in the area of
relational meanings. The meanings that are ascribed to what another
person says are usually a reflection of the listener’s interests, concerns,
and social situatedness. Disengaging from those makes way for consid-
ering other interpretations. It might make room for considering how
the other person thought of their action, which, we have seen, is going
to be conceived of more in terms of their own agency, skill, intent, and
so on. Perhaps we fix on some of those interpretations, but we don’t
need to. Perspective taking may be a stepping stone to knowing what
to ask to improve one’s understanding of the other person. Perspective
taking without communication can be a bit of a wild goose chase, but
communication without perspective taking may not be much better.
In fact, in conflict situations, communication is often quite ineffective.
For instance, Judith Feeney and Andrew Hill examined diary entries of
relationship partners and found that ambiguous communication con-
tributed to diverging ways of thinking about hurtful events. For good
understanding, then, both perspective taking and communication may
be needed.21
Summing up, perspective taking can perform a variety of functions,
depending on our needs and, of course, our ability to do it well. It can
give you a more precise idea about somebody’s particular and unique
thoughts and feelings. As we have seen, it can be difficult to get this quite
right given the structure of memory, and we may have to work more on
it than we might naturally do to get it right (make sure we connect with
the right memories, adjust for visceral sensations, etc.). The focus on
this type of accuracy, however, ignores a number of other functions of
perspective taking that are at least as important, if not more so. When
we do so, we capture a space of options for interpretations that is wider
than our own pre-reflective one. It helps us to consider other interpret-
ations of someone’s reaction. It is also helpful in capturing the quality
of the intention or experience of the other. Sometimes we do so by
creating a functional equivalence between us and the other person by
seeing how we would think, feel, or act as that person. Sometimes it
does it by our experiencing emotions very similar to the ones the other
person is feeling. Most importantly, perhaps, is perspective taking’s
ability to capture what matters, what is significant about the situation
to the other person from inside someone whom it affects directly like it
affects the other. Perspective taking captures value.
Let me just give one more example of understanding in the absence
of knowing the precise details of what we understand. Consider a good
map. If you have visited London, you might recall the iconic map of
the tube, which is posted in all carriages. It represents the relationship
Knowing You 175
between the various lines. In the middle, you have the distinctive bottle
shaped Circle Line. It may shock you to learn that none of the lines
are geographically accurately represented on that map. For instance,
the Circle Line is neither circular nor bottle shaped. Moreover, the
distances between the stops on the map are not an accurate representa-
tion of the physical distances between the actual stops. But if you make
a subway map that is more accurate, it becomes a mess. So, the map is
simplified and falsified with the objective of making it more usable.
We might insist that someone who thinks of the London Underground
in terms of the map does not have accurate knowledge of the precise
details of the Circle Line. But it would be weird to say they don’t un-
derstand how it works. And they may, in fact, be better at using the
tube system than is a person with knowledge of the minutiae. Similarly,
we can understand others enough to know their general intentions
and attitudes toward us or others without understanding their precise
thoughts or feelings.22
7.3 Summing Up
Taking another’s perspective is not a trivial activity, and there are

reasons to think many people don’t do it well. To be successful, we
must be inventive in recentering our egocentric map of relationships
and interests on the other person. If we rely on personal experiences
to do so, we must be aware of various pitfalls. When we forecast our
own reactions, we tend to focalize. On the upside, focalizing mainly
affects the degree and longevity of affective reactions. We also have
problems recreating visceral experiences to situations, we tend to re-
member things as more stereotypical than they were, we sometimes
sympathize less with people who are undergoing hardships we have
overcome, and our bias toward people or their actions can prevent suc-
cessful perspective taking. Knowing when we can expect good results
from taking another person’s point of view is important. But, as I have
also argued, things are not as bad as many people seem to think, and
we can often calibrate our simulation using our knowledge of its lim-
itations. We can learn to do better. We can hold back when it comes
to visceral reactions, we can populate our imagined scenarios with
more contextual factors to avoid focalism, and we can imagine that the
person we are trying to empathize with is someone we really care for.
We should be careful to use perspective taking when we already favor a
certain outcome or when we feel hostility toward the target.
But what about the typical cases people are worried about, such as
more privileged members of society trying to understand what those
less privileged are going through? The worry is that the vastly dif-
ferent experiences of each person will create a gap between them that
is very difficult to bridge. One must exercise good judgment and un-
derstand what types of reactions one is in a good position to under-
stand and which ones are beyond one’s ken. However, since the way
we relate to our world is, to a large extent, the result of our humanity,
our embodiedness, etc., there are many similarities between how we
react to similar situations. This is what the literature on the so-called
fundamental attribution error showed. The best way to predict what
someone will do, Lee Ross claimed, is not to think about what kind
of person they are, but to consider what kind of situation they are in.
Situations are often powerful enough to cause similar reactions in
people of very different personalities, backgrounds, and experiences.
That, in part, is why we are able to do psychological research. And it
is why the US military had no problem figuring out how to torture
people from the Middle East.23
Perspective taking, however, is not merely a matter of taking an
agent point of view on someone else; it is also sometimes taking an ob-
server perspective on ourselves. This is what we turn to next.
8
Knowing Me
In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre asks you to imagine trying

to make out what is going on inside a room from the other side of a
locked door. You have just pressed your ear to the door and are now
peering through the keyhole. Perhaps you are jealous of a lover; per-
haps you are simply overwhelmed with curiosity. Whatever the case
might be, you are utterly absorbed in what you are doing. You strain
your neck so as to make out the mumbled sounds from within and
position yourself so as to catch a glimpse of the people inside. Your
mind is racing, going over the various possibilities. Suddenly, you hear
a noise down the hall. Someone is coming! You freeze. You realize that
you are spying, that you are a voyeur, and you are ashamed.1
The episode illustrates the radical importance, in Sartre’s phi-
losophy, of The Look of another person (called “The Other”) to your
conception of what you do and who you are. You move from being
one with your action to seeing it as this particular action, and you as
the person performing it. You are spying on another; indeed, you are
the kind of person who spies on others in dark hallways, or wherever
you imagine yourself to be. The Look communicates this to you, but
not directly. You might be mistaken about the presence of another in
that hallway. Perhaps no one is there; perhaps it is a mouse. It is the
possibility, not the actuality, of the presence of another that is at issue.
Moreover, as you become aware of this possibility, you automatically
adopt that person’s point of view on yourself. You judge yourself as you
imagine he or she would.
Sartre captures the change in consciousness that occurs when you
switch from an agent point of view, where you are utterly immersed in
what you are doing, to an observer point of view of yourself. This is the
situation before “the intruder” arrives:
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197637081.003.0009
There is no self to inhabit my consciousness, nothing therefore to

which I can refer my acts in order to qualify them. They are in no way
known: I am my acts and hence they carry in themselves their whole
justification. . . . The door, the keyhole are at once both instruments
and obstacles; they are presented as “to be handled with care”; the
keyhole is given as “to be looked through close by and a little to
one side,” etc. Hence from this moment “I do what I have to do.” No
transcending view comes to confer upon my acts the character of a
given on which a judgment can be brought to bear.2
As you are there at the door spying on the lover who spurned you, say,
you do not think to yourself, “I am spying on Albert” (substitute as you
like). Why not? Because you are too busy spying to notice what you are
doing. You are neither aware of yourself as a person nor aware of your
act as spying or peeping. You are, as they say, in the moment. In other
words, you are unaware of perceiving, thinking, or feeling as such. The
unreflective first-person point of view is consciousness not of our-
selves, but of the world. For many of us, this is what our life is typically
like: immersed in-the-moment living. Because it is so unreflective, and
because it represents the ordinary, we rarely think of what it is like. This
is what Sartre is trying to bring out.
The other aspect of the first-person perspective is the way the world
becomes an extension of you. The keyhole is present only “to be looked
through close by and a little to one side.” That is, the keyhole is seen in
terms of what it affords you: a peek at Albert or, even better, the other
person in the room. The objects around you are viewed as potential
instruments to carry out your goal. You do not see them in their own
right; they are, if you like, objects for you. All this changes when you
suspect you are seen. Now you become aware of yourself and what you
are doing:
I see myself because somebody sees me—as it is usually expressed. . . .

Only the reflective consciousness has the self directly for an object.
The unreflective consciousness does not apprehend the person di-
rectly or as its object; the person is presented to consciousness in so
far as the person is an object for the Other. . . . Now, shame . . . is shame
of self; it is the recognition of the fact that I am indeed that object
Knowing Me 179
which the Other is looking at and judging. I can be ashamed only as

my freedom escapes me in order to become a given object.3
Self-awareness, then, implies the possibility of another person. Our

awareness of ourselves as persons in the world is not a first-person
point of view; it is neither an agent nor an observer perspective for
us. As we saw in Part I, a first-person perspective represents things
as suffused by our interests and concerns and we are not explicitly
represented in it. The world is our world. This is particularly clear in
the way we see things when we experience strong emotion, as we saw
in Chapter 6. Ahab sees Moby Dick as malicious, whereas the whale
was acting in self-defense. But, as Sartre points out, the experienced
world is shaped by our interests in ways that often go deeper than that.
We see the keyhole not simply as a door perforation designed to hold
a lock and a key, but as something that affords peeping. We are only
implicitly present to ourselves in the content of our perceptions and
sensations. And the person making his way toward us is an intruder on
our privacy, not simply someone bringing back groceries. Only when
we step outside our unreflective first-person point of view do we re-
ally see ourselves. And when we do, we are struck by the full realiza-
tion of what we are doing and whom that makes us. I realize that I am
spying on my love interest; I am a peeping Tom, as the British would
say. And I am ashamed, not merely because I realize how things look to
the other, but because I realize that things look this way because that is
how they are.
This brings out another use of perspective taking. Perhaps surpris-
ingly, we need to take the perspective of another on ourselves to fully
understand what we are doing and who we are. This is partly due to the
fact that we are often unaware of, or self-deceived about, the nature of
our actions. Our unreflective view of what we do is not necessarily the
same as someone else`s. But that does not mean that this outside view
can be discounted—to the contrary. How someone regards what you
do to him is highly relevant. In this chapter, I will show how a good
understanding of what we do requires us to be able to take a point of
view “as from the outside.” In fact, this ability is a requirement for our
being responsible for our actions. I begin by exploring the delicate life
of actions through the lens of Jefferson’s slave-keeping. Presumably his
own conception of what he was doing was radically different from how
we think of his actions now. And yet, I argue, he can be held respon-
sible for doing what he did not think of himself as doing. The reality is
that we don’t decide what we do. How our actions land on others help
determine what they are. When we are blind to these effects, we are
unable to truly choose our actions, and we get into social trouble. This
is clear in psychopaths, whom I discuss next, and who appear uniquely
entrenched in their own view of things. I then move on to show the
effects of balancing our own views with those of others when it comes
to our own actions and round off by discussing the limits taking an
outside view on ourselves has for understanding what we do to others.
8.1 What Are We Doing?
In 2017, the Washington Post published an opinion piece by journalist

and writer Britni Danielle about the complicated relationship between
modern America and the slaveholding founding fathers. Thomas
Jefferson is, perhaps, the most awkward example. Despite having
penned the rousing opening of the Declaration of Independence,
stating specifically “that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among
these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure
these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their
just powers from the consent of the governed,” the third president of
the United States owned slaves. He also had sexual relations with one
of them, Sally Hemings, starting when she was around 16. He fathered
many children with her. She was 30 years his junior. Newspapers, such
as the Daily Mail and the Washington Post, have referred to her as
Jefferson’s mistress. But, Danielle insists,4
language like that elides the true nature of their relationship. . . . She
wasn’t Jefferson’s mistress; she was his property. And he raped her.
Danielle is right when she points out that Hemings was Jefferson’s
property by US law. She was therefore in no position to consent. She
couldn’t refuse him. But once we look into things, they are a good
Knowing Me 181
deal more complicated than that. Jefferson began his relations with
her while residing in Paris as minister to France. Slavery was illegal in
France, however, and therefore Hemings was not, technically speaking,
his slave during their sojourn there. Hemings entered into an agree-
ment with Jefferson, whereby he promised to liberate any children that
would result from their relations, when they came of age, were she to
return with him to Virginia. He kept his promise, liberating the two
girls during his lifetime and making provisions for the liberation of the
sons in his will (at least two other children died young). He never lib-
erated her.
If we are to believe Danielle, Jefferson repeatedly raped Hemings.
But a charitable interpretation of Jefferson must surely be that he
did not see himself as raping Hemings. Hemings probably didn’t re-
gard the situation in quite those terms either. It was not unusual for
slaveholders to bed their female slaves, particularly when they were as
beautiful as Hemings apparently was. And she got better conditions
than most. Offspring of such unions usually remained slaves. We
don’t know whether Hemings understood that she was not a slave
when Jefferson first approached her, but she must have known prior to
departing to Virginia with him. But then again, his estate was the only
home she’d ever known. Her family was there. To use the fact that she
was not, technically speaking, a slave in France to argue that Hemings
consented to a decades-long sexual relationship with Jefferson ignores
the larger reality of her situation. On the other hand, Jefferson came
from a slave-holding family and was part of a cultural milieu, where
taking slave concubines, particularly after being widowed, was not un-
usual. Sally Hemings was probably, herself, the half-sister of Jefferson’s
late wife, and her mother was also the offspring of a planter-slave union.
Jefferson was a strong proponent of the thesis, popular in the South at
the time, that African slaves and their descendants were intellectually
and physically inferior to white people. And since women were already
regarded as being inferior to men, that placed Hemings pretty far
down the social pecking order. What we think slavery involves today—
holding equal human beings in bondage against their will—is not what
Jefferson thought he did. And the possibility that he raped Hemings,
much as he might rape a white woman, probably never occurred to
him. If we focus on the way Jefferson saw things, and the intentions
behind his actions, to insist that Jefferson was guilty of the crime of
holding slaves and repeatedly raping one of them is wrong. Technically
speaking, he had slaves, but he did not believe he acted wrongly by
keeping equal human beings in bondage.
But if we go down this route with Jefferson, we have to be willing to
do the same with other persons from the past. But typically, we don’t.
Hitler saw himself as liberating Austria, for instance, but we happily de-
scribe him as having invaded the country. He believed he was ridding
Europe of the plague of Jews, whereas we say he instigated genocide.
I don’t think many people would be happy about Hitler’s description
of what he did. Fixing on a description of an action is not merely a
word game. It points to something larger. That larger thing is respon-
sibility. We only ever hold people responsible for actions under certain
descriptions. When we condemn Hitler, we do so not as the liberator of
Austria, for instance. Instead, we describe his actions as we see them,
then hold him responsible for them. What this means is that we hold
Hitler responsible for doing something he did not see himself as doing.
We don’t think this is a problem. But there is an interesting question of
why that is the case. Does a person do what others claim she does even
when she does not intend to do so? Who gets to decide?
Although we can describe an action in all sorts of ways—some more
outlandish than others—there are canonical ways to describe most
actions. For instance, as I return home to my house in the dark, I open
the door and turn on the light. “Turning on the light” is an agreed-
upon way of describing my flipping the light switch. Perhaps we could
use these types of descriptions to fix responsibility. Doing so, however,
faces two problems. First, the canonical way of describing things is pre-
sumably the culturally normative way of describing things. But then,
Hitler describing himself as liberating Austria seems just fine. Second,
the reason I can be said to turn on the light must at least be because my
flipping the light switch causes the lights to come on. But flipping the
light switch also causes my cat to wake up and the prowler at the back
of the house to be alerted to my presence. So why should we not also
describe what I do as waking up my cat and alerting the prowler? After
all, neither description is particularly fishy. We are in need, it seems, of
a better explanation of why this canonical description is the right one.
Now, Donald Davidson, the philosopher whose example this is,
argues that since I do not intend to wake up my cat or alert the prowler,
Knowing Me 183
whose presence, at any rate, I am unaware of, the only action I perform,
strictly speaking, is turning on the light. This is because I flip the light
switch so as to turn on the light. The other results of my flipping the
switch are side effects of my main action; waking up the cat is probably
foreseen but unintended, and alerting the prowler is unforeseen and
unintended. The only action I perform, then, is one that bears the right
kind of relation to the intention with which I set my body in motion
(i.e., flip the switch), and a good canonical description of that is that
I turn on the light.5
Now, suppose the Russians have rigged the light switch so that
flipping it makes the building next door explode. Did I blow up the
building? No, Davidson would say. But suppose my position is
terminated by the spy agency I work for because I should have suspected
that the switch was rigged. I don’t have a great imagination, so please
don’t make me work out the details. I leave it to you. There are surely
dozens of spy movies that have a plot that fits. If I could have known
that the switch was rigged, then I was negligent. If this example seems
too farfetched, then the following might do better. Suppose you are ir-
ritated and in a rush, so you fly onto the highway without much cau-
tion and cause a car to veer dangerously into the other lane to avoid
colliding with you. You did not intend, nor foresee, that this would
happen. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have done it. You are not a monster,
after all. But, when a cop pulls you over, he charges you with reckless
driving. Will it shock you that your argument that you did not intend
to drive recklessly does not hold sway? Probably not. After all, from
the legal standpoint, you were negligent. According to the Cornell
Legal Information Institute, negligence is a “failure to behave with the
level of care that someone of ordinary prudence would have exercised
under the same circumstances.” You were failing to do something you
should have done, in other words. Even if you did not see yourself as
driving recklessly at the time, you still did.6
Now, what does any of this have to do with Jefferson? The key to
Jefferson’s responsibility is not whether he knew, in the sense of ac-
tively entertaining the relevant thoughts, that he was forcing another
human being, whom he kept in bondage against her will, to have sex
with him. The question is, could he have known? Could he?
In reckless driving, the driver is negligent because he does not con-
sider the consequences of driving the way he does. Why not? Because
he is completely absorbed in getting somewhere quickly. He is like

Sartre’s voyeur in the hallway immersed in figuring out what’s going on
in the room and therefore oblivious to what he is doing. He is peeking,
yet unaware of doing so. And just as it was the point of view of someone
else that occasioned the voyeur to see things differently, so the driver
needs to take up a different perspective. He needs to reflect on what
he is doing. But if Sartre is right, reflective self-consciousness just is
taking another point of view on ourselves, namely a third-person ob-
server or, in some cases, a victim or a perpetrator perspective. As long
as someone is able to do so, the fact that they do not is neither here nor
there. It seems obvious that Jefferson was able to take another’s per-
spective and, therefore, that he ought to have been able to take the per-
spective of his slaves. The trouble is that this does not yet make him
negligent, because it is at last a theoretical possibility that Jefferson did
take the perspective of his slaves and still acted the way he did because
he assumed that they were more different from him than they were.
He is supposing, after all, that they were intellectually deficient people.
This is just another way of saying that, given his culture, Jefferson was
unable to understand what he was doing.
Some philosophers think that a culture’s effect on a person’s way of
thinking about things can be so powerful that we cannot reasonably
expect them to see what they are doing in the light we see it now. Susan
Wolf, for instance, thinks people from groups who espouse radically
different moral values from our own lack the capacity to recognize at
last some of the wrongs they commit. Why? Because7
their false beliefs in the moral permissibility of their actions and the
false values from which these beliefs derived may have been inev-
itable, given the social circumstances in which they developed. If
we think that the agents could not help but be mistaken about their
values we do not blame them for the actions those values inspired.
Was Jefferson capable of regarding slavery as we do now, more or less?

We can’t provide an ultimate answer, obviously, but the balance of ev-
idence suggests so. What usually prevents a person from regarding
some practice of their society as wrong is lack of exposure to other
points of view. This is not true of Jefferson, however. Some of his closest
Knowing Me 185
friends were abolitionists. His mentor, George Wythe, believed in his

slaves’ equal mental and physical capacities, taught them to read and
write, and ultimately freed them. Marquis de Lafayette was a staunch
opponent of slavery and a close friend and correspondent of Jefferson.
He frequently tried to dissuade Jefferson from his conservative ideas
about race. His fellow founding father, George Washington, ordered
his slaves emancipated upon his wife’s death. At the time of Jefferson,
the North was full of anti-slavery sentiment. Early in his life, he himself
had argued in defense of a runaway slave, stating that “everyone comes
into the world with a right to his own person and using it at his own
will. . . . This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the
author of nature, because it is necessary for his own sustenance.” When
it comes to women’s rights, Jefferson had many friends who married
intelligent women and treated them more or less as intellectual equals.
They raised their daughters to be well read, not just in the sentimental
literature Jefferson thought acceptable to the female mind, but on such
matters as philosophy and politics. His erstwhile friend John Adams
married Abigail Smith, who was an intellectual, and she became one
of his closest advisers as president. Abigail also corresponded with
Jefferson.8
Jefferson had ample access to the information and arguments he
needed to recognize that slavery was what we think it is today or, at the
very least, as abolitionists of his day thought of it. After all, Jefferson
was possessed of great intellectual ability, he was well traveled, and cos-
mopolitan. He lived in Paris for five years, where slavery was illegal
and widely disapproved of. Since there is no suggestion that he suffered
from a mental disability that prevented him from empathizing with
others, the best explanation of his blindness is not that he couldn’t not
be blind, but that it was convenient for him to be so. Jefferson benefited
greatly from slavery. He lived comfortably on his big estate, supported
by slave labor, and he could have sex at will with a young pretty girl.
Having offspring with her merely enlarged his stock of slaves until he
had to let them go. On the other hand, if he had freed his slaves, his in-
come would be heavily affected, his sex life would suffer, etc. Were he to
truly see the injustice and cruelty he was inflicting upon other human
beings, he might not sleep so well. Jefferson did not lack the capacity to
know what he was doing; he seems to have lacked the will.
Jefferson’s case shows that a good amount of self-deception goes

into the way we think of what we do. I say “we” because I use Jefferson
merely as an illustration of a pervasive human tendency. I hinted at
it before when I said that self-love plays an important role in how we
see the world. On the one hand, we have a natural tendency to see the
world in terms of what it can do for us (i.e., in terms of our interests),
and on the other hand, we have a knack for presenting our actions in
the best possible light. I am reminded of an episode of Angel, where
Cordelia says to Angel, “So that’s why you have Gun and Wesley
breaking and entering?,” to which he replies, “Breaking and entering is
such a negative term. They are simply retrieving some missing pieces
from the Nyazian Scroll.” Well, you get the point. Incidentally, stealing
is very common, but people usually have a way of explaining what they
do in other terms. In my previous job, I had students write an essay on
illegal downloading. Almost everybody did it, but nobody admitted
to its being theft or its being wrong. This was not because the students
thought stealing was fine. They knew stealing was wrong, but they did
not regard downloading music as stealing. They seemed largely indif-
ferent to evidence to the contrary. I have later had long discussions
with executives with excellent salaries, who insist that their illegal
downloading is neither wrong nor stealing. The argument usually
amounts to this. I can do it easily and without being punished, so it
must be fine. I too, of course, have stolen. I have used work envelopes
to file my medical bills. I did not think of it as stealing at the time, of
course. I needed an envelope and here was one . . . Reading an article
about a widower who reminisced about his wife’s honesty—she didn’t
even use work stationary for any purpose other than work—made me
realize that I wasn’t as honest as I thought I was. Stealing from your
employer is, apparently, quite common. According to a 2016 survey by
Jack Hayes International, 75% of US employees admit to having stolen
from their employers. In fact, US businesses lose $50 billion annually
due to theft. An estimated one-third of all business bankruptcies can
be traced back to employee theft. How many of these people thought
of what they did at the time as stealing? My guess is fewer than you’d
think.9
We cannot simply rely on our own conceptions of our actions to un-
derstand what we are doing, what we did, or what we are about to do.
Knowing Me 187
We are biased. We have a tendency to focus on our actions in terms of

how well we performed them, how clever we were, or how efficient. But
we are also liable to think of what we want to do in the most favorable
terms. And so it is that we end up doing what we do not intend to do.
Even worse, we often only think of just a fraction of everything our
actions set in motion. Some things are beyond your grasp; others are
not. We tend to think primarily about the implications for ourselves
and other social actors, but it is becoming increasingly clear that by
heating our houses, buying certain products, and driving our cars, we
are contributing to global warming, which will kill billions of animals
and we can only guess how many humans. Although we do not intend
it, we know what we are doing. Surely, then, we are responsible for it.
What does this have to do with perspective taking? Perspective
taking lifts us out our narrow pre-reflective way of regarding our
actions. By taking an outside view, we can see our action in a new light.
In many cases, we come to see what we do as others do.
8.2 Psychopaths and Rapists
So far, I have presented a case for perspective taking lifting us out of our
immersed and biased perspective on our actions and enabling us to see
what we do in a new light. But at this stage, it is all rather theoretical or,
as some say, philosophical. What you want to know is whether it is true.
So, let’s look at some empirical research. A variety of mental disorders
affect people’s capacity to empathize. Psychopaths often emerge as the
favorite example of pro-empathy researchers because the condition is
so extraordinary. Psychopaths are responsible for a staggering amount
of crime given that they constitute a mere 1% to 2% of the population.
According to recent estimates, 94% of male psychopaths in the United
States are imprisoned, on parole, or otherwise engaged with the crim-
inal justice system. Psychopaths are callous, manipulative, uncaring,
and narcissistic and have a substantially reduced capacity for experi-
encing fear, love, shame, empathy, guilt, and remorse. The core of their
issue is interpersonal. It is therefore not surprising that many psychop-
athy researchers pinpoint lack of affective empathy, or sympathy, as the
root cause of their antisocial and immoral actions. But what is often
overlooked is the fact that psychopaths don’t seem to really appre-

ciate what they do to others. This is not because they cannot under-
stand that other people have thoughts, feelings, or desires of their own.
They do not lack cognitive empathy as such. But this knowledge seems
strangely disembodied and abstract. For instance, a rapist Robert Hare
interviewed said of his victims: “They are frightened, right? But, you
see, I don’t really understand it. I’ve been scared myself, and it wasn’t
unpleasant.” Here is another example from Hare’s work:10
When asked if he had any regrets about stabbing a robbery victim

who subsequently spent three months in the hospital as a result of
his wounds, one of our subjects replied, “Get real! He spends a few
months in a hospital and I rot here. I cut him up a bit, but if I wanted
to kill him I would have slit his throat. That’s the kind of guy I am;
I gave him a break.
In his semiautobiographical book, The Psychopath Inside James Fallon

describes discovering—slowly and over the course of years—that he
is a psychopath. When the coin finally drops, what is his reaction?
He doesn’t care. He feels great. He always has. Sure, he knows his wife
wants a real marriage, that his sister is distraught by his indifference to
her, and that his colleagues are fed up with his irresponsible behavior.
But, you see, he just doesn’t care. He will try to do a little better, but11
the moment I start to become unhappy in order to make anyone else

happy is the moment I put on the brakes. I don’t want to have to give
up all those inappropriate and dangerous activities with inappro-
priate people, even those that happen to put others close to me in
life-threatening, career-ending harm’s way. I do love that so, and that
will be my bright line in the sand.
What stands out in these cases is the startling lack of consideration

that is accorded to what happens, or might happen, to others. Why is
that? We get a hint from the Hare’s psychopath. He just doesn’t get it.
The problem seems to be that he is projecting his own reactions onto
the victim. But since he has a mental disorder that affects his defensive
reactions, an intuitive grasp of what his victims are going through is
Knowing Me 189
beyond his reach. Fallon thrives on risky behavior, and that might also
be a reason he doesn’t quite get what he puts others through. But notice
how he does not justify his actions this way. No, he will only accom-
modate others as long as it doesn’t get in the way of his doing things he
loves to do. Their dying as a result of what he does doesn’t really matter
to him. These are not the reflections of someone who does a poor job
at taking other people’s perspective. Instead, he evidences no perspec-
tive taking at all, just like the robber in the earlier example. The only
person’s point of view that he sees is his own. This doesn’t just create a
problem for his truly understanding what he does to others, but also
for his self-conception. In his book, he often says he’s a nice guy, and he
seems to believe it. But clearly, he’s just the opposite.12
One of the first people to study psychopaths in detail, American
psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley, said that a psychopath13
has absolutely no capacity to see himself as others see him. It is per-

haps more accurate to say that he has no ability to know how others
feel when they see him or to experience subjectively anything com-
parable about the situation. All of the values, all of the major affect
concerning his status, are underappreciated by him.
Writing back in the 1940s, Cleckley maintained that the reason

psychopaths are such expert deceivers and manipulators is not that
they have a heightened sensitivity to what others feel or think, but
that they lack insight into their own actions and their consequences to
others. As he says:14
There is also indication of inability in his fundamental reactions to

size up normally what he has done, what he is, and what he has been.
Psychopaths do not seem to see themselves as they see others. Many

of Cleckley’s patients were shocked by the prospects of going to jail
for crimes that they knew people go to jail for. They did not see them-
selves as criminals, as people who have stolen, raped, cheated, etc.
Psychopaths might recognize, Cleckley continues, that they have done
those things in some superficial sense, but their true significance and
what those actions say about who they are usually escape them. One of
the patients Cleckley had sent home because he deemed him incurable
later sent him a letter extolling the usefulness of treatment and the great
change it caused in him. These are the types of ludicrous behaviors we
would expect from people who fail to consider how others might see
them or, even, how they might see themselves as from the outside. It is
therefore not surprising that a recent study found that the one emotion
different subgroups of psychopaths are all deficient in is shame.15
Psychopaths are known for their double standards. They expect spe-
cial treatment while being unwilling to show others even the most basic
respect. Should they feel unfairly treated, they will stop at nothing to
avenge themselves. Fallon recounts gleefully how he always gets people
that he feels wronged by in the end. Does he stop to consider how he
would like it if people did the same to him? Not at all. It doesn’t even
cross his mind. He fails to think of himself as he thinks of others. This
makes it easy to have one standard for oneself and one for other people.
Why? Because you are not like other people. You are special. Why?
Because you are the only lens through which you see the world; you are
always the one in the driver’s seat; you don’t try to imbue another with
your own agency through perspective taking. When you fail to do this,
you are, of course, always the subject and the other person remains the
object. Stuck in this state, you are likely to miss what to others is the
most relevant aspect of what you do. Perhaps, then, a psychopath’s in-
sistence on taking exception to himself—he is allowed to do to others
what he does not allow them to do to him—is really a failure to see
what he does as being on par with what others do. This failure may be
due to their lacking the ability to take others’ point of view, or it might
just be the result of their failing to do so. There are reasons to suspect
it’s the latter. Why? Because if instructed to imagine that they are the
person in need, even those who generally show a lack of concern for
the well-being of others (and so would score higher on psychopathy
than most people) experience more empathic sadness for the target.
By comparison, simply being instructed to “feel with the target” had no
such effects on them. The data suggests that psychopaths just don’t care
about other people’s point of view.16
But people with no history of mental disorders can show the same
shocking lack of perspective taking as do psychopaths. And they too
exhibit a bizarre way of viewing the world as a result. In January 2015,
Knowing Me 191
Brock Turner is seen outside a frat house having sex with an uncon-
scious woman. He is chased away by two graduate students. At the
trial of what became known as the Stanford rape case, he pleads not
guilty but is nonetheless convicted of raping the girl. A number of
statements from him, his father, and former friends betray a single-
minded focus on his situation and a startling lack of comprehension
of the consequences for the victim. For instance, his childhood friend
Leslie Rasmussen writes:17
I don’t think it’s fair to base the fate of the next 10+years of his life on
the decision of a girl who doesn’t remember anything but the amount
she drank to press charges against him. I am not blaming her directly
for this, because that isn’t right. But where do we draw the line and
stop worrying about being politically correct every second of the day
and see that rape on campuses isn’t always because people are rapists.
Rasmussen denies that Turner is a rapist even as she uses the term
“rape” to describe his action. Psychopaths jailed for grievous bodily
harm are known to sometimes describe themselves as nice and caring.
Notice also that Rasmussen give no consideration to how the victim
might see things while at the same time appealing to the judge to take
Turner’s perspective on the effects that going to jail will have on his life.
More seriously, the statement implies that having sex with unconscious
people is a problem only for people who are all wrapped up in some
superficial correctness nonsense. You might recognize this as a perpe-
trator perspective. Ironically, of course, Rasmussen is taking someone’s
perspective, that is, Turner’s. What she fails to consider is that of the
woman he raped.
Addressing the defense, here is what the victim had to say:18
Lastly you [Turner] said, I want to show people that one night of
drinking can ruin a life. A life, one life, yours, you forgot about mine.
Let me rephrase for you, “I want to show people that one night of
drinking can ruin two lives.” You and me. You are the cause, I am the
effect. You have dragged me through this hell with you, dipped me
back into that night again and again. You knocked down both our
towers, I collapsed at the same time you did. If you think I was spared,
came out unscathed, that today I ride off into the sunset, while you
suffer the greatest blow, you are mistaken. Nobody wins. We have
all been devastated, we have all been trying to find some meaning
in all of this suffering. Your damage was concrete; stripped of titles,
degrees, enrollment. My damage was internal, unseen, I carry it with
me. You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my
safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today.
The court’s opinion was pretty clear. Turner was sentenced to a mere
six months in jail. The (male) judge clearly found it easier to worry
about what a jail sentence might do to Turner’s life than to consider
the long-term harm done to the victim, which is now enhanced by the
judge’s leniency. And yet, it is not hard to see that taking the victim’s
point of view and understanding the impact the rape had on her life
is essential to understanding what Turner did. Rasmussen’s statement
clearly shows that if you do not, you can blow off “rape” as a merely un-
fortunate event, showing nothing about the character or culpability of
the person who did it.
8.3 How Other Points of View Help
Understanding how the people most affected by our actions see what
we do is rather crucial to understanding what we’re doing. This is ob-
vious in a victim-perpetrator story, like the Stanford rape case. We
need to counterbalance the way we think of our actions—which tend
to be mainly, sometimes exclusively, in terms of what we are trying to
accomplish—with another point of view. Sometimes that other point
of view captures what is most important about our action. But the
other point of view need not be that of the victim or the benefactor of
your action. In Sartre’s scenario, the person we are wronging is the one
we are spying on, Albert in my imaginary case. But it is not Albert’s
perspective I adopt or that makes me see what I am doing. It is that of
the unknown person coming down the hallway. I know nothing about
him. But he is about to see me bent over next to the door, so obviously
caught in the act of spying. This brings home the uncomfortable truth
of what I am doing.
Knowing Me 193
Understanding how uninvolved others would judge us, then, helps

us realize what we are doing and what that act makes us. It positions us
in social space, and our actions in a social context. It carries informa-
tion about our social standing and our social identity. I am a peeping
Tom, an asshole, a fun person, or a kind one. When I lived in St. Louis
many years ago, various people told me very intimate things. I found
that puzzling, particularly since I was used to the more tight-lipped
English. Discussing it with my friend Carl, I ventured this hypothesis.
“Perhaps,” I said, “it’s because I’m such an easygoing person.” Carl
laughed long and hard, the way you do when someone says some-
thing particularly absurd or self-deluded. I concluded that although
I was much more chill than I used to be, “easygoing” was not the term
he would use to describe me. He, on the other hand, was generally
regarded as being very easygoing. I could, of course, have insisted that
I was in fact quite easygoing, but it’s easy to see how absurd that would
be. You’re only easygoing if the people around you think you are.
By contrast to victim or perpetrator perspectives, which are biased
in their own way, the perspective of an uninvolved observer provides a
less distorted view of the greater social reality of what we have done. It
makes us aware of other ways of thinking about what we do that are not
directly related to our intention in doing it. But who is this other person
coming down the hallway, who may even be a figment of your imag-
ination? It is none other than yourself, of course. A Freudian would
say the person in the hallway is your super-ego. It is you as you reflect
on yourself and what you do, as if you were seeing yourself as another
person would. If you’re lucky, you will be sympathetically inclined to-
ward yourself, as toward a friend. But in many cases, the self-judge is a
bit harsher than that. And that is, perhaps, a good thing. We don’t want
our super-ego, or whatever you choose to call your self-reflective self,
to be like Rasmussen, condoning our most vile acts. Now, I don’t mean
to say that we are aware of judging ourselves in these instances. But
given the absence of information about the other who is about to catch
us in the act, all we can do is project our own thoughts and feelings
onto him or her.
In the typical Sartre case, then, we are not responding to an actual
other at all. We are instead pulled out of ourselves and made to judge
ourselves as we would another. We can only react in this way, of course,
because we have grown up among other people, learned to react to

them, seen how they react to us, adopted certain norms of behavior,
etc. Sartre’s universe is not solipsistic. If we are properly socialized, as
psychologists would say, our judgment will be fairly representative of
our culture or our community. The identity of the other, even their ex-
istence, is irrelevant. It is a peer of some sort, onto whom we can fully
project our own reactions as we imagine seeing ourselves from the out-
side. When we take a third-person perspective on ourselves—or an-
other person’s observer perspective—we counterbalance the self-love
and self-deception that so often cloud our judgments of our actions.
As I stand in the hallway aware of the possible presence of another,
my resultant third-person (observer) perspective connects me to other
things I know. This is peeping!19
In sum, taking a different point of view on ourselves and what we
do serves to avoid double standards. We don’t need a genuine other to
do that. We just need to see ourselves as from the outside, disengaged
momentarily from our immersion in life. It is the opposite of a psycho-
pathic approach. Your typical psychopath will complain vociferously
about perceived wrongs done to him while happily doing the same,
or worse, to others. He always has an excuse for the latter, but never
for the former. There is no comparison between his actions and other
people’s that could possibly reflect badly on him. Perspective taking
protects us from this type of psychopathic entrenchment. It also avoids
the criticism that we discussed in the previous chapter: It may be im-
possible to get other people exactly right, but often we don’t need to.
When Jesus of Nazareth preached that we should do unto others as we
would have them do unto us, he echoed an old rule expounded long
before his time, by the ancient Egyptians in the second millennium
BCE, Thales of Miletus around sixth century BCE, and Confucius
around fifth century BCE. We now call it The Golden Rule. The idea is
clear. Taking another agent’s perspective on yourself, even if that agent
is nothing but a projection of yourself, is a helpful rule of thumb in
acting well toward others.20
I feel the need to hammer this point home because it is increas-
ingly common for people to focus on the ills of projection. But let us
return to Jefferson for a moment. Was the problem he faced that he
Knowing Me 195
projected his own desires, thoughts, and feelings about how he should
live or be treated onto his slaves? Quite the contrary. He dehumanized
them to such an extent that any identification with them was impos-
sible. Had he instead simply projected his own desire for liberty and
autonomy onto women and slaves, he would have done better. One
of the greatest problems when it comes to how we treat others is usu-
ally not that we assume that they are too much like us, but rather that
we don’t give them the consideration and importance we would give
ourselves. Their pain does not move us the way our pain does. History
shows that imagining that others are more like us than we assume
prevents many injustices. Indo-Tibetan Buddhists talk of “exchanging
self and other” as a tool for developing greater compassion. Although
the term “exchange” here is highly metaphorical, it touches on some-
thing rather basic to perspective change. Being willing to exchange
your point of view for that of another person is already an admission
of the equal value of that person. Resisting such a change of point of
view amounts to a rejection of the equal worth of others and the equal
importance of their experiences. What this shows is that, once again,
being right about another person’s particular thoughts or feelings is
not the main issue. The person you imagine being when you train
your eye on yourself is often not a specific person at all. It is, if you like,
a representative of humanity. What is important is that you imbue the
other person with the significance you have to yourself. The partic-
ular thoughts or feelings you imagine having may not matter much
at all. What matters is that you imagine your actions from the other
side, as the one affected by them, as opposed to the one performing
them. Incidentally, we may apply this lesson to our treatment of non-
human animals too. Factory farming is not the horror it is because
we are failing to fully appreciate the differences between us and cows,
pigs, and chickens. It is because we deny them feelings, suffering, and
a wish for autonomy. In other words, it is because we deny that they
are like us in these crucial respects.
In the case of Jefferson, part of his blindness may have derived from
his position of power. Psychological research shows that people in
power are less likely to take other people’s perspectives. More precisely,
a power relation sets up an asymmetry whereby the ones in power
are less sensitive to the perspective of the ones they have power over,
whereas the ones with less power are more likely to take the perspec-
tive of people who have power over them. The point is not that power
impairs a person’s ability to take other perspectives, but rather that it
affects her tendency to do so.21
In one of the most straightforward studies of power and perspec-
tive, Galinsky and colleagues made their participants feel powerful by
first asking them to recall an incident in which they had power over
another person. They were then given two tasks to test their coordina-
tion skills, or so they thought, namely snapping their fingers as quickly
as possible and drawing an ‘E’ on their forehead. The last task was,
of course, a perspective-taking task. People primed to feel powerful
had a greater tendency to draw the E egocentrically so that someone
looking at them would see an ‘∃,’ whereas people primed to feel less
powerful were more likely to write the ‘E’ non-egocentrically so that
someone looking at them would see an ‘E.’ This research is supported
by other studies that show that people with great power over others
have less interest in what these others are thinking than these people
do when it comes to the ones in power. Those with more power also
experience less empathic distress and compassion for others, and ex-
perience less motor resonance with them. Further evidence suggests
that the reason is that people with power regulate their emotional
reactions to less powerful others in distress, because people with
power regulate their negative emotions more than do people with less
power. On a Machiavellian worldview this makes sense. It is not in
the interests of the powerful to be concerned about the thoughts and
feelings of those who have little capacity to affect their access to re-
sources. In fact, doing so might make them be less exploitative, which,
from a purely self-interested perspective, is clearly bad. By contrast,
people with little power have incentives to figure out what the more
powerful think and how they feel, since this might affect their own
competitive standing.22
Power, then, is an impediment to interpersonal understanding.
The point is one of motivation, not capacity. This cannot be stressed
enough; people with power can take the perspective of those less pow-
erful, but they tend not to. The effect of power can be overcome, of
course. Famously, the historical Buddha was a pampered prince driven
Knowing Me 197
by great compassion for those less powerful than he. One trick to over-
come one’s tendency not to empathize with those one has power over is
to switch the way one thinks of power. If one focuses on one’s respon-
sibility toward those one has power over, it actually increases one’s ten-
dency to take their perspectives, studies show.23
One can push this line of thinking too far, of course. The Golden
Rule is known for better helping us see what we should not do than
what we should do. People do differ from us and it would be absurd
to suggest that I can understand how any of my actions might impact
you by just using myself as a model, without any consideration of your
individuality. It all depends, of course, on what the aim of our perspec-
tive taking is. It is also worth keeping in mind that the way you see my
action may not actually help me better understand what I do, because
your view may be dangerously distorted. More of that in Chapter 9.
8.4 Conclusion and Trouble Ahead
To be in a good position to choose what to do, we must be able to con-

ceive of our actions from an angle different from the one we have when
we are immersed in life. In that mode, we are absorbed in action and
see right through it to our goals. This prevents us from considering the
context, how it affects other people, how others would think of what
we do, and how we would think of it were we not the ones doing it. Our
tendency to see ourselves and what we do in the most positive light
adds to the dangers of being entrenched in our own perspective. It is a
psychopathic mode of operating, I maintain, although some might call
it narcissistic. The name matters less than the reality behind it: com-
plete ego-centeredness. This leads to blindness to what we do. Perhaps
a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, as Gertrude Stein once wrote, but
pinching someone’s buttocks isn’t simply pinching someone’s buttocks.
It is also sexual harassment, depending on whose bottom it is.24
We ought to be guided by how other people conceive of our actions,
if for no better reason than it helps us decide what to do. But other
people can be ignorant, prejudiced, biased, or malicious. If they are,
their point of view might be informative about them, but not about
who we are or what we do. In fact, adopting a hostile attitude to
ourselves can be very damaging, as we are about to see. The irony of

perspective taking is that whereas it is a tremendously useful tool, and
we ought to do it more, it also makes us uniquely vulnerable to other
people’s manipulations. Then what do we do? This leads us to the next
chapter.
9
The Empathy Trap
For a long time Xavière had been only a fragment of

Françoise’s life, and suddenly she had become the only
sovereign reality, and Françoise now possessed no more
than the colourless contours of a reflection.
“Why should it be she rather than I?” thought
Françoise, with anger. She need only say one word, she
need only say “It is I.” But she would have to believe in that
word, she would have to know how to choose herself. For
many weeks Françoise had no longer been able to dissolve
Xavière’s hatred, her affection, her thoughts, to harmless
vapours. She had let them bite into her, she had turned
herself into a prey. Freely, through her moments of resist-
ance and revolt, she had made use of herself to destroy
herself. She was witnessing the course of her own life like
an indifferent spectator, without ever daring to assert her-
self, whereas Xavière, from head to foot, was nothing but
a living assertion of herself. She made herself exist with so
sure a power, that Françoise, spellbound, has allowed her-
self to be carried away so far as to prefer Xavière to herself,
and thus to obliterate herself. She had gone so far as to be
seeing places, people, and Pierre’s smiles, through Xavière’s
eyes. She had reached the point of no longer knowing her-
self, except through Xavière’s feelings for her, and now she
was trying to merge into Xavière. But in this hopeless ef-
fort, she was only succeeding in destroying herself.
—Simone de Beauvoir, She Came to Stay, pp. 292–93
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197637081.003.0010
We are at the climax of an existentialist novel seemingly about a

ménage- a-
trois. Our heroine, Françoise, is attempting to escape
the gravitational pull of her rival’s consciousness. Xavière is a friend
of hers, whom she invited to come to Paris so she could escape her
dull life in the provinces. But no sooner has she alighted at her hotel
than she takes up with Françoise’s longtime partner, Pierre. Being of
a modern mindset, Françoise accommodates, even encourages, the
relationship. Xavière, however, does not take kindly to playing third
fiddle. Increasingly, her antics monopolize the time and attention
of the couple, much to Françoise’s dismay. As the quote makes clear,
Xavière doesn’t just occupy Françoise’s time, but also her mind. And
much as Françoise tries to break free of this hypnotic mind meld, she
fails. She does, however, eventually end up with both Pierre and a new
lover, Gerbert, whom she shares with Xavière, unbeknownst to the
latter. Xavière understandably feels betrayed when she finds out. “You
were jealous of me because Labrousse [Pierre] was in love with me. You
made him loathe me, and to get better revenge, you took Gerbert from
me,” she says as she confronts Françoise. Françoise “contemplated with
horror this woman at whom Xavière was gazing: that woman was her-
self.” Identified with this view of herself, she thinks, “I did that. It was
I,” and “This is what I am forever.” After a while, however, she suddenly
recalls how innocent her attraction to Gerbert was, and his to her. Then
she returns to herself: “ ‘No’, she repeated, ‘I am not that woman.’ ”1
However,2
she could not defend herself with timid words and furtive deeds.
Xavière existed; the betrayal existed. “My guilty face exists in flesh
and bone.”
It would exist no more.
[...]
It is she or I. It shall be I.
She goes to Xavière’s room and turns on the gas, thereby killing her.
This part of the story parallels our peeping Tom in the last chapter.
Françoise is presented with a point of view on herself that is uncom-
fortable, but which she can’t dismiss. But instead of accepting her guilt,
The Empathy Trap 201
she kills it in the form of the person who accuses her. With Xavière
gone, the person she wronged is no more and, by sympathetic magic,
her transgression is erased.
This is evidently not a healthy way to deal with others’ perspectives.
But it is easy to appreciate Françoise’s dilemma. Here are two
contrasting versions of the same series of events, and the two are not
easily reconcilable. Xavière’s accusation rings true. Sure, Françoise did
not only betray Xavière; she started an affair with Gerbert because of
their mutual affection. But she also betrayed Xavière by sleeping with
her lover and hiding that fact from her. Even if she had no intention
of betraying anyone, she did. However, Xavière’s view is also partial.
“How you must have laughed at me!” she says to Françoise after dis-
covering the truth. But it’s not clear that Françoise seduced Gerbert to
avenge herself. Xavière sees the affair purely in terms of how it affects
her. Still, Françoise did not consider Xavière’s feelings or the situation
she put her in. She asks herself, “How had that innocent love become
this sordid betrayal?” Good question.3
The conflict between Xavière’s and Françoise’s way of looking
at things is an extreme example of a relatively mundane situation
we find ourselves in daily. Perspectives are sometimes complemen-
tary, but not always. And when our view of things differs markedly
from other views, what should we do? How do we balance different
points of view against each other? I begin to answer this question by
taking us to the origin of de Beauvior’s inspiration for her book: Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s master and slave dialectic. This dialectic
describes the battle of consciousnesses that we see illustrated in She
Came to Stay. The early stage of this dialectic is similar to what we
call gaslighting these days, which I discuss in section 9.2. In section
9.3, I discuss false confessions and false memories, which show that
most people are surprisingly impressionable. This brings us to how
to handle our tendency to be overly influenced by what others think
of us and the world around us. The answer is also Hegelian: We need
a synthesis between our own view and that of the other person. I dis-
cuss that in section 9.4. You might wonder whether taking an unin-
volved observer’s view wouldn’t save us the trouble. The answer is no,
and I explain why in section 9.5.
9.1 Master and Slave
We have seen that to have a proper sense of ourselves, we must at the

very least implicitly acknowledge other perspectives. Indeed, we must
be able to adopt some such perspective on ourselves. Otherwise, our
selves remain undifferentiated from the world. We would be our world.
Other perspectives make us recognize that the way we experience the
world may be different from how the world is. Without others, we are
liable to conflate our view of the world with the way the world is. And
yet, the ability to make that distinction—to acknowledge that yours is
only one perspective—is compatible with being singularly entrenched
in your own point of view, as expressed in a narcissistic orientation to-
ward the world, with all its attendant problems. But the converse is also
possible. That is, a person can become so absorbed in another point
of view that they become alienated from themselves. The detective in
The Element of Crime, who ended up becoming the murderer he was
chasing (Chapter 1), is an example of such identification. Less momen-
tous, but still fairly dramatic, is Françoise’s identification with Xavière.
This is often called overidentification because it is thought to be patho-
logical. Of course, to the subject, identification and overidentification
can present themselves almost identically. When one identifies with
another, one’s own point of view falls away and one becomes engulfed
in what one takes the other person’s perspective to be. But typically,
overidentification is associated with a greater degree of identifica-
tion and over longer periods of time. Françoise’s preoccupation with
Xavière lasted months, for instance.
De Beauvoir uses the story in She Came to Stay to illustrate the
master-slave dialectic first propounded by the 19th-century German
philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. It later played an im-
portant role in the French existentialists’ view of intersubjectivity.
The master-slave dialectic can be regarded as the foundation story of
a more just and equal society that has overcome stark social divisions.
But it is also a story about the importance of mutual recognition in
the development of human relationships. For our purposes, it is par-
ticularly important because it brilliantly captures what happens in the
clash of perspectives.
The master- slave dialectic begins with the meeting of two

consciousnesses. Before this meeting we can imagine each conscious-
ness enveloped in itself. The world is nothing but an extension of the
self because each consciousness relates to it purely in terms of what it
can do for it. The self is, as it were, everything. And by virtue of being
everything, it is thereby also nothing. It is only by recognizing another
consciousness and becoming aware that that other consciousness
recognizes it as a consciousness too—mutual recognition—that a con-
sciousness comes to recognize itself as a consciousness. A conscious-
ness that recognizes another consciousness thereby acknowledges a
different point of view on itself, namely that which emanates from the
other. It recognizes that just as the other consciousness is an object to
it—outside, other, and to be grasped—so it is an object to this con-
sciousness. It too is outside, other, and to be grasped in ways it cannot
control. This is a moment of genuine self-consciousness, the likes of
which are not possible without such an encounter. But the encounter
is a double-edged sword as far as the individual is concerned. On the
one hand, the other consciousness confirms its being (or existence)
by making it its object. On the other hand, the other consciousness
threatens to impose on it a picture of it and the world, which it cannot
control, and which is invariably foreign, if for no other reason than
that it represents an outside perspective. And so, every consciousness
capable of becoming aware of other consciousnesses is in the bitter-
sweet situation of being caught between the self-confirming and the
self-alienating force of the other.4
The natural result is for a battle of consciousnesses to ensue, where
each consciousness tries to get the upper hand. The upper hand, in
this instance, is for its perspective or point of view to be the domi-
nant one, in the sense that the other consciousness will adopt it and
leave its own behind. This does not simply involve adopting the other’s
point of view on the world at large. It also implies embracing the other
consciousness’s view on itself. The loser of this battle will then be in
a state of self-alienation. It will come to see itself as an object for the
other. It has become a slave to the other consciousness, which is now
the master. Although this captures much of the history of the world
nicely, Hegel is an optimist. The victory of the master consciousness
over the slave is Pyrrhic, he insists. By reducing the other conscious-

ness to a slave, the master has deprived itself of the recognition that
comes from a genuine other point of view. In a sense, it has returned to
its previous state before the meeting in which it was everything and yet
nothing. On its part, the slave becomes aware of the important work
it performs for the master, which elevates it. The slave recognizes that
the master depends on it, and thus begins its path toward transcending
its own enslavement. Because the slave comes to recognize its own
powers and abilities, and because the master recognizes that its being
recognized depends on the existence of other free consciousnesses—
that have genuine other points of view—they will both transcend the
master-slave relation. Greater equality will ensue.
Whereas Hegel conceived of this master-slave dialectic in terms of
the realization of the World Spirit, the existentialists were more inter-
ested in the interpersonal and political aspects of Hegel’s ideas. Jean-
Paul Sartre’s view of “The Other” is deeply influenced by Hegel, as is
de Beauvoir’s view of womanhood in The Second Sex. The way it plays
out in existentialist thought is this. Each human consciousness has two
modes of being: being-in-itself and being-for-itself. The former is a
thing’s being as what it is, understood without reference to anything
else. It characterizes all things’ being in the world. Something that
exists for itself, on the other hand, is something that is reflective and
is capable of comprehending itself. Whereas all existents are in-them-
selves, only some also are for-themselves. The latter is made possible by
the encounter with another consciousness. We have already seen some
of the effects of such an encounter, for instance, shame as you are dis-
covered in the hallway peeping through the keyhole. But this is a tran-
sitory state, even if it is foundational for our self-understanding. What
someone like de Beauvoir is interested in are the effects on a person
of long-term subjugation to an external point of view. She famously
claims that men objectify women and see them as The Other. More
problematic, perhaps, but natural given the strict societally sanctioned
power structure that deprives women of most rights and opportunities
to act in the world, women see themselves primarily through the eyes
of the very men who oppress them.5
In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir outlines a woman’s life from child-
hood to old age as one in which she is alienated from herself and the
essential conditions of subjectivity. This is because she is made to

define herself from the outside in terms of the male view of what a
woman is. In contemporary terms, the view of women as sex objects
is an external view foisted upon her. A woman is made to see herself
as having value in terms, not of her own projects, goals, or values,
but of what someone else desires from her: gratification of sexual de-
sire, being taken care of, and so on. De Beauvoir uses literature lib-
erally to make her case. She uses the chilling example of the “perfect
marriage” of Pierre and Natasha in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. “She
was a coquettish and romantic girl; when married she astounds those
who knew her by giving up her interest in her appearance, society, and
pastimes and devoting herself to her husband and children.” Quoting
directly from Tolstoy: “In her face there was not, as formerly, that
ceaselessly burning fire of animation that had constituted her charm.
Now one often saw only her face and body, while her soul was not seen
at all.” For de Beauvoir, this signals the obliteration of a consciousness
by another. This is not merely the result of a power struggle between
two consciousnesses; it is institutionalized enslavement of certain
members of society. Points of view are not simply momentary attitudes
toward the world instantiated by a particular person at a particular
time but are promulgated in art, literature, politics, and norms. Who
gets to have their view represented is ultimately a question of power
and influence. Indeed, to be able to live fully from one’s own point of
view is the ultimate power or, if you like, the ultimate freedom. This
story fits nicely with the studies on power and perspective we exam-
ined in Chapter 8. People in power tend not to take the perspectives of
those they have power over.6
The pathological model of identification described by de Beauvoir
has also been developed outside the philosophical sphere in psychoan-
alytic theory. Anna Freud and Sándor Ferenczi each talked about the
tendency of victims to identify with their aggressors. This is particu-
larly clear in the case of child abuse. Instead of protesting, the abused
child internalizes the adult’s guilt:7
These children feel physically and morally helpless, their personal-

ities are not sufficiently consolidated in order to be able to protest,
even if only in thought, however, if it reaches a certain maximum,
compels them to subordinate themselves like automata to the will of

the aggressor, to divine each one of his desires and to gratify these; com-
pletely oblivious of themselves they identify themselves with the ag-
gressor. Through the identification, or let us say, introjection of the
aggressor, he disappears as part of the external reality, and becomes
intra-instead of extra-psychic.
The idea here is that identification serves a defensive function, much

as do projection and repression. But instead of locating what threatens
us on the outside, as in projection, we make ourselves disappear, in a
manner of speaking. Our point of view is gone, and we are one with
what threatens us. We are fully identified with the powerful oppressor.
When we are, we do not experience our own oppression as oppression.
As Jay Frankel has noted, it is not only people who have experi-
enced severe trauma who habitually “identify with the aggressor.” For
instance, Frankel observed a tendency among many of his patients to
“buy into” other people’s views of them despite their knowledge that
such views were not accurate. For instance, being berated by a super-
visor for bringing certain forms for signatures—which was the correct
procedure—one patient nonetheless could not shake the feeling of
having done something stupid. In an attempt to broaden the charac-
terization of identification with the aggressor, Frankel proposes that
childhood trauma includes emotional abandonment/isolation and
being subject to a greater power. This greater power is a feature of all
relationships, but the asymmetrical power relation of parents and chil-
dren is particularly apt to cause this type of mild trauma. Everybody
has the potential to identify with aggressors purely in virtue of having
been children. The tendency to identify with others— sometimes
to our own detriment—takes a less dramatic form in these cases.
Frankel says:8
I think identification with the aggressor, on a smaller scale, operates

invisibly but pervasively in the everyday lives of most people. . . . We
efface our own particularity all the time in our social interactions
with symbolically powerful figures in whose presence we become
awed, meek, dumbstruck, or gullible; doctors, bosses, celebrities,
experts, people who wear uniforms or suits. We become compliant
patients, docile (even if resentful) employees, eager consumers,

walking corporate advertisements, passive citizens.
In other words, we all adopt desires, evaluative attitudes, and so on from

people who are powerful or prestigious. In the right circumstances,
this tendency is relatively benign. It does, however, make us vulnerable
to adopting views and attitudes that are damaging to ourselves, as is so
abundantly clear in victims of abuse. This leads us to the question of
how to regard this tendency to let the points of view of others replace
our own. The Hegelian picture suggests that a future possible synthesis
of different points of view is the desired, if not the inevitable, outcome
of this changing back and forth. De Beauvoir’s somber ending suggests
something altogether different. The best way to make headway here is
to move from the speculative to the practical realm. The psychology
of self-help and abuse talks at length about the dangers of overidenti-
fication, only they use terms such as gaslighting, codependence, and
manipulation.9
9.2 Gaslighting
The term “gaslighting” derives from the 1938 play Gas Light—most
memorable in the film version starring Ingrid Bergman from 1944—
which portrays one man’s attempt to convince his wife that she is in-
sane. He does so by staging certain phenomena—footsteps in the attic
or flickering gas lights (hence the title)—and denying that they are
occurring, so as to make her believe that she is imagining things. In
the play and the movie, the husband is engaged in an elaborate manip-
ulation. But “gaslighting” doesn’t just refer to such instances; it is used
to describe any pattern of behavior whereby one person acts so as to
make another person doubt their version of reality, for the purpose of
exerting control.
Academic research is almost entirely silent on gaslighting. Only
in recent years have people begun to show interest in this field. Yet,
if you google “gaslighting,” you will find more sources that you can
check. There are YouTube self-help videos, blog posts, and discussion
boards, and Psychology Today has a series of articles on the issue. The
relation between gaslighting and the master-slave dialectic is obvious

in this quote:
For pathological gaslighters, the ultimate purpose of gaslighting is

about power and control. By aggressively weaponizing false infor-
mation, and repeatedly bombarding their victims with propaganda
and disempowering messages, the gaslighter aims to psychologically
subjugate and subdue an individual, a group, or an entire society. The
gaslighter can then exploit their victims at will, for the purpose of so-
cial domination and personal gain.10
Although gaslighting is often thought of as occurring in romantic

relationships only, it is also a factor in the workplace and, as recent
events have made evident, politics. Gaslighting is common behavior in
people with psychopathy and narcissism. But according to Stephanie
Moulton Sarkis, who specializes in treating survivors of gaslighting, it
is also common in people with antisocial, borderline, histrionic, and
narcissistic personality disorders.11
Many people find themselves at the receiving end of gaslighting.
And while writing this chapter, an entire nation finds itself in the hands
of a gaslighter. The extraordinary support enjoyed by Donald Trump
despite the thousands of lies he has told and his ignorance of even the
most basic facts about governance is a testament to the fact that any-
body can fall victim to the reality distortion of one determined indi-
vidual. But the gaslighter is not our concern here; it is the gaslightee.12
A gaslightee typically responds to what is called cognitive disso-
nance, namely a conflict between information someone provides her
with and what she believes to be true. The natural response to cogni-
tive dissonance is to engage in some exploration or reflection to test
which version is true, if, that is, the information provided is thought to
come from a reliable source. Few people will frantically start exploring
whether the world is actually flat, the claims of the Flat Earth Society
notwithstanding. Things would be substantially more straightfor-
ward if we had easy access to an omniscient and omnibenevolent
God. As things stand, however, one person’s reliable source—such as
a scientist—is another person’s fraud. However, in many cases, such
as the size of the crowd at an inauguration, fact checking is not too
onerous and provides good, reliable results. But in more typical cases
of gaslighting, the contested facts are more slippery. They may con-
cern someone’s intentions, what they said, what the other person said
(we are all familiar with the “he said, she said” conundrum), or how
tasteful, good, or fashionable something is. In these instances, fact
checking requires the collaboration of the other person, who, if he or
she is a gaslighter, won’t be forthcoming; reliance on one’s memory; or
trust in one’s pre-existing values and commitments. But—and here is
the kicker—any reasonable person must be open to the fact that they
may misremember something, may be wrong about something, or
have values that are outdated or problematic. Such a person is, there-
fore, vulnerable to gaslighting.
A successful campaign of gaslighting leads to victims doubting their
version of reality, becoming convinced of their own badness, while
defending or protecting the perpetrator. It would have been better for
the victims, of course, had they resolved the cognitive dissonance by
rejecting the other person’s reality distortion instead. Psychotherapists
are fond of pointing out that people with trauma, anxiety, or depres-
sion are more likely than people without these disorders to fall into
the snare of someone who gaslights them. They are right. Statistically,
people who were abused as children are more likely to end up in abu-
sive relationships as adults. A recent British study shows that one-third
of people who were abused as children were also abused as adults, com-
pared to only 11% of people who had not been abused as children.13
The problem with focusing on prior abuse is that it ignores the very
reasonable impulse to doubt oneself once one is confronted with an
alternative portrayal of facts, which is presented forcefully and re-
lentlessly. Malcolm Gladwell in his Talking to Strangers uses the term
“default to truth”— relying on the work of psychologist Timothy
Levine—to denote our tendency to believe others are telling the truth.
Depending on who you are, it’s either a profound or an obvious truth.
Because we assume that people tell the truth, we tend to believe a liar
even when the lie strains our credulity. Should we happen to think
we know otherwise, we are liable to at least doubt ourselves for a mo-
ment. The people who never experience the slightest tendency to
doubt their own version of the truth are not quite as reasonable. In
fact, the tendency to hold on to one’s beliefs come hell or high water
is characteristic of people with mental disorders, such as psychopathy,

schizophrenia, or paranoia. Being willing to doubt one’s own version of
the truth is a sign of mental health. But mental health does not always
lead to good consequences, because when placed in adverse envir-
onments, a healthy individual may be easier to manipulate. A recent
study on false memories makes clear what I am talking about.14
9.3 False Confessions, False Memories
On January 3, 1989, Huwe Burton returned to his home to find his

mother murdered in her bed. She had been stabbed twice in the neck.
Blood was everywhere. He called the police. The police investigated.
They determined that there was no sign of forced entry. The only thing
missing was the family car and the keys to it, so it didn’t seem like an
ordinary burglary. The police therefore decided it was an inside job.
Burton’s father was in Jamaica at the time. The main suspect therefore
quickly became Burton himself. He was just 16 years old. The police
interrogated him for hours. They convinced him that he was up for
statutory rape for having sex with his 13-year-old girlfriend unless he
confessed to murdering his mother. The court would judge the murder
as an accident, his interrogators said. Huwe was alone. He was young.
He was in shock. He had no family to look out for him and no lawyer
present. Two days after the murder, he confessed. But he quickly
recanted. And the case was not as open and shut as the police made
it out to be. A week after the murder, the investigating officers pulled
over a young man, who lived downstairs from Burton and his mother.
He was driving the missing vehicle. When questioned, he claimed
he had helped Burton cover up the murder. He, however, had prior
convictions for rape and attempted robbery. They let him go. He was
killed before the case went to trial. Burton was sentenced to 15 years to
life and spent 20 years in prison until the Innocence Project helped get
his sentence overturned.15
Burton’s confession seems to have determined the outcome of the
case. In the early 1990s, the idea that someone might confess to a
crime they did not commit seemed outlandish. Moreover, why would
someone admit to having killed his own mother if he hadn’t done it,
particularly when it would mean up to a lifetime in jail? It just makes

no sense. Indeed, it does not, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
It is yet another quirk of human psychology. Of course, people don’t
just run around making false confessions. They usually do so under
coercion. Burton didn’t just sit down and confess. He was alone, in
shock, and questioned for hours by police officers who had wrought
false confessions from two other men just months before. Something
was up with the way these interrogations were conducted. However, al-
though these police officers were particularly problematic, that wasn’t
the only problem. Another one was that the police at the time were
trained to use the so-called Reid interrogation technique.
The Reid interrogation technique should be familiar to you from the
cop shows you’ve watched. The suspect is kept in a small claustrophobic
room for hours while repeatedly accused of committing the crime in
question and presented with—real or manufactured—evidence to the
effect that he committed the crime. In one instance, a suspect accused
of killing his parents was told that his father had survived and testified
to him being the killer. The father was, in fact, dead. After the Reid in-
terrogation technique was introduced—to replace police beatings—it
was so successful in obtaining confessions that it was quoted in the US
Supreme Court’s 1966 Miranda decision, which requires suspects to
be informed that they are not required to give self-incriminating evi-
dence. As it stands, the technique sounds eerily like gaslighting—po-
lice gaslighting. For this reason, there has been pushback against the
method in recent years. In 2017, Wicklander-Zulawski & Associated,
a major group of consultants working with US police departments,
announced that they would no longer train police in the Reid interro-
gation technique.16
False confessions, it turns out, can happen to anyone. Professor of
psychology Saul Kassin has long criticized certain types of interroga-
tion techniques—those that presume guilt and are confrontational in
nature—because they lead to false confessions in a significant number
of cases. False confessions are hard to overturn and many cases are de-
cided on the basis of a confession, even when the evidence suggests
that the accused did not commit the crime. Out of the now 675 people
who have been exonerated through the Innocence Project, more than
one-quarter made false confessions. In 2017, the New Yorker ran a story
about the botched police interrogation of the murder of Helen Wilson

in Beatrice, Nebraska. Six people were convicted for the crime after a
long series of interrogations, where one person implicated another. All
were eventually exonerated. All confessions were false. Most of the ac-
cused were troubled; some had been the victims of incest, while others
had intellectual disabilities. Incredibly, one of the accused, Ada JoAnn
Taylor, claims to have vivid memories of murdering the victim. The
story suggests that some people are particularly prone to falling victim
to gaslighting techniques. Whereas Burton recanted almost immedi-
ately, Taylor carried the guilt of a crime she didn’t commit for more
than 20 years. However, we now have evidence that practically any-
body can fall victim to false memories and false confessions.17
Psychologists have induced people to generate false autobiograph-
ical accounts of a variety of activities and events, such as getting
lost in a shopping mall as a kid, being attacked by a vicious animal,
cheating on a test, and, astonishingly, having tea with Prince Charles.
Following up on this research, Julia Shaw and Stephen Porter found
that after three interviews using the types of techniques Kassin says the
police uses and that lead to a high number of false confessions, 70%
of a pool of university students had acquired false episodic memories
of a crime they were told they committed during their youth! What
were those techniques? First, the interviewer would create a rapport
with the student. Then, the student was given powerful evidence to
the effect that they committed the crime, such as “Your parents told
us that . . . ”; was exposed to social pressure, such as “Most people are
able to recall these events if they try hard enough”; and was provided
advice about what to do to remember the event, such as using imagery
to mentally recreate it. When asking about their memory of the event,
the interviewer would use long silences or open-ended questions, such
as “What then?” When debriefed at the end of the third interview, the
students were astounded to realize that the event they had been asked
to recall never happened. They had not suspected it.18
Were there any differences between true and false memories?
Sure. The students would recall their true memories more vividly,
with greater certainty, in more detail, and they were more likely
to recall the true event from both an observer and a field perspec-
tive. Nevertheless, the students would recall details involving visual,
tactile, auditory, and olfactory information in both true and false
memories, would be as anxious when recollecting true compared to

false actions/events, and would use as much cognitive elaboration in
the two cases. It is worth dwelling on the fact that these interviews
were carried out under relatively cozy circumstances. The students
were not trapped for hours with policemen while isolated from other
people. They were not in shock, and instead of being sleep deprived,
they went home and came back for another 45-minute interview after
a week. If such mild inducement can cause false memories of crimes,
imagine what a rigorous police interrogation can do! Note also that
the crimes the students were recalling were either theft, assault, or as-
sault with a weapon. Students would even confabulate details about
their contact with police!
It is not hard to see how this is relevant to perspective taking. If you
are presented with evidence about yourself that conflicts with your
own conception of what happened, what you did, your intentions,
or your ultimate motivations, it is easy to come to doubt yourself.
Ordinarily, we hope, people do not force their point of view on others
in this way. But, as we have seen, gaslighting is far from uncommon.
It is a very common behavior in addicts, for instance. They convince
their close ones that they are not using, explain away all the discrep-
ancies, and often try to convince their parents, spouse, or children
that they are the ones having an issue. These cases are not too hard
to understand on the model of false memories and false confessions.
But other cases are harder. For instance, the gaslighter might be con-
vinced of his or her view of things. Moreover, that view of things
may be unreliable more than clearly false. Is this real gaslighting? It
fits with common usage, for sure. Some psychologists will insist that
gaslighters usually know what they are doing, but when reading these
articles, one gets the curious sense that the people who influence
others to doubt their version of reality are vilified. It is doubtful that
all these characters have a good grasp of reality. Let’s not forget that a
particularly narcissistic person may not be wrong about how another’s
action impacts them. Their error often lies in a singular focus on their
own impressions to the exclusion of any other account.
This leads us to the next question. Just how common is this form
of influence, where one person imposes her point of view on another
and the other person comes to accept it, usually to his own detriment?
According to some, this is very common.
9.4 Synthesis
Hegel promises that the World Spirit moves in the direction of greater
synthesis. In his master-slave dialectic, that is surely the desirable
result. But how do we find synthesis at the interpersonal level? In
Chapter 8, I made it clear just how important taking another’s point of
view is to our self-understanding, but we have now seen the dangers
of doing so. If we simply accept that person’s construal of what we do,
we haven’t achieved synthesis so much as a takeover. In some cases,
the takeover may be friendly and ultimately helpful, but in other cases,
such as the ones we have considered here, it is decidedly hostile. What
should we make of it all?
On a first pass, it seems that if we can only determine whether other
people suffer from mental illness, addiction, or just a bad character, we
can protect ourselves against undue influence. This is good advice, no
doubt. But it also presents a fundamentally misleading way of thinking
about intersubjectivity. More precisely, it pathologizes what Hegel saw
as a natural urge in all consciousnesses, namely to be recognized. Not
in a superficial way, like being checked out in the pub—the need for
recognition goes deeper than that. A conscious being desires recog-
nition of its experiences, its way of seeing the world, its point of view.
The problem, as we saw, is that only another conscious being can give it
this recognition, but such a being also invariably represents a different
point of view. Another person is a blessing and a curse at the same time,
if we allow ourselves to be dramatic about it. On the one hand, she
validates our existence as conscious beings by acknowledging that we
too are a source from which the world is experienced. On the other, she
might invalidate our point of view, even if she acknowledges our status
as the haver of such a view. Nobody is ever going to see exactly eye to
eye with us. And so others deny us the freedom of simply taking the
way we think of ourselves, our experiences, our actions, and the world
in general as a reflection of how things are. Hence, a clash is inevitable.
De Beauvoir describes such a clash in She Came to Stay, although
the love triangle at the center of it hardly counts as an everyday occur-
rence. Nevertheless, the story certainly helps bring out the logic of the
master-slave dialectic, even if no synthesis is reached. Instead, we have
a final revolt against the hostile takeover, which leads to the oblitera-
tion of the master-consciousness. The unhappiness of the master-slave
dialectic is something of a theme among existentialists. It is epitomized

by the male character in Sartre’s play No Exit, who exclaims, “Hell is
other people.” He has died and finds himself enclosed in a small hotel
room with two women. As they await what they expect to be unim-
aginable suffering, while bickering among themselves about their re-
spective guilt or innocence, it dawns on him. Hell is not being roasted
alive. Hell is to be stuck in a room with other people who relate to you
in whatever way they see fit. What he means is that his own view of
himself is boxed in by the points of view of the people around him.
Those points of view limit him and prevent him from being truly free
in his choice of who he is. Clearly, the existentialists do not have good
options for a synthesis. Instead, their characters seem stuck in un-
healthy ways of dealing with the master-slave dialectic.19
We can do better. If we return to She Came to Stay, we see that de
Beauvoir’s heroine, Françoise, has an all-or-nothing attitude to things.
Either the point of view of Xavière is adopted or her point of view is.
This makes sense, of course, if we assume that there can only be one
true point of view. But therein lies the problem. There is no God’s point
of view, and even if there were it would not coincide with Françoise’s,
nor would Françoise have access to it. This is why we talk about points
of view in the first place. Imagine that our two cartoon figures in
Figure 6.1 arguing about whether the numeral they each see from a
different angle is a 6 or a 9 switched places. It would surely be absurd
for our number 6 man, once he has seen the 6 from the 9 angle, to walk
over and murder the number 9 man, just to ensure that his perspective
remains unchallenged. What I want to suggest is that Françoise’s dra-
matic act of killing Xavière is no less absurd. There will always be dif-
ferent points of view on her actions, her relationships, and her affairs.
She is unlikely to find anyone who will fully adopt her way of seeing
things in all details. So potentially she would have to kill everybody.
That would obviously be messy and tedious. So, why did she have to kill
Xavière? Couldn’t she just ignore her point of view?
De Beauvoir’s point is, of course, that it is only by killing Xavière
that Françoise can ignore her, because she is all too aware of how jus-
tified Xavière’s complaint is. The murder symbolizes what we do men-
tally when we blot out other people’s just complaints about us that we
do not want to hear, that we cannot bear to accept. Françoise’s problem
is that she cannot synthesize. She cannot accept part of what Xavière
says without accepting all of it and replacing her own experience with
Xavière’s. But, returning to our number guys, it doesn’t have to be like
this. Given the evidence available to them, it is perfectly understand-
able why they would believe what they believe. But now that they have
seen the numeral from a different angle, they should also be able to ac-
knowledge that it could be a 6 or a 9. The synthesis in this case is clear,
even if unsatisfactory. It is a 6 or a 9 or, perhaps, both (for the devious
artist).
What would a synthesis look like for Françoise? Well, she unde-
niably went behind Xavière’s back in her relationship with Gerbert,
whom she knew was involved with her. Sure, all these characters are
happy about open relationships, but it does seem as if there is one
rule: transparency. Xavière was transparent about their affair, as
was Pierre. Françoise was openly supportive of it. She suffered in si-
lence. Xavière’s complaint that she was kept in the dark is valid, then.
Moreover, whereas Xavière made sure she had Françoise’s blessing,
Françoise doesn’t care to make sure that Xavière is okay with what she
does. On the other hand, the Gerbert affair was probably not a way of
taking revenge on Xavière. But, then again, we read that “Françoise
suddenly felt very tired. The arrogant heroine she had so passionately
hoped to vanquish, was there no longer; there remained a poor, hunted
victim, from whom no vengeance could be exacted.” Perhaps, then, we
ought to say that Françoise did not only get involved with Gerbert to
exact revenge. Gerbert seduced her. She did not resist. But, as she says
to Xavière, “I did not laugh at you. . . . I only thought more of my-
self than of you.” It’s not a difficult synthesis. Xavière exaggerates the
wrong done to her and just how callous Françoise was, but Françoise
did nonetheless betray her confidence.20
The problem, then, is not that a synthesis is out of reach. The
trouble is that any synthesis that will do justice to her own actions and
intentions is unacceptable to Françoise. She cannot bear to see her-
self as having betrayed her friend, even if her friend has been a bit of
a nightmare to her. She must be innocent; she must be in the right. In
killing Xavière, Françoise is killing off part of her own conscience. She
recognizes her guilt, can’t live with it, and so shuts it down. By doing so,
she shows that she has failed to come to terms with the existence of The
Other. Why? Because it interferes with her own good view of herself
(even as she recognizes that this view is false).
The lesson for us is simple. Don’t go the way of Françoise. Although

we sometimes just want to understand what others think, and so take
their perspective for that explicit purpose, we should be careful not to
get stuck there. The point of considering other people’s point of view
is not to make them our own. It is to give us more information about
them for some purpose or other. Perhaps we want to improve our
relationships; perhaps we are interested in testing our own ideas about
the way of things. Whatever the case might be, once we have taken an-
other person’s point of view, we are tasked to come up with a synthesis
of our view and theirs.
9.5 The Uninvolved Observer
I have argued that taking another person’s perspective is usually an

initial step toward a larger goal. Once we move beyond whatever un-
derstanding this method has afforded us, we should try to synthesize
this view with our own. That can sometimes be difficult, particularly
if there is heated disagreement about how to view the same series of
events, as in She Came to Stay. But why should we aim for a synthesis
if we have the option of taking the point of view of an uninvolved ob-
server instead? If we look back at the gaslighting cases, it seems that
the easy way to solve the problem is to adopt the point of view of an
uninvolved observer and discount both one’s own point of view and the
view of the person with whom one is in conflict. Taking this approach
gives us the most objective view of the situation we can achieve, and
that is surely preferable to the rather partial way of looking at things
that characterizes each person’s first-person perspective. It is tempting,
surely. But it is also problematic for several reasons.
First, to fully adopt the perspective of an uninvolved observer, you
must discount your own experience of the situation. In Chapter 8,
I warned of the dangers of not being sufficiently critical in our assess-
ment of our lived experience. So, discounting your self-engaged and
possibly overwrought picture of events might seem quite helpful. And
I’m not saying it might not sometimes be a good idea. The problem,
though, is that you are also thereby invalidating your own experience.
You become self-alienated, as an existentialist might say. In this re-
spect, then, you won’t be much different from the person who is being
gaslighted. You have lost your own point of view, only the view you
are adopting is not that of a hostile, dominant other, but of someone
who has no particular interest in you or your relationship. It is an er-
satz solution, which is to say it is no solution at all. Second, you also
discount the perspective of the person with whom you are in conflict.
And despite Xavière’s early manipulation of Françoise, we see that she
has a valid point. Françoise too sees it, before she decides to kill it off.
Perhaps an uninvolved observer would catch the betrayal, but they
are unlikely to capture how the betrayal is experienced. Something is
inevitably left out of the picture by shutting out the point of view of
someone you are involved with altogether. It might, of course, be nec-
essary if you are in the clutches of a particularly problematic person,
but it should be the exception rather than the rule. And third, a large
part of this book is an attempt to persuade you that taking up the point
of view of another agent is essential in many cases. Without it, you can’t
fully understand the other. And so, although there may be cases where
downplaying, even ignoring your own or another person’s point of
view is recommended, in the general run of things you ought not to.
It is worth dwelling on why agent points of view matter so much. It is
tempting to think, particularly when faced with entrenched conflicts,
that if we could all just be objective, things would improve. Hopefully,
I have already convinced you that there is no objective point of view,
since that would be a view from nowhere. But it is easy to wonder
whether we shouldn’t get ourselves into a state of being as little invested
in a particular conflict as we can be, in order to see our way out of it.
The problem is that the more we move away from engagement, the
more indifferent we become. And it is not at all clear that indiffer-
ence toward the feelings and experiences of human beings serves any
human project. There is another danger that lurks here, and that is that
dehumanizing is a mark of the ultra-objective stance. You might get rid
of conflicts this way, but only at the cost of dispensing with humanity.
Experiences matter. And an experience is always somebody’s. It is al-
ways had from a perspective. To appreciate that experience, we must
attempt to take up the point of view of someone having that experi-
ence. You know the story by now.
Whereas the perspective of an uninvolved observer cannot re-
place the perspectives of people in an interaction exactly, it can serve a
multitude of other purposes. It may be a step toward taking the other

person’s point of view. The more wrought a disagreement, the harder it
is to adopt the other’s perspective. This is particularly true as the other’s
view of one is unlikely to be complimentary in any way. But one might
be able to take a more distanced view of matters. Again, if one takes an
observer point of view, one will still want to come back, compare, and
synthesize with one’s own view of things. It too can serve as an impor-
tant corrective as we saw in the previous chapter. But it can also serve
as a stepping stone to taking the point of view of the person with whom
one is in conflict. It does not, however, obviate the need to consider
other agent points of view. Even if the temptation is there to think that
it provides the objective, and therefore the “real,” view of things, we
know better.
9.6 Conclusion
Taking another’s point of view is of great importance when it comes

to understanding people, what matters to them, what we are doing to
them, and who we are to them. However, such perspective taking also
leaves us uniquely vulnerable to hostile takeovers. It helps to keep in
mind that a synthesis, not assimilation, is the next step. The point of
putting yourself in another person’s situation is not to remain there
when it comes to their assessment of you, what you do, or the world
as a whole. It is to use that information wisely alongside what infor-
mation you have gathered yourself. It might be thought that another
way to protect ourselves from gaslighting and other forms of influence
is not to focus on what another involved person thinks, but to take the
point of view of an uninvolved observer. I hope I have persuaded you
that this is a false hope. That point of view is valuable, certainly, but
does not replace that of others. However, it has often been thought
to be what might save us from the inevitable subjectivity that springs
from empathic engagements with others when it comes to things like
morality or the law. This is what we turn to next in the last chapter of
this book.
10
Being Impartial
Both the backward-looking, particularistic, and moralistic

ground of an unconscionability decision, and the forward-
looking paternalistic rule that might follow from it on
the traditional model, should be informed by the judge’s
moral sense—and hence, in part, by moral emotions and
moral sentiments, including both empathy and sympathy.
The judge might or might not be morally repulsed by the
parties’ behavior. He won’t know, however, whether the
behavior is morally objectionable or not unless he can em-
pathize with both parties to the transaction, and then reg-
ister a stronger sympathetic response to either one or the
other. That’s just the nature of the beast.
—Robin West, “The Anti-empathic Turn,” p. 29
For much of the last century, Robin West argues, the idea that em-
pathy is essential to good juridical decisions was entirely mainstream.
Knowledge of the law was not enough. Only if the judge also consid-
ered empathically the claims of both parties could she make a judg-
ment appropriate to the case at hand. The application of the law on
this picture is historical, backward-looking, and particular. It relies on
common law, natural law assumptions, moral sense, and legal prece-
dent. Judicial reasoning therefore relies in part on analogy to past cases.
But to determine whether one case is sufficiently like another, the judge
must “know something about the subjective feel of promising, and of
warranting, and of diagnosing, and of discriminating. Analogous rea-
soning by definition seemingly requires empathic understanding, at
least where it is people’s utterly subjective situations, problems, fears,
anxieties, suffering, opportunities, dreams, and foibles, from which,
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197637081.003.0011
Being Impartial 221
and to which, one is analogizing. And, adjudication does proceed

largely, albeit not entirely, by analogy.”1
This is no longer the case. American law has undergone a paradigm
shift, West argues. She illustrates the shift by means of focusing on
changes in contract law, specifically the conscionability doctrine. This
doctrine applies to contracts whose terms overwhelmingly favor the
party with the most bargaining power or are so unjust as to be con-
trary to good conscience. Current contract law has turned away from
an empathic regard for the litigants at hand toward concern about the
consequences of any judgment for the welfare of future contractors,
West points out. Skepticism about our ability to understand other
people’s ideas of welfare, along with the idea that each person is the
best judge of his or her own well-being, has made empathy suspect as a
legal practice. Instead, there has been an increased focus on using ob-
servable and quantifiable actions as a guide to welfare. And how better
to quantify than in terms of money? Friedrich Hayek’s brilliant idea
was to quantify individual welfare in terms of market choices. What
people decide to spend their money on seems neutral when it comes
to different ideas about welfare. Because it both promises an objec-
tive measure of welfare and readily accommodates different values,
Hayek’s idea has increasingly come to permeate social policy, politics,
and the idea of law. Welfare and how to measure it are obviously dis-
tinct. However, once you adopt a certain measure, it often comes to
define the way you think of what you measure. And so, the ability to
choose in the marketplace has become central to safeguarding welfare
in common law, certainly in the United States.2
The scientistic approach to welfare has made empathy with others
irrelevant, West points out. In fact, it has done more than that. It has
made empathy “positively toxic,” and not only in common law, but also
in law more generally. We, as citizens, “are now very publicly being
taught that empathic judging is not only not something to strive for in
judging, it is something to avoid or even abhor. Empathy itself, we are
told, is contrary to the rule of law. It is the precursor to impermissible
activist judging.” West warns us that much has been lost in this transi-
tion. We lose the moral interpretation of many common law concepts,
such as contract as a promise and tort as a harm, the idea that we can
put moral limits on what is permissible in contracting, and the notion
that common law and previous rulings can be a repository of wisdom

that springs from particularistic decision-making. On my reading, the
quick way to summarize her concern is that the individual has fallen
out of the legal picture and been replaced by a generic rational person,
whose future welfare is measured in terms of her economic choices.3
It is interesting to observe how similar the ideas here are to those
of empathy skeptics in philosophy and psychology. In his summary of
the shortcomings of empathy, Jesse Prinz stresses that it can lead to
preferential treatment and that it is biased. We empathize more with
our friends and allies than with people we don’t know, we empathize
more with our countrymen than with foreigners, we empathize more
with the cute than the unshapely, and so on. Why is this bad? It can
lead to us coming to the aid of those we empathize with before we help
those we do not empathize with but who might be in greater need. We
are told of hospital waiting lists, stigmatized ethnic groups, and hur-
ricane victims. Almost never is a personal encounter with another
person used as an example of a morally relevant situation. Paul Bloom
continues this trend. When discussing the ills of empathy as a moral
guide, Bloom focuses on how to eliminate hunger in the developing
world, on orphanages in far-flung countries, on curing illnesses, on
helping victims of natural disaster, and on other large-scale operations
in which the individual has disappeared, and we are instead making
utility calculations. As he says, “The real problem is that often people
don’t care about maths.” Because empathy makes us care about the in-
dividual and not the masses, it is bad as a moral tool. In fact, Bloom
explicitly likens a moral agent to a policymaker. The impersonal ap-
proach here looks much like that of Chief Justice Roberts, who likens
himself to an umpire.4
In this morality-by-the-numbers approach, concern for other indi-
viduals is gone, and we are left making unemotional calculations about
how to make the world a better place for faceless individuals we will
never encounter. Morality, like the law, has become entirely imper-
sonal. This approach is a mistake. Not only is impersonal impartiality
impossible, but it is also undesirable. We have seen why it is impos-
sible in Part I. It is now time to tackle the issue of why it is undesir-
able and why, contrary to what we have been told recently, empathy
makes us more, not less, impartial. In section 10.1, I argue that empathy
Being Impartial 223
is essential to law because knowing a person’s intentions plays a cru-

cial role in determining his or her culpability (mens rea). In section
10.2, I consider whether we can replace the points of view of individual
stakeholders with the point of view of an Impartial or Ideal Observer,
and I argue that we cannot. Ideal observers lack the humanity that
is central to our ethics and our laws. In section 10.3, I address often-
voiced concerns about empathy, and in section 10.4, I summarize the
overall argument of the book.
10.1 The Perfect Judge, the Ideal Jury, and

the Innocent Victim
Who is the perfect judge? And what makes her so? At the beginning
of this book, I talked about the debate surrounding Sotomayor’s con-
firmation hearing. She was attacked for having an empathic stance to
applying the law and for claiming that a wise Latina woman would
reach a better conclusion, as a judge, than a white male who hadn’t lived
the life she had. The worry was that she would introduce bias toward
white nonminorities. Why? Perhaps the idea goes something like this.
A Latino person, and perhaps especially one as aware of being Latina
as is Sotomayor, is overwhelmed by her identity to such an extent that
she is incapable of rendering verdicts that are fair to anyone outside
her ethnic group. Instead, she’ll give Latinos a pass for more serious
crimes and reserve her harsher sentences for white people. Justice will
no longer be blind.5
The unquestioned underlying assumption is that white male
justices do not have an ethnic identity that affects their ability to render
judgments fairly and in accordance with the law. You don’t have to have
read this book to be suspicious of that claim. It seems fishy because it
is fishy. Of course, white men belong to an ethnic group. And if group
identity affects a person’s objectivity or impartiality, it affects theirs too.
It is therefore easy to see Sessions’s opposition to Sotomayor’s nomi-
nation as willful blindness and posturing. But this belies a deeper, and
more troubling, fact. People who belong to the majority group, whose
vision of life and well-being is culturally sanctioned and promoted
in social policy, popular culture, and the arts, find it easy to ignore
that their vision of life, of other people, and the world is a vision. It
is easy for them to regard other ways of seeing things as perspectives.
This is, of course, a magnified version of the agent perspective, but its
magnification is important. It is made possible by being comfortably
ensconced in a position of power where your point of view, in its most
general outlines, is shared and unquestioned. This is exactly what gives
support to Sotomayor’s claim that she might be better at judging im-
partially than is a white male justice.
Sotomayor’s claim is not that her bias will counterbalance the bias
of white male judges so that overall, the total judgments rendered by
the courts will be less biased against racial minorities. It is, of course,
true that only 7% of sitting lower federal court judges are Latino and
only 27% are women. Comparatively speaking, the population share of
women is 51% and Latinos 12.6%. If she were as biased as white male
judges, and in the same way toward the groups she identifies with, we
would expect overall bias to change. And that would be fairer than the
current situation. But Sotomayor doesn’t propose this at all. Instead,
she claims that she is better able to supersede her identity and provide
more impartial judgments than a white male judge. Why? The fact is
that women and minorities are painfully aware of perspectives because
the dominant one is not their own, nor does it center on them. The
reigning cultural perspective in the United States, Canada, and Europe
is still that of a white male, a fact that is brought home to women
and minorities every day. To adapt, you must adopt that perspective.
People who are unreflective may fail to notice it. But those of a more
reflective mindset are apt to see it writ large in the world they live in.
As a white male it is easy to bumble through life without stopping to
consider that you have a point of view. If you live safely in the main-
stream, you won’t face much fundamental opposition. The advantage
of someone like Sotomayor is not simply that she is a racial minority
and a woman and therefore biased in ways different from a white male,
but that her status has led her to recognize prevailing biases and actively
work against them. One way to do that, she says, is to empathize with
the people toward whom one is biased. This sounds very good in the
abstract. But it may be hard to figure out how it works in practice. To
see how it might be implemented, let’s think about the role of intent in
criminal law.6
Being Impartial 225
Intent is a fundamental part of determining what is called mens

rea—Latin for guilty mind. To determine someone’s culpability, we
must know their intentions. And it is here that perspective taking is
particularly important. In Chapter 3, we saw that we assess other
people’s relative warmth or morality quickly and unthinkingly. These
judgments reflect our history, our experiences, and the prejudices of
our culture. Psychologists Amy Cuddy, Susan Fiske, and Peter Glick
have produced a graph that places social groups on the dimensions
of perceived competence and warmth. In the United States, house-
wives, Christians, Americans, middle-class people, the Irish, and black
professionals are all rated high on warmth and competence, standing
in stark contrast to homeless people, who sit alone in the bottom corner
of low warmth and low competence. Welfare recipients, poor blacks,
Turks, Arabs, and feminists do a little better, but not much. This is sig-
nificant since warmth has enormous implications for how we see the
rest of someone’s personality and their actions, and how we act toward
them. What is a judgment of warmth ultimately? It is a determination
of the quality of a person’s intentions, and their honesty, trustworthi-
ness, dependability, and moral caliber.7
The way we think of the quality of someone’s intentions, then, is very
important to our subsequent attitude toward them. Judgments con-
cerning someone’s warmth, personality, and intentions appear to be
closely linked, mutually informing one another. The warmer we judge
someone to be, the more benevolently we regard their motives. The
colder we think a person is, the more likely we are to ascribe question-
able intentions to them. This applies not only in everyday life but also
in the courtroom. Mauricio Delgado and James Dilmore write:8
As is well known by trial attorneys, the cultivation of a witness’s

image early in a proceeding as a trustworthy, moral, and upright in-
dividual may reap rewards throughout the trial. Indeed, the moral
aptitude of a witness is often central to a criminal trial where the
actions of the accused are being evaluated for criminal intent.
Witnesses thought to be warm are more likely to be believed. But it

is not only witnesses who are judged this way. More troublingly, the
moral standing of victims also appears important. It profoundly affects
how jurors judge the severity of the crime committed against them.
The Capital Jury Project, a country-wide research program focused on
determining whether jurors’ sentencing decisions in capital cases con-
form to the constitution or are biased, has revealed that victim charac-
teristics influence jurors’ tendency to recommend the death sentence.
For instance, if a murder victim was randomly chosen, was engaged
in an everyday activity, was of good moral and social standing, was
married, had children, or was a woman, the jury is more likely to rec-
ommend the death sentence. If, on the other hand, the victim was un-
married or divorced, was relatively friendless, had personal troubles,
used drugs or alcohol, or was personally involved with the perpetrator
in some way, jurors are more likely to recommend life. Assuming that
harsher sentences track the wrongness of the act, we can conclude that
who the victim is affects how wrong murdering them is thought to be.
That the nature of the victim influences jurors can also be seen in the
time spent discussing the victim during deliberation. Forty-three per-
cent of jurors said they spent a great deal (11%) or a fair amount (32%)
of time discussing “the reputation or the character of the victim.”
Thirty-nine percent said that their jury spent a great deal (18%) or a
fair amount (21%) of time debating the “victim’s role or responsibility
in the crime.” The longer a jury deliberated a victim’s character or role
in the crime, the less likely they were to recommend the death sen-
tence. (I am not recommending the death sentence, by the way, but
merely using this evidence to show how jurors’ judgments are affected
by the characteristics of victims.) In other words, defendants who got
life were more likely to have killed someone whose character or re-
sponsibility was under debate. A person’s moral character, therefore,
even affects judgments about what was done to her. How culpable was
she for her own murder? It is worth mentioning that such cases are
not restricted to drug deals gone bad or arguments between the victim
and the perpetrator. In one instance, a victim who was picked up late
at night by another man in a sleazy bookstore was thought to be partly
responsible for his own subsequent murder.9
When it comes to the accused, the United States has fairly complex
laws about the permissibility of character statements. However, jurors
have plenty of information upon which to base character judgments
even in the absence of such evidence. The Capital Jury Project was
Being Impartial 227
conducted at a time when victim impact evidence was impermis-

sible in court. Nonetheless, victim characteristics influenced jurors’
decisions. This is all to say that a person’s perceived trustworthiness,
honesty, fairness, intent, helpfulness, and morality dispose us to inter-
pret their actions more charitably. This tendency is strongest when an
action is ambiguous, or when the intention behind it is. Most actions,
however, are at least a little ambiguous when it comes to figuring out
the quality of the intentions behind them.
Judges too have been under scrutiny recently. Some studies have
found extraordinary things. For instance, an Israeli study claimed
that judges who were hungry were less likely to post bail for the ac-
cused than were judges who were not hungry. Another study found
that judges whose favorite football team suffered a surprising defeat
the previous week gave longer sentences than did judges whose foot-
ball teams were not so shockingly defeated. Whether these particular
results will withstand scrutiny or not, there is much evidence of judi-
cial bias. For instance, judges are just as susceptible to intuitive biases
as are ordinary people, including in their judicial reasoning. And
judges too rely on the assessment of the moral character of the accused
in many cases, for instance, when determining the severity of the crime
or whether to grant bail.10
As we have seen, perspective taking gives us a tool to counterbal-
ance our pre-existing interpretations of another person’s actions. In a
series of studies that support this idea, psychologists Ximena Arriaga
and Caryl Rusbult found that people are more willing to accommo-
date romantic partners and to forgive transgressors if they take their
perspectives. It seems that in doing so, the partner is able to seize upon
an interpretation of the other person that does not involve imputing
bad intentions to them. I should note that the Capital Jury Project also
found that jurors often spontaneously identify with some victims,
which leads to their taking their perspective and to harsher sentences
for the defendant. They also spontaneously fail to identify with other
victims, typically those deemed to be morally questionable, and this
leads to more lenient sentencing. These findings lend support to those
who decry the bias empathy imparts on a person’s judgments. And one
might therefore think we ought to do more to prevent jurors—and
judges, for that matter—from empathizing. The trouble is that there is
no reason to think that failure to identify leads to more just judgments.

In fact, statements from jurors suggest the opposite. Heinous crimes
are sometimes regarded as not so bad if the victim is judged to be un-
worthy of empathy. We come back, yet again, to the view that our only
option in counterbalancing our own perspective is to adopt those of
others. This is one way to make sense of Sotomayor’s claim that em-
pathy is essential to good judging.11
I have focused on Sotomayor here, not because I think perspective
taking is more central to law than other areas of life, but because a good
judge is generally assumed to be an ethically competent person. She
represents a moral ideal. Consequently, we look to her as a guide to
how to be better people. A problem remains, however. It is all well and
good to say that we cannot rely on our own perspective alone when we
try to understand others and what they do; it is quite another to insist
that we ought to take a variety of different perspectives to reach the
kind of impartiality we commonly think is central to morality and the
law. Why not take the perspective of some ideal moral person who is
unhampered by the pitfalls of perspective, someone who is truly objec-
tive and impartial? Such a person would not have a perspective at all,
if we are to believe moral philosophers, since they tend to argue that
morality must be aperspectival if it is to be impartial.12
10.2 Impartiality and Perspective
It is at this point that the typical empathy enthusiast goes on the of-
fensive. If perspectivism implies partiality and bias, then we need
to explain how we might overcome such partiality and bias. I have
explained how, once we recognize that we already have a perspec-
tive, and therefore are invariably partial and biased, it is obvious that
to become less biased, we must adopt more perspectives. In doing
so, we adopt other sets of biases that give us a new way of thinking
about things. This is only a solution, of course, if we then step back
and balance these various perspectives against one another to reach an
overall assessment of the situation, whatever that might be. Empathy
is not simply empathy, if you like. It is part of a process. In a dispute,
for instance, you might take the perspective of the other person and
Being Impartial 229
an uninvolved observer. This change of perspective shifts your own

interests, so that they are centered on another person. It is this fact
that underwrites the techniques’ capacity to yield relatively impartial
judgments. Incidentally, it is worth pointing out that despite the outcry
about bias, many studies show that taking others’ perspectives makes
us less biased against them and the group they belong to. That, surely, is
desirable. A critic might protest that this now makes us biased against
other individuals and other groups. But there is no reason it should if
we are taking another’s perspective to better understand them or to
rid ourselves of bias toward them. Moreover, if we are trying to get a
more impartial view of things, the answer is not to empathize with nei-
ther party, but with both. You should be familiar with this line by now.
But what is often ignored in this debate is the questionable standing of
the silent premise in the argument against empathy. Partiality or bias is
bad, and we ought to get rid of it—sooner rather than later, please. But
is it really?13
Think of it this way. If partiality was truly a morally bad thing,
then you are acting badly whenever you privilege your child over
others, privilege your spouse over other people’s spouses, or selec-
tively spend time, effort, and money on a friend over people you
don’t know. Your entire network of personal relations would be rid-
dled with immorality. Family values are perhaps the worst of all. They
refer to extreme partiality toward those we love or regard as family. If
you were to be impartial, you should not spend a penny more on your
own child than on other people’s children. And so on. Most people
would regard such a result as unpalatable, if not itself immoral. This
is why morality is often thought to regulate the social sphere, some-
times to the exclusion of the private. What happens in somebody’s
home is nobody’s business, the story goes. Perhaps the idea is that
our ordinary tendency to care for those we are related to is enough
to ensure a happy family life, and so the partiality problem in ethics
disappears (sort of). But few people think that we have fewer or no
obligations to our family than toward strangers. Rather, the opposite
is true. We have more or special obligations toward members of our
family. The same is true of friends and partners. It is no accident that
Dante places Judas Iscariot in the lowest rung of Hell. After all, he
betrayed his friend and teacher.14
Although people insistent on the fact that morality implies impar-

tiality suppress this fact, almost all will accommodate it if pressed on
the point. But it is often not well explained by their theories. Bernard
Williams, for instance, felt he needed to write a paper arguing against
the idea that someone must find a way to morally justify saving his
wife over a stranger, if he cannot save both. Such a justification, he fa-
mously says, involves “one thought too many.” We shouldn’t have to
argue that we are allowed to have family and friends matter more to us
than strangers. There are limits, of course. Nobody thinks it is okay to
sacrifice a village to shock one’s partner out of their bored stupor. But
once we allow that partiality is not only tolerable in a morally upright
person but also actually morally required, we can see that empathy
skeptics’ fixation on bias is misguided.
Someone might say that this type of impartiality—which most
ordinary people would agree is not only acceptable but also prob-
ably morally required—is different from the kind of impartiality that
Sessions claimed to want in a judge and that empathy skeptics are gen-
erally concerned about. Whether we must weigh all people’s interests
equally when considering what we are morally required to do is a sep-
arate question from whether our prior beliefs, interests, ways of seeing
things, etc., create problems for our ability to judge people, actions,
and situations fairly. Therefore, our favoring our family or friends over
other people, for instance, is neither here nor there when it comes to
the impartiality we are really concerned with. This objection is fair only
up to a point. But when Williams talks about the thoughts that go into
the rescue scenario he is considering, he is in fact touching on the bias
we are concerned with here, for his relationship to his wife shapes the
way he conceives of what is happening, its importance, and his space
of options. As I have argued throughout the book, it is our location in a
web of relationships, interests, and concerns that determines our per-
spective. Williams is surely not to be reprimanded for seeing the world
in this way. If he were, we might equally lambast him for conceiving of
his environment in relation to his body, which is something that keeps
him alive. Bias, in general, is not a bad thing. It is certain forms of bias
in certain contexts that are problematic.15
When we clamor for impartiality in morals or law, we are not ac-
tually asking for the impersonal impartiality that would come from
Being Impartial 231
no perspective. Instead, what we want is impartiality toward certain

people in a certain situation and in certain respects. What we mean
by this is that the impartial person should have no stake in the out-
come she’s trying to determine. She must not, for instance, already
want to condemn the other person. She should not let pre-existing
ideas about the act, the person, or the situation determine her judg-
ment. Keeping in mind her own partial view and her fallibility, our
impartial judge instead considers other ways of viewing the same
thing and, of course, the important subjective facts pertaining to the
individuals in that situation. The impartiality that we need and can
get lies in adopting different perspectives on the situation. The subse-
quent synthesis of different points of view is an understanding that is
impartial enough.
It is easy to see the problem with this position, however. How many
different points of view do we have to take into consideration? Are we
well positioned to do so? Won’t we get overwhelmed? And so on. The
more frugally minded will want something simpler. And why not?
Why spend time triangulating different points of view if we can take
the perspective of someone not directly involved in the case? Why not,
in other words, simply adopt an observer perspective?
The problem with this solution is that it leads to ignoring the way
the situation is regarded by the main actors. Along with bias, we are
likely to throw out their experiences, their concerns, their feelings, and
their humanity. Not only would we think less about their experiences
and feelings, but we would also be emotionally disconnected from
them. Instead, we would be focused on their intentions. We would
think of their beliefs as beliefs, and consequently potentially flawed;
we would consider these people to be more swayed by external factors
and desires; and we would be more interested in their warmth than
their agency. We would focus on the abstract features of the situation
they are in and its overall significance instead of its particularity and
context. Not only that, but we would likely also assume that in doing
this, we would understand the people embroiled in conflict better than
they understand themselves! We would suppose that their psycho-
logical needs are less important to them than their physical needs; we
would underestimate the pain of their psychological experiences and
assume that they have more voluntary control over their beliefs than
we do. This is an observer perspective. It doesn’t look particularly ob-

jective to me.
But if an ordinary observer perspective won’t do the job, how about
the perspective of a superlative observer of sorts? To philosophers,
this idea should be familiar from the works of David Hume and Adam
Smith. To counterbalance the biasing effects of empathy and self-love,
Hume recommended that people adopt “some common point of view,
from which they might survey their object, and which might cause it
to appear the same to all of them.” He is working up to the idea that it
is disinterested consideration of someone’s character, or their action,
which is ultimately morally relevant. Smith followed suit but talked
instead of an Impartial Spectator, namely someone who is unbiased
and fully informed about our motivation, character, the consequences
of our actions for others, and so on. Such a person does not exist, of
course. No one is fully impartial. But we can imagine such a person,
says Smith. When we consider someone from a moral point of view, as
victims or beneficiaries of someone’s actions, as actors, or as uninvolved
observers, we ought to adopt the perspective of an Impartial Spectator.
In this way, we overcome our own and others’ limitations, which is to
say our biases, limited knowledge, affective dispositions, etc.16
Later versions of the Ideal Observer have been even more exacting.
Roderick Firth’s Ideal Observer is omniscient with respect to noneth-
ical facts, omni-percipient, disinterested, dispassionate, consistent, but
in other respects normal (whatever that could possibly mean). It is easy
to see why this observer is “ideal,” or if not ideal, then at last “ideal-
ized.” The observer isn’t even close to being human. But if our Ideal
Observer isn’t human, how can we be assured that his or her judgments
are actually relevant to human morality? We can, Firth seems to admit,
because the Ideal Observer is really just a stand-in for God’s all-seeing
(and unsentimental) eye. And God knows what is best for humans al-
most by definition. But does he?
I am reminded of a wonderful talk I heard years ago by philosopher
Brad Art regarding the Book of Job. Job recounts the testing of Job’s faith
as part of a bet between Satan and God. Satan points out that God’s
righteous followers also happen to be quite well off, are healthy, have
wives and children, etc. But what would happen if, instead, they were
sick, shunned by everybody, and bereft of all their belongings, their
Being Impartial 233
family, etc.? Would they still follow God? To find out, God allows Satan
to kill Job’s wife, all his children, and his livestock and strike Job with
disease. Only once Job submits himself fully to the will of God does he
relent. And thus does God win the bet with Satan. To reward Job for his
faithfulness, he heals him and gives him a new wife, new children, new
cattle, etc. “So Job died, being old and full of days,” the book ends. This
“happy” ending is extraordinary, Art points out. It shows a striking
blindness to the value of individual human life, human attachments,
and human experience. A wife or a child cannot simply be replaced
with a new wife or new children, even if those children are more nu-
merous and more beautiful (as the book says). The trauma suffered due
to sickness, ostracism, suffering, and loss is not erased by becoming
well again or respected again. In fact, one might describe the attitude of
the God of Job as callous and cruel, completely lacking comprehension
of what matters to a human life—perhaps exactly what one would ex-
pect from an Ideal Observer.17
The problem with the Ideal Observer we have introduced to ensure
impersonal impartiality is its inhumanity. An Ideal Observer would,
among other things, be unable to experience “surprise, disappoint-
ment, the anxiety which springs from ignorance of the future,” says
Richard Brandt in his critique of the view. Being omniscient, it will
know the facts. But what are the facts? And is it enough to know them?
Is the ability to experience feelings irrelevant to their moral impor-
tance? This is less clear. Experiential or affective knowledge is, at least
intuitively, different from abstract knowledge. When Job complains to
God about how he has been afflicted, he points out that since God has
no body, he cannot suffer. And because God cannot die, he cannot un-
derstand mortality. As Art argues, this means that an “invulnerable,
immortal God cannot understand the two most important experiences
of vulnerable, mortal humans. Job concludes this makes it impossible
for God to be an ideal moral observer of humans.” This, Art continues,
highlights the necessity of a bridge between the divine and the human,
which we later find in the human being of Jesus of Nazareth. We will
return to that shortly.18
Margaret Urban Walker also raises the alarm. She questions, like
me, whether the purported judgments of this Ideal Observer are rele-
vant to our morality. Ideal observers, she writes,19
are, in Seyla Benhabib’s image, “like geometricians in different rooms

who, reasoning alone for themselves all arrive at the same solutions
to a problem.” This they may do, because the stipulation of total in-
formation and perfect epistemic prowess bypasses questions of
techniques and means of acquiring relevant information, especially
those interpersonal methods of pooling and sharing and interpreting
information for greater completeness and mutual correction.
This stands in obvious contrast to what we do on an everyday basis,

where we often discuss difficult moral choices with other people, and
where we negotiate how we or they are to be treated. In effect, the Ideal
Observer thinks for others, not with them. This worry also applies to
Smith’s Impartial Spectator, who is supposed to be sympathetically in-
clined toward the people it passes judgment on. Assuming that sym-
pathy really is compatible with the sort of impartiality Smith has in
mind, a sympathetic Impartial Spectator is still paternalistic. It does
not communicate with the parties involved in a moral dispute. But
surely, Walker says, we want to think with others, not for them when
passing moral judgment.
Someone might argue—and in fact one of my students has—that
by stipulation the Ideal Observer possesses all the information we
could possibly acquire through the methods Walker talks about.
Consequently, the Ideal Observer already knows the upshot of any pos-
sible debate we could have with other people. It is therefore unneces-
sary for us to actually negotiate with the actors in a dispute or take each
person’s perspective. Instead, all we need to do is to imagine that we are
an Ideal Observer or, alternatively, imagine the thoughts of an Ideal
Observer. Putting things this way highlights the problem with this idea
and is presumably why neither Hume nor Smith recommended it as a
technique in everyday moral judgment, but as a theory of what features
of an action make it morally right or wrong. The problem is that the
imagination is not magical. How can I imagine the outcome of a dis-
cussion about moral matters between engaged participants purely by
wanting to? This is surely beyond our abilities. At the very least, I have
to imagine the actual discussion. But to make the discussion realistic,
I have to imagine what matters to each person. To do so I must, of
course, take each person’s perspective. These can then be contrasted
Being Impartial 235
with my own point of view, which, if I am personally uninvolved, is

an observer point of view. I can then arrive at a less biased, and more
nuanced, position. This is, of course, exactly what I have argued. Notice
that my suggestion is not that perspective taking eliminates the need to
listen to other people and discuss with them to decide together what
actions are morally appropriate actions. Taking up different points of
view is not simply another, more complex, form of paternalism. My
point is that without taking other people’s point of view, we hear what
others say from our own point of view, which makes the resultant in-
terpretation more biased than it would be if we had also taken into con-
sideration the speaker’s point of view. In a court of law, for instance,
people speak. But often they are not listened to. Another way of putting
the point is that although it may be logically possible that there could
be an intelligence that simply possesses all information about all pos-
sible interactions without having observed them or engaged in them,
and not from any point of view, it is not an intelligence of our world.
We may be able to imagine the existence of such a thing, but we are
certainly unable to imagine the content of this knowledge without also
imagining all the individual interactions, etc., from certain points of
view.20
What marks another significant difference between us humans and
the ideal moral arbiter is that it is a “spectator” or “observer,” and not
an actor. We, however, are in the messy situation of not only making
moral judgments but also acting on them and having to live with the
result. A judge doesn’t have to; prison guards, executioners, or parole
officers take care of the rest. Does this make the judge better than us
judgment-wise? It is often thought so. But Walker points out that when
faced with a difficult choice, we sometimes ask ourselves whether we
would be able to live with our decision. How would I feel, for instance,
if I lied to a dying parent about fulfilling a problematic wish of theirs
after their death? This problem is not faced by a spectator. A spectator
judges but does not act. Consequently, he or she is insensitive to facts
central to moral deliberation for most people. Somebody who is un-
involved is less biased, but they are surely also less engaged. We are,
as I showed in Chapter 2, actors first and philosophers (thinkers,
reflectors, speculators, ruminators, etc.) second. And surely morality is
about acting more than it is about thinking.
There are many reasons to be unhappy about an Ideal Observer

theory. What promises to meet our hopes for “true” impartiality and
objectivity also removes us from the messiness of human interac-
tion, negotiation, and compromise. It threatens to lead to judgments
unsuited for human justice and human concerns. So, we have to syn-
thesize different points of view, which in many cases involves trian-
gulating our own, another’s, and an uninvolved observer’s points
of view. And that is a good thing. Triangulation not only keeps us in
touch with our humanity but also does justice to the interests of ac-
tual people. Now, someone might object that the Ideal Observer crit-
icized earlier is not Smith’s Impartial Spectator. Gilbert Harman, for
instance, says that the Ideal Spectator “imagines himself or herself in
the circumstances of the agent and imagines how he or she would react
in those circumstances.” The spectator is also a member of the person’s
moral community, and so his or her reactions are heavily influenced
by convention, and because of the dialectical interplay between taking
an inside and an outside view of our actions, the spectator is also really
an actor and not just a spectator. This Impartial Spectator seems much
more like a real person, who triangulates her way to good judgments.
But appearances are deceiving in this case. Why? What Harman writes,
just after the last quote, is this:21
If the agent’s reaction is similar to the reaction the spectator ima-

gines having, the spectator sympathizes with the agent. If the agent’s
reaction is more extreme than the spectator’s imagined reaction,
the spectator does not sympathize with the agent. . . . Spectators ap-
prove of the reactions they can sympathize with and disapprove of
reactions they cannot sympathize with.
Triangulation is different. When we triangulate, we take another

person’s point of view seriously and do not simply disapprove of it be-
cause our unreflective selves, or some Ideal Spectator, do. We consider
it alongside the other points of view in play. We do not take up the
point of view of someone who knows better, namely someone who has
the “right reactions.” We can, of course, decide not to put too much
stock on reactions that seem unjustified given the situation. But this
type of triangulation still differs from what an Ideal Spectator would
Being Impartial 237
do. It removes the notion that some ideal presence can adjudicate the
case at hand. It’s just us here. Instead of appealing to some fictitious
Divine Parent, we must negotiate how to play nice with each other.
It is worth contrasting this view of impartiality with the new,
improved legal ethos we encountered in section 10.1. By focusing on
how judgments affect social welfare in the abstract, keeping in mind
baselines and means, judges increasingly ignore the individual. The ac-
tual person lodging a particular complaint about a certain contract,
say, is now largely irrelevant to the judgment that must be rendered.
Instead, the judge is to consider a rational agent—whose rationality is
usually reduced to market choices—in the abstract. As philosophers
are well aware of, it is difficult to give an account of rationality, let alone
rational wanting. And, as my friend Tony Jack would add, it is a mis-
take to think reason is just one thing. Empathy is a form of reason!22
The reason law took this turn is instructive. The move arose from
skepticism about the knowability of other people’s preferences. If we
could only suppose that we all have the same preferences, then we
could proceed to think about welfare on that basis. But we can’t, of
course. Empathizing with others does no good because we are simply
too different from one another to get good results, the thought goes.
But then how do we do justice to subjective preferences? If this worry
sounds familiar, it’s because it is. This was the concern we started out
with. Over the course of the book, we have seen that it is overblown. It
nonetheless permeates recent liberal thought. A liberal society allows
its citizens to pursue their interests, whatever they may be, provided
they do not conflict with other citizens pursuing their interests. The
authors of the US Declaration of Independence made it very clear that
a person (or a white propertied man, at any rate) has a right, not only
to life and liberty, but also to the pursuit of happiness. One person’s
idea of happiness, however, may not be another’s. For those who were
escaping religious persecution in Europe, this was far from being a
mere philosophical point. If, then, we want our laws and morals to be
general enough to allow for substantial differences in ideas of happi-
ness, we cannot rely on our own ideas about what happiness is or what
leads to a good life. What to do? The reduction of welfare to market-
place choices promises to solve the problem, economist Hayek argued.
Calculating people’s preferences “objectively” in terms of what they
spend their money on helps us out of the subjectivist mire of individual

preferences. In this way, the marketplace became the repository of ob-
jective human value.23
We are all now familiar with where this neoliberal ethos takes
us: nowhere good. The problem is, of course, that our idea of happi-
ness cannot be reduced to dollars spent. People sacrifice themselves
for ideas they hold dear, they forego economic benefits because of
adherence to ideology or faith, and what matters most to people is
widely thought to be priceless. As John Lennon sang, “Money can’t buy
you love.” In our urge for greater fairness, we have created a monster.
Human values have fallen out and been replaced with money, and the
once-sacred individual has become a mere consumer of goods. In the
end, this dramatic turn was unnecessary. As we have seen in this book,
we can understand each other, even if not perfectly so. And there is no
reason to think that consumption is a better indication of individual
preferences than is empathic understanding. What people spend their
money on is often a result of passing fads, of aggressive advertisement,
of supply and demand, etc., none of which expresses fundamental ideas
of happiness relevant to social policy or law. At the end of the day, there
is more that binds us together than separates us. In our enthusiasm for
greater liberality, we have lost sight of what morality and law are re-
ally about. They don’t concern the application of some immutable rules
laid down from up high. Instead, they are systems in place to regulate
our behavior so that we can live together in peace. At the core of this is
respect and care for the well-being of others, both of which are facili-
tated by empathy and perspective taking.
Like so many things that seem to be unmitigated goods, impersonal
impartiality may not actually be what we want when we call for impar-
tiality. We want a little less than that. And guess what? Triangulation
promises to yield as much impartiality as we need. Let me end with an
observation made by the religious historian Karen Armstrong about
the Golden Rule, namely “Do unto others as you would have them do
unto you.” “I found that every single religious tradition has formulated
that Golden Rule—and said that it is that—and not a particular doc-
trine, that is the fundamental teaching of their religion.” If our ideas of
happiness and living well were so different, it would be nothing short
of a miracle that different religions all agree on this simple point. It
Being Impartial 239
is hard, for instance, to imagine that the Jesus who insisted that the
Golden Rule was the core of his teaching would have made a bet with
the devil the way the God of the Book of Job did.24
10.3 Nobody’s Perfect
I have argued that to understand yourself, the world, and others better,
you must take the perspective of other people. You can do so by imag-
inatively occupying a position in a web of interests, concerns, and
relationships that mirrors theirs or, more simply, by empathizing with
their emotions (which achieves similar results). But what are we to do
about the darker sides of empathy? Empathy isn’t just criticized for
its bias. We discussed the problem of overidentification in Chapter 9.
Here we saw that although the dangers are very real, they are not un-
manageable. The error lies in thinking that because empathizing with
others is a good thing, we ought to do it all the time, indiscriminately,
or as much as possible without taking into consideration the context,
who the other person is, the possible results of doing so, etc. Bloom,
who extolls the virtues of rational thinking over empathy, makes this
mistake. But it is a poor empathizer who sets aside the other tools at his
or her disposal and only empathizes in all situations. Of course, we need
to consider whether empathizing with someone in a certain situation
is useful, whether it will lead to good results or not, and perhaps also
whether the other person would want us to empathize with them in
the first place. Fritz Breithaupt, in his ominously titled The Dark Sides
of Empathy, cautions that empathy is better for the empathizer than
the recipient of it. Why? Being empathized with is disempowering, he
says. I do wonder whether he has in mind pity more than empathy.
I rarely hear people complain about being empathized with too much.
It is usually the other way around. Nonetheless, it is perhaps polite to
ensure that one’s empathy is desired before one proceeds to give it.
Another worry of Breithaupt’s is also voiced by Bloom. Empathy
leads to violence and hatred when we empathize with victims. So-
called moralistic violence is actually quite common. As Breithaupt
insists, “People imagine that empathy can help resolve tensions in
cases of conflict, but very often empathy is exactly that thing that
leads to the extremes, that polarizes people even more. . . . Humans

are very quick to take sides. And when you take one side, you take the
perspective of that side. You can see the painful parts of that perspec-
tive and empathize with them, and that empathy can fuel seeing the
other side as darker and darker or more dubious.” This is why Bloom
advises us to set empathy aside and embrace its nicer cousins, sym-
pathy and compassion. It would be good advice if we could be assured
that sympathy or compassion can do the things for us empathy can and
that they do not also have its shortcomings. Sympathy or compassion,
however, does not give us other points of view. But they do seem to
lead to moralistic aggression. Stefan Pfattheicher, Claudia Sassenrath,
and Johannes Keller conducted a series of studies where they found
that the more someone sympathized with a victim of wrongdoing of
some kind, the more harshly they wanted to punish the perpetrator.
In one story, one person broke his shoulder as a result of a young man
bumping into him aggressively. People who did not sympathize with
him much, because they were instructed to remain objective, thought
the young man ought to be punished, of course. But the people who
sympathized with the victim thought he ought to be punished more.
This is exactly what Bloom worries about in empathy. Sympathy and
compassion, then, are not ready substitutes for either perspective
taking or affective empathy.25
The critique of empathy due to its role in moralistic aggression shows
something typical. Most recent empathy criticisms are based on sim-
plistic ideas about empathy: what it is, what it does, and how it should
be practiced. As I have been at pains to point out in this book, taking
another’s perspective is quite a complex activity. One doesn’t want
to rush into it half-cocked, nor does one want to be stuck there once
the deed is done. Many studies seem to ignore the intricacies of good
perspective taking. Take the following example, for instance. Maron
Mooijman and Chadley Stern found that asking social conservatives to
imagine being homosexual and having sex with their partner increased
their dislike of the person they imagine to be and homosexuals as a
group, and it made them feel less positive about sexual minority rights.
The reason, it seems, is that imagining sexual activity with a same-sex
partner made them disgusted. What are we to make of this? We are
not, I argue, to conclude that perspective taking does no good. What
Being Impartial 241
the study actually shows is that the conservatives did a bad job at
taking a gay person’s perspective and that the perspective-taking in-
duction was poor. If you are a socially conservative heterosexual man
and you imagine having sex with a male partner, you are not taking
the perspective of a homosexual man. It would be like a homosexual
man imagining having sex with a woman in an attempt to put himself
in a heterosexual man’s shoes. Neither one is realigning his interests
with those of the other person. Instead of imagining having sex with
someone he does not sexually desire, he should imagine having sex
with someone he loves. Failure to do so does not show that perspective
taking is bad, only that it is hard.26
Nonetheless, there is no denying that taking someone else’s perspec-
tive is sometimes worse than not doing so. Jacquie Vorauer and Stacey
Sasaki, for instance, have shown that when the person, whose perspec-
tive we are encouraged to take, has negative characteristics (is rude or
callous), performs negative actions (pushes people, ignores those in
need), or constitutes a threat to us or our self-image (a member of a re-
pressed group), taking their perspective can make us judge them even
more harshly and increase our hostility toward them. The pattern is
predictable. We are happy to identify with people who have character-
istics we regard as positive, but we distance ourselves from those with
traits we disapprove of. It seems that we ascribe negative intentions to
those who perform negative actions, we ascribe hostility to those we
feel threatened by, and we don’t look beyond the negative traits we see
in others. This tendency is unfortunate since it is often those we dis-
approve of that we are most in need of understanding from the inside.
But there is reason to be optimistic. Most of the studies that show
these negative effects of perspective taking are studies where students
are being asked to take another’s perspective. They are not independ-
ently motivated to do so. A person who really wants to understand
another can try harder. Indeed, she often does. It seems almost too
obvious to point out. But the literature often ignores this fact. Trying
harder in this instance involves seeking out more information about
the other person. Studies show that self-serving biases are usually
the result of our failing to consider evidence that goes against our
preferences. One reason to be optimistic about the prospects of suc-
cess when we work hard at getting more information about the person
we are trying to understand comes from acting. After Schindler’s List

came out, Ralph Fiennes was interviewed by the New York Times
about his role as Goetz, an infamous camp director in Nazi Germany.
An otherwise decent person, Fiennes described how he eventually
got to like Goetz. “It is not a rational thing, but it is an instinctive
thing. . . . [I]‌f you are playing a role, you are immersing yourself in
thinking about that character—how he moves, how he thinks. In the
end he becomes an extension of your own self. You like him.” If we are
persistent, we can overcome our disinclination to identify with people
we think of as bad. Whether we ought to obviously depends on the
situation.27
Identification with Goetz points to another concern that is some-
times voiced in connection with empathy. It can be used for ill as much
as for good. The philosophical literature has long maintained that nei-
ther empathy nor perspective taking ineluctably leads to caring for the
other person. Torturers, we are told, use empathy to figure out how
to hurt their victims better. And in a recent article, Nils Bubandt and
Rane Willerslev argue that in some non-Western cultures, “the first-
person imaginative projection, at once cognitive and emotional, of
oneself into the perspective of another . . . is . . . closely linked to a de-
ceptive ambition.” For instance, a Siberian hunter knows how a moose
he hunts sees the world. He knows that she will not be afraid of another
moose. She might even calmly approach it. He therefore dresses up as a
moose, and moves like one, to deceive her so that he can kill her. There
is not much caring here, it seems.28
Here again, the problem is not empathy but a particularly narrow
view of what perspective taking or empathy is supposed to do for
us. The underlying idea seems to be this. Because people sometimes
empathize with others but still do horrible things to them, empathy
cannot be good. But for this argument to work, we need another
premise. Namely, we need to suppose that whatever motivation em-
pathy provides will always override any other motivation someone
might have. But why should we suppose that? After all, it’s not even
true that most motivation derived from moral considerations cannot
be overridden. People steal, cheat, lie, harm, and kill others with
alarming regularity. Even those of us who do not, often act immorally
because, at the time, other things mattered more. Even moral saints
Being Impartial 243
must act in ways that contravene moral motivations because of moral

dilemmas.
A moral dilemma arises when I am morally required to do two in-
compatible things. Suppose I am faced with a runaway trolley hurtling
down a track with five hikers on it. As luck would have it, I am right by
a switch that will allow me to divert the trolly onto another track. This
track, however, has one hiker on it. Being a morally upright citizen,
I am motivated both to divert the trolley, so as to save the five hikers,
and to not divert the trolly, so as not to kill the one. But I must do one or
the other. Whatever I choose to do, I will override a moral motivation.
The fact that I do so does not show that the motivation that did not
lead to action wasn’t good or moral in the first place. Therefore, the fact
that I override a motivation to be kind to the being I empathize with—
because I need to eat, for instance—does not show that empathizing
itself is not a good thing. Now you might think that this trolley case
doesn’t compare to the Siberian hunter example. Why? Because the
hunter uses empathy to harm the being he empathizes with. Put differ-
ently, empathy is the means to the end of killing. That is not true in our
trolley case, where killing the one hiker is not the means to saving the
five (the diverting of the trolley is), but merely the (foreseeable) side
effect of doing so.
However, the literature on moral dilemmas contains examples that
more closely mirror the Siberian hunter case. Imagine the same situa-
tion as before. You see a trolley hurtling toward the five hikers. In this
instance, however, there is no switch. You do, however, find yourself
on an overpass next to a fat man. You recognize that the only way to
stop the trolley is to throw him onto the tracks. Your jumping in front
of the trolly will do no good because you are short and light. Suppose
you judge that the most important thing in this instance is to save the
five hikers. You decide to push the fat man off the bridge. We might
say that you were motivated to do so by a desire to save the five hikers.
But that motivation directly led to killing the fat man. Does this mean
that the motivation to save people in danger is itself bad? Surely not.
And so, it is too quick to claim that if empathy can be used for bad, it
cannot be good. As Osgood Fielding III says to Daphne—aka Jerry—
in Some Like It Hot after s/he reveals that he is not a she, “Nobody’s
perfect.”29
10.4 Conclusion
We have reached the end. If I have been successful, you are now firmly
convinced that each one of us sees the world in a way that is a func-
tion of both the way the world is “in itself ” and who we are, what we
want, where we are, and who we are associated with. We understand
the world in a way that is relative to our interests and our concerns.
A perspective is often seen as a bias. And bias, we are told, is BAD. The
best thing to do, then, would be to cancel perspectives. But attempts to
do so are doomed to fail. Perspectives are inevitable, I have argued, and
are a part of our humanity. The solution to the dark side of perspec-
tive is not to attempt to excise every fragment of subjectivity from our
worldview. Instead, it is to multiply perspectives, and in doing so bal-
ance them against one another. Bias is not bad in itself. Without bias in
what we attend to, few of us would be alive, because instead of reacting
immediately to danger, we would be considering all the other aspects
of the situation we are in. Bias keeps us alive. Bias helps us pursue our
interests. Bias helps make us happy. But bias can also lead to trouble.
It leads us to understand what other people do and why they do it in
terms of how it affects us, our previous experiences with actions of
that kind, and so on. We are also biased toward thinking of our actions
more in terms of what they accomplish for us and less in terms of how
they affect other people. To solve the dual problems of limited self and
other understanding, we must learn to take other people’s perspectives.
This is far from an impossible feat because of interpersonal differences;
the relatively invariant nature of perspective enables us to take the per-
spective of other agents because we are agents ourselves.
How does it work? Instead of remaining centered on ourselves, as we
usually are, we recenter ourselves on the person whose perspective we
want to take. To do so, we have to shift our survival interests, physical
capabilities, relationships and attachments, and hopes and interests so
that they radiate out from the other person. This involves identification
and projection. But it involves a lot more than that. Had perspective
taking only involved projection, Julie would have failed to understand
me, I would have continued think my ex-boyfriend didn’t respect me,
and Buffy wouldn’t have saved Willow. When we shift our center to an-
other person, we correct for our differences by replacing what we know
Being Impartial 245
are their relationships and attachments to similar relationships or

attachments of our own. This is why a person who ends up feeling dis-
gusted after imagining being gay and being intimate with their partner
has failed the exercise. If you are heterosexual, you should not imagine
having sex with a person of your own sex. You should instead imagine
having sex with someone you love or, at the very least, someone you
are physically attracted to. If, therefore, you are incapable of figuring
out how another person is situated in terms of her attachments and
interests, you will have a hard time taking her perspective. You have to
work at it. As another empathy enthusiast Roman Krznaric points out,
we can read widely about other people’s experiences, put ourselves in
the types of situations they find themselves in, and so on. We can, of
course, also interact with them if we are in a position to.30
We do not always have to work hard to gain insight into another
person’s experience. When we emotionally empathize with another
person, I have argued, we thereby adopt their perspective, at least the
part of their perspective that is constituted by their emotional expe-
rience. As we saw in Chapter 6, emotions provide a smorgasbord of
information about a situation’s (potential) impact and how to react.
Fear signals danger, fixes our attention on potential threats, prepares
us to engage in compensatory action (freeze, flee, or fight), and so on.
Of course, we don’t obtain this information in the form of a scientific
report. It is embodied (incoming large object!), evaluative (oh, crap!),
welfare related (I am in danger!), and motivationally poised (run!). It
may take effort to unpack it at a more conscious level. In general, we
never adopt anyone’s complete perspective. That is beyond our power.
But we can take up his point of view in certain cases and toward certain
things. Empathizing is an easy gateway to the other, but it is one we are
often barred from taking by pre-existing antipathy, distraction, inat-
tention, or sheer discomfort if the other is suffering. That most of my
examples of perspective taking in the book are mainly of the elaborate
cognitive kind should not be taken as an indication that affective em-
pathy is not important. It is.
When we adopt another’s point of view, it is as if we were going
through what (we imagine) the other person is going through. Because
the agent perspective reflects our embeddedness and our survival-
oriented natures, once we adopt it in another situation, we naturally
imbue that situation, the action, or the event with self-interestedness.

As a result, we represent the significance of the situation to the other
person in the form of our own thoughts, feelings, and desires about
that situation. What this helps do is present the situation the other
person is in in a new light. Perspective taking encourages an orienta-
tion toward the other, where their well-being is represented as being as
important, or nearly as important, to us as is our own. It is a peculiarly
selfless orientation given that it is built out of self-concern.31
It is not only when it comes to others that taking a different perspec-
tive is useful. It is true of ourselves too. When we witness ourselves
from the outside, new things stand out. In particular, moral features
have a way of reasserting themselves when we move beyond our un-
reflective, but nonetheless self-interested, conception of the situa-
tion. Being able to adopt other perspectives is necessary for us to be
responsible for our actions precisely because we are so prone to think
of things in terms of how we are benefited or harmed. If we are to do
right—even by our own standards—we must understand the nature
and consequences of our actions, and our own perspective gives a de-
cidedly partial view of this. How our actions appear when we think of
them as if another person performed them, or as if we were watching
ourselves act, also reveals something about our character. We have a
natural tendency to regard our intentions as good, but we often deceive
ourselves and ignore what is so obvious to others. To suppose we have
the ultimate say when it comes to the quality of the intentions that ulti-
mately caused us to act is a mistake. To truly understand the quality of
our actions, we need to do more than consult our own sense of what we
did and why we did it.32
I have not discussed the interactor perspective much in this book.
This perspective, once we move beyond the entangled and yet oppo-
sitional structure of the victim and perpetrator perspectives, is really
more about perspective having than perspective taking. Because there
is no previous intention to take another’s perspective and since, strictly
speaking, you are not taking the other person’s perspective in isolation
from his or her interaction with you, the flow of information is much
more complex. We are sharing a cocreated experience in many cases.
And that has a logic to it that exceeds anything discussed here. The
sense of togetherness and the sense of sharing an experience, which are
Being Impartial 247
often integral to doing things together, are themselves instruments of

creating a new understanding of self and other. In particular, it helps us
understand that we are not as isolated as we think we are.
I want to end with Hegel’s insight that we fundamentally crave rec-
ognition. Every consciousness, Hegel maintained, wants recognition
of its existence by another consciousness. A consciousness is a perspec-
tive. What makes one consciousness different from another is not the
formal features of that consciousness, but its content. In other words,
what makes a consciousness the consciousness that it is is nothing
outside the content of its experiences (something we also touched on
in Chapter 1). What we crave, therefore, is recognition of our way of
experiencing the world. It is this recognition that is denied Hermia
in Chapter 1. Her perspective is nothing to her father, nothing to the
Duke of Athens, and nothing to Demetrius. This is the true face of sub-
jugation. As we are becoming increasingly aware, certain members of
society are denied recognition of their point of view but are instead
expected to adopt the ruling or dominant perspective. An example is
women. In the middle of the last century, Simone de Beauvoir created
an uproar by writing about the way women are alienated from their
own point of view and made to view themselves as men see them,
namely as sexual objects, playthings, wives, or mothers. A joke I saw
in the New Yorker years ago captures the issue beautifully. The scene is
a bookstore. A young woman asks the owner, “Do you have any books
about the white male experience?”
The denial of the validity or importance of a person’s perspective is
the greatest violence you can do to her. By refusing to take her perspec-
tive, you show your dominance over her and her insignificance as a
person, as a conscious being. The problem with an ethics or a juridical
system premised on impersonal ideas of objectivity and impartiality is
that they are premised on a way of relating to other people that denies
them recognition. When, therefore, Obama insisted that empathy was
a highly desirable quality in a judge, he was right. The solution to the
problem of bias in empathy is not to empathize less, but to do it more.
Through it, we recognize the humanity of the other. Recognition does
not, as some people seem to think, necessitate agreement. But adopting
a different point of view offers up new ways of thinking about the other,
ourselves, and our common world. That is the power of empathy.33
Notes
Introduction
1. Crawford Greenberg, de Vogue, and Tapper 2009.

2. Zimmerman 2009.
3. Sotomayor 2009.
4. As reported by Rollert 2011.
5. As quoted in Gerstein 2009.
6. Rollert 2011.
7. For the radioactivity of empathy, see Baker 2010. Bloom 2016, although he
was beaten to the punch by Prinz 2011 and Goldie 2011 and, to some extent,
Maibom 2009, 2010. For the dark side of empathy, see Breithaupt 2019.
8. Nagel 1986.
9. Sotomayor 2009.
10. Sotomayor 2009.
11. For racial bias, see Tuttle 2019; Rachlinski, Johnson, Wistrich, and Guthrie
2009; and Report of the Sentencing Project to the United Nations Special
Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination,
Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance 2018. For bias against women, see
Gold 1989 and Darbyshire, Maughan, and Stewart 2002.
12. On Ku Klux Klan denying white supremacy, see Reeves 2016, and for white
supremacists insisting they are not racist, see Demby 2016.
Chapter 1
1. Nietzsche 1887/1989, Book III, section 12.

2. See, e.g., Heal 1986.
3. Borges 1970, p. 66.
4. Goldie 2011.
5. Karsten Stueber pursues a similar line in his 2006 book.
6. Stich 1996.
7. Both this and the earlier quote are from Borges 1970, p. 69.
250 Notes
8. E.g., Schacter 1996 and Baddeley, Eysenck, and Anderson 2009.

9. Stueber 2006.
10. Descartes 1647/2000.
11. For arguments of this type against Descartes’s conclusion regarding his
existence, see, for instance, Kant’s first paralogism (Kant 1781/1998) and
Nietzsche 1886/1996, Chapter 1, section 16.
12. Most people’s characters change over time, as measured by the Big Five
personality traits (extroversion, agreeableness, openness, neuroticism,
and conscientiousness). As a rule, extraversion and neuroticism de-
cline with age, whereas agreeableness and conscientiousness increase
(Donnellan and Lucas 2008; Lehmann et al. 2013; Wortman, Lucas, and
Donnellan 2012). Openness seems to peak in middle age for some groups
(Lehmann et al. 2013) but steadily declines in others (Wortman, Lucas,
and Donnellan 2012). In either case, there are clear changes over a lifetime.
13. James 1902/2002, 142, footnote.
14. Concerning problems understanding our past selves when we have under-
gone significant self- transformation, see also Schechtman 2001 and
Paul 2014.
15. Gordon 1995 talks of “an ego-centric shift.”
16. Gordon doesn’t ignore it but doesn’t capitalize on it as much as I think he
should have. See Gordon 1992 and 1995.
Chapter 2
1. See, e.g., Alberti 1435/1991 and Gombrich, 1995. The quote that follows is
Gombrich 1995, pp. 114–15.
2. Noë 2004, p. 167.
3. I owe the term ‘unrepresented focal point’ to Naomi Eilan 1995. See
also Wittgenstein 1921/1961 for the idea of the experiencing subject as
the point of view from which the world of objects is present, and John
Campbell 1994 for the egocentric representations of perceptual experi-
ence. For the quote, see Wittgenstein 1953, section 129.
4. Perry 1979.
5. For others pointing to the essential action directedness of the essential in-
dexical, see Nichols 2008 and Rey 1997. For the vanishing point of the
world, see Sartre 1943/1966, Part 3, Chapter 1.
6. Locke 1690/1979, Chapter 27. (Chapter 27 only appeared in the second
edition from 1694.)
Notes 251
7. I should note that my colleague Peter Langland-Hassan has just written

a whole book on why what I just said is false (Langland-Hassan 2020).
I can’t go into the details here, but I think he’s wrong (obviously). For
someone who agrees with me that imagination is perceptual in nature, see
Kind 2001. For unilateral visual neglect, see Bisiach and Luzzatti 1978. For
seeing and imagining faces, see Damasio, Tranel, and Damasio 1990 and
Young et al. 1994.
8. For the imagery debate, along with experimental data such as the mental
rotation experiments, see Kosslyn 1980 and 1994, and Pylyshyn 1973 and
1981. For a continuation of the debate, see Kosslyn, Thompson, and Ganis
2006 and Pylyshyn 2002. Thomas 2014 is a wonderfully clear and concise
overview of the debate. For philosophical defenses of a quasi-pictorial ap-
proach against the standard objections, see von Eckhardt 1984 and Tye
1988. For criticisms, see Pylyshyn 2002.
9. On the idea that mental imagery is constituted by partial enactment, see
Neisser 1976. For more on the so-called enactive theory of mental im-
agery, see Thomas 2014. For the table tennis experiment, see Antrobus,
Antrobus, and Singer 1964. For the reaction time to peripheral visual
stimuli, see Marzi et al. 2006. For eye movement in REM sleep, see
Sprenger et al. 2010. Martin Hoffman 2006 talks of this as E-imagining,
e.g., pp. 151–57 (visual imagery) and pp. 157–60.
10. Kant 1781/1998 and Husserl 1901/1992. This section owes much to the
excellent introduction to phenomenology by Käufer and Chemero 2015.
James Gibson’s theory of affordances was also heavily influenced by this
tradition, cf. Gibson 1979.
11. Heidegger 1927/2010 and Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002.
12. See Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002. For ‘can’ versus ‘think,’ see p. 139.
13. For Gestalt psychology, see, e.g., Wertheimer 1938 and Lewin 1936. For a
view of emotion that is highly compatible with the idea of our affectivity
coloring our experience of the world, see Lazarus 1984 and 1991.
14. For the dorsal and ventral stream, see Milner and Goodale 1995. For the
close interaction between processing going on in the two streams, see
Hebart and Hesselman and, for grasping specifically, van Polanen and
Davare 2015, and Fabbri et al. 2016. Vishton, Jones, and Stevens 2015
argue that we shouldn’t think of two visual streams as much as two visual
modes. One might think that the existence of the ventral stream (assuming
that this is the correct way of thinking about visual processing), particu-
larly if it can operate in isolation from the dorsal stream, might show that
the view presented here is too strong. It is only part of the truth. However,
neurological and psychological data on visual processing concerns what
252 Notes
the processing is directly for. But the argument made here is actually dif-
ferent. We are not concerned with the fine print of visual processing, but
with the experience of seeing. Our ability to move, the idea is, forms part of
our ability to perceive (see also Noë 2004, pp. 11–12).
15. For the hand and size perception, see Linkenauger, Ramenzoni, and
Profitt 2010.
16. For the reduction of the Ebbinghaus illusion, see Vishton et al. 2007. For
the closer attention to objects within reach, etc., see Brockmole et al. 2013.
For seeing guns when holding guns, see Witt and Brockmole 2012.
17. For the ankle weight experiment, see Lessard, Linkenauger, and
Proffitt 2009.
18. For spider perception, see Cole, Balcetis, and Dunning 2013 and Riskind,
Moore, and Bowley 1995. For emotion and perception more generally, see
Barrett and Barr 2009.
19. See Nagel 1986. The quote is from p. 14.
20. For a recent book about how science is molded to fit the human mind, see
Potochnik 2017. The idea that an engaged and a detached way of seeing the
world are not absolutes, that they infect each other, and that new contrasts
arise from such “infection” is also observed by Nagel 1986.
Chapter 3
1. The table is from Sillars 2011. Sillars notes that this is not an exact tran-
script, so as to protect the privacy of his subjects. Nonetheless, it is closely
modeled on one such interaction.
2. For instance, when conducting family therapy, Sillars reports that parents
and adolescents were partially right about each other about a quarter of
the time, and only quite accurate about the other 10% of the time (Sillars,
Koerner, and Fitzpatrick 2005; Sillars 2011). When it comes to taking
another’s point of view, he observes few spontaneous attempts at it. This
suggests that people assume that they know their partners’ intentions.
3. Malle et al. 2000.
4. Of course, as all philosophers know, Davidson 2001 argues that reasons
ultimately are causes.
5. The example is from Malle 2004, p. 104.
6. Nagel 1979b and 1986.
7. For this and the other actor-observer asymmetries to follow, see Malle
and Pearce 2001 and Malle, Knobe, and Nelson 2007. Some people might
Notes 253
wonder why I don’t talk about the person and the situation, as the lit-
erature on the fundamental attribution error encouraged many to do.
The reason is lack of evidence, as Malle’s 2006 meta-study convinc-
ingly shows.
8. Malle, Knobe, and Nelson 2007. See also Malle 2004, Chapter 7. The ex-
ample of the nonvoter is from Malle, Knobe, and Nelson 2007.
9. According to Malle and Pearce 2001, agents pay up to twice as much at-
tention to their inner mental states as do observers, who pay up to twice
as much attention to agents’ actions or unintentional behaviors (such as
sweating or nervousness). Overall, people pay more attention to actions
or experiences than to unintentional behaviors and thoughts.
10. For our tendency to overestimate how transparent our psychological states
are to others, see Gilovich, Savitsky, and Medvec 1998 and Kamada 2007.
For psychopaths, see Maibom 2019, 2021.
11. Wojciszke 1994 and Wojciszke, Bazinska, and Jaworski 1998. The two
big dimensions are sometimes called the agentic and the communal, e.g.,
by Abele and Wojciszke 2007 or Paulhus 2019. For a review of the litera-
ture, see Fiske, Cuddy, and Glick 2007 and Abele and Wojciszke 2014. For
the description of the two dimensions, see Fiske, Cuddy, and Glick 2007;
Paulhus 2019; and Wojciszke 1994. For the importance, see Fiske, Cuddy,
and Glick 2007 (review). For observer focus on warmth, see Wojciszke
1994. For political candidates, see Sherman, Mackie, and Driscoll 1990.
12. Foulkes 1994. The quote is from p. 681.
13. Foulkes 1994. The quote is from p. 681.
14. Freud 1899/1950 and Nigro and Neisser 1983. Rice and Rubin 2009
found that recalling using multiple perspectives is fairly common. But see
Radvansky and Svob 2019 for evidence that many people have no observer
memories at all. This study contrasts with a whole body of studies that
show the opposite, so should be taken with a grain of salt.
15. Lisa Libby and Richard Eibach have conducted a number of studies on the
characteristics of imaging from the first-person vs. third-person perspec-
tive—cf. Libby and Eibach 2013; Libby et al. 2014; Schaeffer, Libby, and
Eibach 2015. The quotes that follow are from Schaeffer, Libby, and Eibach
2015, p. 534, and Libby et al. 2011, p. 1158.
16. See Libby, Schaeffer, and Eibach 2009.
17. For better recall of emotion, see Nigro and Neisser 1983, McIsaac and Eich
2004, and Robinson and Swanson 1993. For the more detailed character-
ization of emotional memories, see Siedlick 2015 and Sutin and Robins
2010. The neuroscience study is Jackson, Meltzoff, and Decety 2006. The
asymmetry in intensity of affect is from Haslam et al. 2005.
254 Notes
18. For the connection with dissociation and trauma, see Kenny et al. 2009,
Kenny and Bryant 2007, and McIsaac and Eich 2004. For the tendency to
remember traumatic events from an observer perspective, see Cooper,
Yuille, and Kennedy 2002. For shame, Libby et al. 2011 found no main
effect of perspective on shame. However, once you examine the data
from people with high self-esteem and people with low self-esteem sepa-
rately, you find that the latter are much more likely to feel ashamed when
recalling a personal failure from a third-person than a first-person per-
spective. There was no such effect for people with high self-esteem. For
evidence that people with chronic social anxiety tend to retrieve memories
of social experiences from an observer perspective, see D’Argembeau et al.
2006 and Wells, Clark, and Ahmad 1998.
19. For favored views on situations, see Rice and Rubin 2009.
20. For older events being remembered more often from an observer per-
spective, see Nigro and Neisser 1983 and Robinson and Swanson 1993.
For other factors influencing an observer memory stance, including per-
sonal change, see Sutin and Robins 2009. For power and perspective, see
Galinsky et al. 2006. For women remembering objectifying situations
more from an observer perspective, see Huebner and Frederickson 1999.
21. Pronin et al. 2001 and Steglich-Petersen and Skipper 2019.
22. Schroeder and Epley 2020. For agent-observer asymmetries regarding in-
trinsic vs. extrinsic incentives, see also Heath 1999.
23. Nordgren, Banas, and MacDonald 2011.
24. Cusimano and Goodwin 2020.
25. Darwin 1838/1985.
Chapter 4
1. Takaku, Weiner, and Ohbuchi 2001 and Exline et al. 2008; Gospel of
John, 8:7.
2. Baumeister 1997, especially Chapter 1. For Socrates on nobody doing evil
willingly, see Protagoras 358a–d and Gorgias 466–68 in Plato 1997. For the
Jesus quote, see Gospel of Luke, 23:34.
3. Baumeister, Stillwell, and Wotman 1990.
4. The effects reported here are an amalgam of results from three studies,
namely Baumeister, Stillwell, and Wotman 1990; Kearns and Fincham
2005; and Zechmeister and Romero 2002. All three studies found
that victims were still angry and felt their anger was justified; victims
described the perpetrator’s actions as incoherent or incomprehensible
Notes 255
and inconsistent; and perpetrators felt their actions were justified, that
there were extenuating circumstances, and that the victim overreacted, yet
they nonetheless regretted their actions and blamed themselves. Two out
of the three studies found that the victim saw the action as the culmina-
tion of multiple provocations and was more likely to regard it as immoral,
and that the perpetrator thought the victim provoked the action and that
the action could not be helped (Baumeister, Stillwell, and Wotman 1990;
Zechmeister and Romero 2002). Baumeister, Stillwell, and Wotman 1990
and Kearns and Fincham 2005 found that the perpetrator had a tendency
to deny that their actions had negative consequences.
5. Kearns and Fincham 2005, Study 2.
6. When the interaction was unambiguous, the results narrowly failed to
reach significance (p < .057). I’ve written out the somewhat clipped de-
scription of the video with the ambiguous beginning from Mummendey
and Otten 1989 presented in their Appendix I. Instead of using A and B for
the boys, I have substituted names.
7. The reported results are from Mummendey, Linneweber, and Löschper
1984 and Mummendey and Otten 1989.
8. The quote that follows is from Stillwell and Baumeister 1997, p. 1171.
9. The data reported here is an amalgam of several studies, including Stillwell
and Baumeister 1997 and Baumeister, Stillwell, and Wotman 1990. In
their replication, Kearns and Fincham 2005 verify the general pattern of
victim maximization and perpetrator minimization but find additional
differences on a number of the variables. I report only those attitudes that
were found in Baumeister, Stillwell, and Wotman 1990 and that were rep-
licated either in Study 1 or Study 2 in Kearns and Fincham 2005 and/or
in Zechmeister and Romero 2002. The pattern of victim maximizing vs.
perpetrator minimizing was also found in Gordon and Miller 2000.
10. See Stillwell and Baumeister 1997 for the distortion of victim and
perpetrators compared to observers. Gordon and Miller 2000 and
Mummendey and Otten 1989, pp. 35–36, claim that observers have a more
balanced view.
Chapter 5
1. For versions of these protests, see Zahavi 2014 and 2017, Hutto 2011,
Gallagher 2008 and 2017, and Ratcliffe 2007. For the scientistic attitude
toward others, I am thinking about the theory theory, defended by Fodor
256 Notes
1987, Churchland 1970, Stich and Nichols 1995, Astington and Gopnik
1991, and Maibom 2003 and 2007. The most extreme versions of this are,
perhaps, Ryle 1949 and Sellars 1963.
2. Scheler 1912/2008, p. 10.
3. Scheler 1912/2008, p. 6.
4. The original paper is Samson et al. 2010. Celia Heyes has argued that there
is no automatic visual perspective taking, but that Samson et al.’s result
can be attributed to other factors (Heyes 2014; Santiesteban et al. 2014).
However, there have been a range of replications of the results that rule out
Heyes’s alternative explanation. See Furlanetto et al. 2016; Baker, Levin,
and Saylor 2016; and Conway et al. 2017. For examples of how conflict is
related to latency, see Kornblum, Hasbroucq, and Osman 1990.
5. For the study of whether Level 2 perspective taking is automatically com-
puted in the same way as Level 1 perspective taking is, see Surtees, Samson,
and Apperly 2016. For the difference between Level 1 and Level 2 perspec-
tive taking and what is required for their representation, see Michelon and
Zachs 2006. For evidence of Level 2 perspective taking being embodied
because it requires a deliberate movement simulation, see Kessler and
Rutherford 2010.
6. For the original study, see Luan and Li 2020.
7. For an overview of the social facilitation and impairment literature, see
Belletier, Normand, and Huguet 2019. For the fact that presence causes
arousal, whereas attention of some sort is required for most of the other
effects, see footnote 4 and Mullen, Bryant, and Driskell 1997 (for arousal)
and Claypole and Szalma 2018 (for the necessity of attention).
8. For contagious crying in infants, see Simner 1971 and Sagi and Hoffman
1976. For contagious yawning in humans (but not in people with au-
tism), see Provine 1986 and Senju et al. 2007. For contagious yawning in
chimpanzees, see Madsen et al. 2013 and Campbell and de Waal 2011. For
a general review of emotional contagion findings, see Hatfield et al. 2014.
9. Kopel and Arkowitz 1974; Lanzetta, Biernat, and Kleck 1982; and
Zuckerman et al. 1981 show the enhancement or reduction effect of fa-
cially expressing emotions. Asking someone to adopt a facial expression
affects how they feel; for a review, see Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson
1994. For emotion regulation, see Gross 2014.
10. The pencil-in-the-mouth classic study of facial mimicry is from Strack,
Martin, and Stepper 1988. For a failure to replicate, see Wagenmakers et al.
2016, but later Marsh, Rhoads, and Ryan 2019 replicated the result. Some
people argue that the way we recognize emotion is through the subtle mim-
icking of that emotion, e.g., Goldman and Sripada 2005.
Notes 257
11. Dimberg 1982 is a classic piece on spontaneous mimicry, but Blairy,

Herrera, and Hess 1999 and Hess and Blairy 2001 failed to replicate
it. Luckily, many other studies have replicated Dimberg’s results, such
as Weyers et al. 2006; Sato, Fujimura, and Suzuki 2008; and Sato and
Yoshikawa 2007. Additionally, many studies have found facial feedback
when people are exposed to facial expressions of emotion. This implies the
existence of mimicry. See, for instance, the meta-study by Coles, Larsen,
and Lench 2019, which shows univocal support for the fact that feedback
from facial mimicry can initiate affect and modulate it. It does not show,
however, that it invariably does so. For a study showing mimicking posi-
tive vs. negative affect facially, see Achaibou et al. 2008.
12. For a good overview of the recent state of the art in emotional mimicry,
see Hess and Fischer 2014. For individual differences in facial mimicry, see
Dimberg and Thunberg 2012.
13. Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson 1992 posited the existence of this primi-
tive emotional contagion. Wild, Erb, and Bartels 2001 found evidence for
it when it comes to happiness and sadness. For the anxiety and sweat study,
see Prehn-Kristensen et al. 2009.
14. For the work on contagious disgust, see Wicker et al. 2003.
15. For contagious/empathic pain, see Decety et al. 2013; for disgust, see
Benuzzi et al. 2008 and Wicker et al. 2003; for fear, see de Gelder et al. 2004;
for anxiety, see Prehn-Kristensen et al. 2009; for anger, see de Greck al.
2012; for sadness, see Harrison et al. 2006; for embarrassment, see Krach
et al. 2011.
16. For emotional convergence, see Anderson, Keltner, and John 2003. For
similar brain activations for similar emotions, see Nummenmaa et al. 2012.
For improved interaction and brain synchrony, see, e.g., Dikker et al. 2017.
17. For synchronization of brain waves of musicians improvising together,
see Lindenberger et al. 2009. For synchronization of heart rate, see Noy,
Levit-Binun, and Golland 2015. For entrainment of speech patterns, see
the overview in Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson 1994.
18. Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson 1994. Weatherholtz, Campbell-Kibler,
and Jaeger 2014 show that social closeness/identification moderates the
effect.
19. See Chemero 2016.
20. As philosophers will know, I am touching on the complex topic of collec-
tive intentionality, collective action, and collective responsibility. What
dogs all of these accounts is how to get anything truly collective out of an
individualistic ontology. If your basic assumption is that beliefs, desires,
intentions, or emotions are always those of individual agents, then it
258 Notes
becomes surprisingly hard to provide an account of joint action or joint

intention. The main dangers are that accounts become circular or that
they lead to infinite regress. For instance, take Raimo Tuomela’s sugges-
tion that participants in a common enterprise must have a mutual belief
“to the effect that the joint action opportunities for an intentional perfor-
mance of X will obtain (or at least probably will obtain)” (Tuomela 2007,
p. 94). Here Tuomela seems to be passing the buck to the people who
are required to explain what a “mutual belief ” is, which is another way
of saying that his account is circular. He, himself, insists that it is not vi-
ciously circular (Tuomela 2005). But problems such as these have inspired
other philosophers, such as Philip Pettit, Deborah Tollefsen, and Annette
Baier, to move in an anti-individualist direction, where joint action is
not reducible to the intentions of individuals (Pettit 2009; Baier 1997;
Tollefsen 2015). For the problem of regress in theory of mind, see Morton
1996. For an excellent introduction to the issues of joint intentionality, see
Schweikard and Schmid 2020.
21. See Nummenmaa et al. 2012.
22. Baumeister, Dale, and Sommer 1998 and Newman, Duff, and
Baumeister 1997.
23. Ogden 1994.
24. The first quote is from Ogden 1994, p. 8, and the one that follows is from
pp. 9–10.
25. For books relevant to anti-individualistic ways of thinking, see Zimmer
2018, Quammen 2018, and Sheldrake 2020. For Damasio’s classic book on
the reasonableness of emotion, see Damasio 1994.
26. Freud 1911. For the general acceptance of projection as a “real” psycho-
logical phenomenon, see Kawada et al. 2004, p. 555: “Projection makes
people arrive at ascribing goals or intentions to others on the basis of their
own goals or intentions. This is different from arriving at the inference of
intentions on the basis of the features of the observed actor and the be-
havior she performed.” For the defensive nature of projection, see Edlow
and Kiesler 1966; Halpern 1977; Kawada et al. 2004; Newman, Duff, and
Baumeister 1997; Schimel, Greenberg, and Martens 2003; and Mikulincer
and Horesh 1999. Newman, Duff, and Baumeister 1997 argue that projec-
tion is a byproduct of suppression of unwanted traits, which, because of its
accidental nature, does not qualify as a defensive mechanism. However,
Schimel, Greenberg, and Martens 2003 provide evidence that projection of
feared traits serves a defensive function even if this defensive function may
originally have been a byproduct of other processes.
27. Batson 1991 and 2011.
Notes 259
28. See Batson 2011. For the specific study regarding the types of distress,
see Batson, Early, and Salvarini 1997. For the philosopher and psychol-
ogist: People high in personal distress help as much as people high in
sympathy (empathic concern). In other words, not every person in the ex-
periment ends up helping, but the vast majority do.
29. See Scheler 1912/2008 and Zahavi and Rochat 2015. One wonders whether
more iterations are needed. Does the empathizer need to know that the
other person knows that he knows that he feels what he feels as well? If so,
where do we stop?
30. A former student of mine, Max Gatyas, has argued that people can share
the same token emotion (Gatyas 2021).
31. Botvinick and Cohen 1998. For more about illusions of self along these
lines, see Metzinger 2009. Recently, Lush et al. 2020 have argued that the
rubber hand illusion is best explained by suggestibility. Their evidence is,
however, purely correlational and fails to provide a proper account of what
is the best explanation of how our minds build our body map. Should the
illusion turn out to be due to suggestibility, not all is lost. There are plenty
examples of our integrating objects into our body maps, such as canes, to
use a famous example by Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002.
Chapter 6
1. Since Aristotle, it’s almost universally agreed that anger involves a desire
for revenge. The most famous passage is from The Rhetoric, 1378a31–33,
where he says that anger is a “desire accompanied by pain for conspicuous
revenge caused by a perceived slight” (Aristotle 1984). However, see Silva
2021 for a dissenting view.
2. For switching field and observer perspectives, see Sutin and Robins 2010.
3. Malle and Pearce 2001, Study 3, found that the asymmetries were nei-
ther eliminated nor reversed. Since people reported on the difficulty of
doing so, they probably failed to take the perspective of the other some
of the time, which can account for the failure to reverse actor-observer
asymmetries.
4. For emotions not requiring previous judgments or appraisals, see
James 1884, Robinson 1995, and Prinz 2004. The startle example is
from Robinson 1995. For fear, see LeDoux 1996. Méndez-Bértolo et al.
2016 provide support for the existence of a low road of fear and of short
pathways from perceptual systems to emotion areas.
260 Notes
5. James 1884. Jesse Prinz, who is a Jamesian in spirit, has argued that
emotions may be experienced unconsciously, and so gets around the ob-
jection that one might be feeling, say, happy without feeling any bodily
changes (Prinz 2004, Chapter 9). For a vociferous opponent of this way of
thinking, see Nussbaum 1997.
6. Damasio 1994. But note that Robinson 2020 argues that aesthetic
emotions don’t really impel us to do anything except, perhaps, continue
gazing on the artwork.
7. See Forgas 2000b.
8. See Schwartz 1999 and Fiedler 2000. My own favorite work on anger, and
the lack of analytical thinking involved in it, is Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s
De Ira (On Anger) (Seneca 1995).
9. For the difference between moods and emotions, see Forgas 2000a; Prinz
2004, Chapter 8; and Griffiths 1997, Chapter 10. Norbert Schwartz explic-
itly claims that emotions have the same effects on thinking as do moods
in his 1999 paper, but he provides no evidence to this effect. For people
inhibiting the effects of emotion on their thinking when they are aware of
their emotions, see Berkowitz et al. 2000.
10. Nummenmaa et al. 2012, p. 9602. If you think this sounds a lot like the
interactor perspective we have just been discussing, you are right. The dif-
ference is that people were watching a movie and they were not watching it
together.
11. McEwan 2007; all quotes are from p. 27, including the indented one.
12. McEwan 2007; the quotes are from pp. 133, 134, and 135, respectively.
13. Melville 1851/1981. The first quote is from p. 153, and the second, in-
dented, quote is from pp. 153–54.
14. Keltner, Ellsworth, and Edwards 1993.
15. Oatley 2000 and Oatley and Laroque 1995.
16. Maner et al. 2005.
17. Hsee, Hatfield, and Chemtob 1992. The quote is from p. 123.
18. See Stueber 2006 for the extended argument or go straight to Stueber 2017
for the short version.
Chapter 7
1. Hitchens 2008.
2. Pollyea 2009.
3. Takaku, Weiner, and Ohbuchi 2001.
Notes 261
4. Batson et al. 1996; Ruttan, McDowell, and Nordgren 2015; Krznaric 2014.
5. For problems recreating visceral experiences, see Morley 1993;
Loewenstein 1996; and Levine, Lench, and Safer 2009. The quote is from
Loewenstein 1996, p. 284.
6. The quote is from Gilbert and Wilson 2007, p. 1354.
7. For visceral affect and issues with forecasting generally, see Morley 1993;
Loewenstein 1996; Gilbert, Gill, and Wilson 2002; and Van Boven and
Loewenstein 2005. On hunger, see Read and van Leeuwen 1998 and
Gilbert, Gill, and Wilson 2002. For thirst, see Van Boven and Loewenstein
2003. For the possible implications for empathy and perspective taking,
see Maibom 2016.
8. For an engaging and accessible introduction to memory research, see
Schacter 1996. This is his definition of episodic memory: “In order to be
experienced as a memory, the retrieved information must be recollected in
the context of a particular time and place, and with some reference to one-
self as a participant in the episode” (p. 17). For the rapid fading of episodic
memories, see Robinson and Clore 2002 and Levine, Lench, and Safer
2009. For implicit memories, reference Levine, Lench, and Safer 2009.
9. For focalism, see Wilson et al. 2000. Schkade and Kahneman 1998 call it
the “focusing illusion.”
10. The spaghetti example is from Gilbert, Gill, and Wilson 2002.
11. For cognitive and affective empathy being affected by reward, see Epley
et al. 2004; Hess, Blaison, and Dandeneau 2017. Men typically perform far
worse than women on tests where they are supposed to figure out what
others think or feel—unless, that is, they are rewarded with money. Women
appear to find understanding others rewarding in itself. You might think
about that next time your husband acts clueless or, if you are the husband,
the next time you are tempted to be clueless (see Klein and Hodges 2001).
12. For our ability to correct for forecasting errors when attention is explicitly
drawn to other features of the situation, see Dunn, Forrin, and Ashton-
James 2009.
13. (1) Bernstein and Davis 1982 and Israelashvili, Sauter, and Fischer 2019.
(2) Erle and Topolski 2017; Goldstein and Cialdini 2007; and Goldstein,
Vezich, and Shapiro 2014. (3) Dovidio, Allen, and Schroeder 1990; Carlo,
Allen, and Buhman 1999; Fennis 2011; Dovidio, Allen, and Schroeder
1990; Myers, Laurent, and Hodges 2014; Pahl and Bauer 2013; and
Goldstein, Vezich, and Shapiro 2014. (4) Goldstein, Vezich, and Shapiro
2014; Davis et al. 1996; Davis et al. 2004; Galinksy, Ku, and Wang 2005;
Galinsky, Wang, and Ku 2008; Myers and Hodges 2011; and Laurent and
Myers 2011. (5) Galinsky et al. 2008; Neale and Bazerman 1983; Trötschel
262 Notes
et al. 2011; and Gilin et al. 2013. (6) Decety and Yoder 2016 and Berndsen
and McGarty 2012. (7) Eisenberg, Zhou, and Koller 2001 and Hoffman
2000. (8) Walker 1980; Eisenberg, Zhou, and Koller 2001; and Mencl and
May 2009. (9) Arriaga and Rusbult 1998. (10) Gordon and Chen 2016;
Long and Andrews 1990; Long et al. 1999; and Franzoi, Davis, and Young
1985. (11) Konstam, Chernoff, and Deveney 2001; Zechmeister and
Romero 2002; and Takaku, Weiner, and Ohbuchi 2001. (12) Hepper, Hart,
and Sedikides 2014. (13) Galinsky and Moskowitz 2000; Todd, Galinsky,
and Bodenhausen 2012; and Vorauer and Sasaki 2009. (14) Moore 2005;
Todd et al. 2011; Shih, Stotzer, and Gutiérrez 2013; Shih et al. 2009; and
Vescio, Sechrist, and Paolucci 2003. (15) Mohr et al. 2007; Richardson,
Green, and Lago 1998; and Nemerovski 2010. (16) Macrae et al. 2016.
(17) For psychopathy deficits in empathy, see Maibom 2017a and Blair,
Mitchell, and Blair 2005; for perspective taking deficits in psychopathy and
children with oppositional defiant disorder and high callous-unemotional
traits, see O’Kearney et al. 2017; for people with autism and empathy and
perspective-taking deficits, see Baron-Cohen 1995, Sigman et al. 1992,
Rogers et al. 2007, Anastassiou-Hadjicharalambous and Warden 2008,
and Hirvelä and Helkama 2011. (I should note that many papers claim
that psychopaths have intact perspective taking [e.g., Mullins-Nelson,
Salekin, and Leistico 2006], but that is almost invariable because of how
psychopaths fare on self-report tests, like the Interpersonal Reactivity
Index [Davis 1980], or on other measures concerned with theory-of-mind
tasks [e.g., the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy, Nowicki and
Duke 1994] that do not require perspective taking as I have described it
here. Psychopaths are notoriously mendacious and may have poor in-
sight into their own incompetence, and so one cannot rely on self-report
measures.)
14. Eyal, Steffel, and Epley 2018. A later meta-study by Israelashvili, Sauter,
and Fischer 2019 found a small-to-medium effect of perspective taking on
facial emotional expression recognition.
15. Epley 2014.
16. Some studies appear better suited to test perspective taking, like the false
belief task. But it is doubtful that true perspective taking is required for
passing this task.
17. Sillars 2011, p. 201.
18. Keysar et al. 2000, p. 32.
19. Sillars 2011, p. 205.
20. My feeling understood as a result of someone taking my perspective is not
related to that person having an accurate view of my thoughts and feelings.
Notes 263
This is true both in romantic relationships and in relations between

therapists and patients (Elliott et al. 2011; Pollman and Finkenauer 2009;
and Cramer and Jewett 2010). Goldstein, Vezich, and Shapiro 2014 claim
that you get all the positive effects of perspective taking on a relationship
only if the target assumes that the perspective taker has been successful.
This suggests that in the other experiments, the target assumed that the
perspective taker was accurate and that’s why they felt more understood.
But their study is a bit tricky. The unsuccessful situation is one in which
the perspective taker says they tried to take the target’s perspective but re-
ported that “I couldn’t put myself in their shoes.” This statement can sug-
gest many things. For instance, it might suggest that they regard the other
person as alien in some way, that the other person’s reactions were so bi-
zarre that they couldn’t do it, and so on. This is surely off-putting to the
target. Getting a somewhat inaccurate result from a simulation is not the
same as being unable to put oneself in someone else’s shoes at all.
21. Feeney and Hill 2006.
22. For the iconic London Tube map go to https://tfl.gov.uk/maps/track/tube;
for the more geographically accurate one, go to https://mappinglondon.
co.uk/2015/geographictube/
23. Ross 1977. In his meta-analysis of the actor-observer asymmetry, Malle
argues—persuasively to my mind—that people have operationalized “the
situation” in ways that fail to distinguish between a person’s beliefs about
the situation and the situation itself (Malle 2006). If that is right, what does
it mean for the claim I’m making here? It doesn’t show it is false. Instead, it
indicates that people also tend to have similar beliefs about situations. And
that’s just what we want.
Chapter 8
1. Jean-Paul Sartre 1943/1966, p. 347ff. Sartre asks us to imagine that he is

doing the peeping, but I think the example is more powerful if we imagine
ourselves in the position of the voyeur.
2. Sartre 1943/1966, pp. 347–48.
3. Sartre 1943/1966, pp. 349–50. Sartre’s view of shame is pretty specific and
appears to be inherent in the recognition that one is an object to another,
even if what one is doing isn’t dodgy at all. I disagree with Sartre on this
point. The view strikes me as too dramatic. I use his example to highlight
self-consciousness in the context of what is generally accepted as a shame-
inducing situation. And so, it is not that the potential intruder “fixes” me
264 Notes
and my action as something that I no longer have control over that gives
rise to shame, but that I am caught doing something shameful, which
I only see as shameful once I see what I am doing as another would.
4. Declaration of Independence. For the relations between Jefferson and
Hemings, see Gordon-Reed 2008. For the Washington Post article, see
Danielle 2017.
5. Davidson 2001.
6. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/negligence. My thoughts on this have
been much influenced by Sher 2009.
7. Wolf 2003. For a more developed critique of her view along the lines that
follow here, see Maibom 2013.
8. For these details, see Burstein 2005, particularly Chapters 4 and 5. The
quote is from Gordon-Reed 2008, pp. 99–100. Jefferson lost the case, but
the slave managed to escape to the North.
9. For the full report, see http://hayesinternational.com/wp-content/uplo
ads/2016/06/28th-Annual-Retail-Theft-Sur vey-PR-Stats-Thoughts1.pdf.
Employees who steal from their employers are unlikely to think of them-
selves as thieves. Why? It turns out that what is stolen often determines
whether the thief thinks of it as theft or not. Psychologist Dan Arieli
studied this phenomenon both in the laboratory and in real life. Those of
you who have lived in dorms know that food and drink items have a ten-
dency to go missing. Does this mean that people in dorms are just thieves?
Not quite. When Arieli put six one-dollar bills in a stack and a six-pack of
coke in the fridge, nobody touched they money, whereas all the cans of
soda were gone in a couple of days (Arieli 2008). What seems to be going
on is that people think of certain acts of stealing as not really stealing at
all. Perhaps the person reasons that he or she will replace the soda at some
point. I have certainly helped myself to a drop of cream from a common-
room fridge more than once thinking vaguely that I’d bring a pint of cream
soon, yet never did. The Angel quote is from season three, the episode
“Offspring.”
10. For features of psychopathy, see Hare 2004 and Cleckley 1982. For the
recent statistic mentioned, see Kiehl and Lushing 2014. The first quote is
from Hare 1993, p. 44, and the quote that follows is from p. 41.
11. Fallon 2013. The quote is from p. 205.
12. One recent study shows that psychopaths do not automatically take
the visual perspective of other people (Drayton, Santos, and Baskin-
Sommers 2018). Along with the anecdotal evidence, from both experts
and psychopaths themselves, this gives us very good reasons to suppose
this capacity is impaired in this population. It explains their poor self-in-
sight, their grandiose sense of self-worth, and, of course, their “profound
Notes 265
lack of empathy and a callous disregard for the feelings, rights, and welfare
of others,” as Hare writes (Hare 2004, 39). Note that if you peruse the lit-
erature, you will find papers claiming that psychopaths—at least primary
psychopaths—have unimpaired perspective taking. This is usually because
what the researchers call perspective taking is not what I have described as
perspective taking here, but merely theory of mind (or: the capacity to as-
cribe psychological states to others); see, e.g., Mullins-Nelson, Salekin, and
Leistico 2006.
13. Both quotes are from Cleckley 1982. The first is from p. 214 and the second
from p. 216. His book was originally published in 1941 but has undergone
several revisions.
14. Cleckley 1982, p. 216.
15. Cleckley 1982, p. 214 and p. 216 in that order. For more on this line of
thinking, see Maibom 2017b. For the recent study regarding shame, see
Mullins-Nelson, Salekin, and Leistico 2006. This study also found intact
empathy, but through self-report tests, which won’t work if psychopaths
either are lying (the standard view) or lack self-insight.
16. For psychopaths and ability to experience empathy, see Hare 1993; Blair,
Mitchell, and Blair 2005; and Maibom 2022. Psychopaths may be capable
of affectively empathizing with others, as suggested by Decety et al. 2013
and Meffert et al. 2013. Recent studies suggest that psychopaths’ attention
is grabbed by people in distress, but they fail to continue being focused on
them and do not experience anything like the strong defensive reaction
normal people do. However, this appears to be due to emotion regulation
and is under conscious control. Marsh 2014 argues that psychopaths may
have difficulties empathizing with fear specifically, but that could be due
to their own deficient fear responses, which are well documented in the
literature. Fear recognition also appears to be a problem for them, and they
don’t seem to comprehend what an awful emotion fear is for most people.
Since psychopaths are also known to have shallow emotions—i.e., short
lived, often explosive, but without their usual depth and color—their em-
pathic affect should be equally shallow. And yet, going by how charming
and engaging many people find them, we should at least expect them to
experience if not empathic, then, certainly, vicarious joy and excitement.
A recent study supports Marsh’s contention that it is the ability to empa-
thize with fear specifically that is impacted in psychopathy (Deming et al.
2020). For the study of improvements in empathy due to being instructed
to imagine yourself in the other’s situation, see Beussink, Hackney, and
Vitacco 2017.
17. Webber 2016.
266 Notes
18. Webber 2016. Does better appreciating the effects on the victim prevent
rape? It is hard to say. Most research is done on convicted rapists, which
constitute a fairly heterogeneous group. One study of an Irish interven-
tion program showed increases in victim empathy and empathy with
women as a result of treatment; cf. O’Reilly et al. 2010. But the sample size
was small (N =35). A large study of the effectiveness of the SOAR pro-
gram in North Carolina showed no effect of treatment—which included
an empathy element—on recidivism; cf. Grady, Edwards, and Pettus-
Davis 2017. This might have been because the group was very unlikely
to recidivate anyway, suggesting that treatment groups are often self-
selecting. It is unclear whether sex offenders have reduced empathy in ge-
neral (whether perspective taking or affective empathy), as most tests rely
on self-report. However, there is some indication of a selective deficit in
empathy for the victim group (i.e., in pedophiles for boys, and in rapists
of girls for girls); see Curwen 2003 and Geer, Estupinan, and Manguno-
Mire 2000.
19. There may be cases where I judge myself as I imagine a certain type of
person would judge me, even if I do not, myself, judge others that way. This
complicates the story told here somewhat, but not beyond recognition.
20. The Egyptian saying is from The Eloquent Peasant from the period of the
Second Kingdom (Gardiner 1923). For Thales of Miletus, see Laertius
1988, I:36. For Confucius, see Confucius 1988, Book XV, Chapter XXIII.
For the saying of Jesus of Nazareth, see Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 7, verse
12 (The Bible. The Authorized King James Version. 1998).
21. For an excellent introduction on exchanging self for other in Indo-Tibetan
Buddhism, see McRae 2017.
22. Galinsky et al. 2006. For a review of the literature, see Galinsky, Rucker, and
McGee 2016. The experiment showing less interest of those with power
in what people think is Tjosvold and Sagaria 1978; the one that shows
reduced motor resonance is Hogeveen, Inzlicht, and Obhi 2014; and the
one showing less empathic distress and compassion is van Kleef et al. 2008.
This latter study was also the one that suggested that emotion regulation
is responsible for reduced empathic distress and compassion in people
with greater power. This idea is supported by Leach and Weick 2020, who
show increased regulation of negative affect in people with more power
compared to people with less power. Other unfortunate power effects in-
clude reduced cooperation; see Kanso et al. 2014. This study also supports
the idea that one of the big factors in this power blindness to others is
motivation.
Notes 267
23. Chen, Lee-Chai, and Bargh 2001 and Overbeck and Park 2001 and 2006.
24. From the poem “Sacred Emily,” Stein 1922.
Chapter 9
1. de Beauvoir 1943/1984; the quotes are all from pp. 405–6.

2. de Beauvoir 1943/1984, p. 407.
3. de Beauvoir 1943/1984, p. 405 and p. 406, respectively.
4. Hegel 1807/1977, Chapter 4.
5. Sartre 1943/1966 and de Beauvoir 1949/2011.
6. de Beauvoir 1949/2011. The quote is from p. 907.
7. Ferenczi 1949, p. 227.
8. Frankel 2002, p. 122.
9. For a different approach to adopting ways of thinking, acting, or doing
things by mimicking what prestigious or powerful people do, see Boyd
and Richerson 2006.
10. Preston 2019.
11. Sarkis 2018.
12. According to the Washington Post on January 21, 2021, Trump had told
30,573 false or misleading claims during his presidency; see Kessler, Rizzo,
and Kelly 2021. For Trump’s ignorance of the US constitutional process,
see Latimer 2017, Brown 2016, and, of course, Bolton 2020. For Trump’s
thirst for, and abuses of, power, see Cohen 2021. His second impeachment
was, of course, for abuses of power and obstruction of Congress. Even back
in 2017, 54% of Americans said they believed he abused his power, ac-
cording to a Time report (Begley 2017).
13. Impact of child abuse on later life, Crime Survey for England and Wales,
year ending March 2016: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulation
andcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/peoplewhowereabusedaschildre
naremorelikelytobeabusedasanadult/2017-09-27
14. Gladwell 2019 and Levine 2014.
15. Ransom 2019 and Starr 2019.
16. Hager 2017.
17. See, e.g., Kassin, Bogart, and Kerner 2012 and Kassin et al. 2010. For the
New Yorker story, see Aviv 2017. See also http://www.innocenceproject.org
18. Shaw and Porter 2015.
19. Sartre 1944/1989.
20. de Beauvoir 1943/1984, p. 402 and p. 405, respectively.
268 Notes
Chapter 10
1. West 2011. The quote is from p. 4.

2. Locke 1689/1987 and Hayek 1945.
3. West 2011, p. 4.
4. Prinz 2011, especially pp. 225–27. Bloom 2016. He talks empathy and
policy making on pp. 107–8. Chief Justice Roberts likened himself to an
umpire in his opening speech for his confirmation hearings, as quoted in
https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-activities/
chief-justice-roberts-statement-nomination-process.
5. Something like this idea is pushed by Alcoff 2010.
6. For lower federal court judges, see the Democracy and Government
Reform Team 2020; for the racial makeup of the United States, see
Frey 2020.
7. Cuddy, Fiske, and Glick 2007. See also Fiske, Cuddy, and Glick 2006.
8. Delgado and Dilmore 2008, p. 910.
9. See Sundby 2003 for the discussion of the Capital Jury Project in this and
the next two paragraphs. The quotes are from p. 350. The factors most rel-
evant in jurors’ decisions were what the victim did immediately leading
up to the crime. However, there is little doubt that a character assessment
was quickly formed on the basis of how those actions were described and
that it, in turn, further affected how the jurors thought about the situation.
It is also worth noting that jurors are largely unaware of victim charac-
teristics affecting their judgments. When asked “If a defendant were to
brutally rob and murder a person standing on a street corner because he
needed drug money, would it make a difference to you if the victim was [a
respected member of the community, a stranger, or someone with a crim-
inal record?],” jurors say no. Jurors, therefore, certainly believe they think
of all victims the same way. The problem is that all murders are particular
occurrences, involving particular people under particular circumstances.
And it is here the troubles begin, according to Sundby 2003. For wider is-
sues concerning the idea of the “perfect victim,” see Meyers 2016.
10. For the hunger study, see Danziger, Levav, and Avnaim-Pesso 2011. There
have been a number of objections to this study, and it is worth being skep-
tical about it. But it did get a lot of press. For the football scenario, see
Eren and Mocan 2018. For intuitive biases, see Guthrie, Rachlinski, and
Wistricht 2007.
11. Arriaga and Rusbult 1998. Incidentally, Decety and Yoder 2016 looked at
correlations between dispositional empathy and justice orientation, and
they found that perspective taking—and sympathy—correlated positively
with concern for injustice to others (see also Berndsen and McGarty 2012).
Notes 269
12. For consequentialists and effective altruists, like Peter Singer and Peter
Unger, this goes without saying. But it is a very common view in ethics. It
is forcefully expressed in Railton 2017, p. 173. Railton argues that morality
and science are alike in (1) seeking impartiality, (2) seeking generality,
(3) seeking consistency, (4) seeking independence of appeals to special au-
thority, and (5) guiding thought and action. Morality, however, is also con-
cerned about (6) harms and benefits to those involved.
13. Perspective taking increases interpersonal liking (Dovidio, Allen, and
Schroeder 1990; Goldstein, Vezich, and Shapiro 2014) and helping (Carlo,
Allen, and Buhman 1999; Fennis 2011; Dovidio, Allen, and Schroeder
1990; Myers, Laurent, and Hodges 2014; Pahl and Bauer 2013; Goldstein,
Vezich, and Shapiro 2014) and reduces bias and prejudice (Moore 2005;
Todd et al. 2011; Shih, Stotzer, and Gutiérrez 2013; Shih et al. 2009; and
Vescio, Sechrist, and Paolucci 2003).
14. The idea that morality is often, implicitly, thought to concern mainly the
social sphere spurred Martha Nussbaum to reconceptualize the public
sphere (see Nussbaum 1999a, 1999b). Alighieri 1472/1986.
15. Williams 1981.
16. Hume 1739/1978 and Smith 1759/1976. The quote is from Hume 1739/
1978, 3.3.1.30.
17. Firth 1952. Given that the Ideal Observer theory derives from the Scottish
sentimentalists, it’s surely a little odd that Firth imagines his Ideal Observer
to be entirely lacking in affect, including sympathy. But the world is a
strange place. Art, unpublished manuscript. The quote is from The Book of
Job, Book 42, verse 17 (The Bible. Authorized King James Version. 1997).
18. Brandt 1955, p. 409. Art, private correspondence.
19. Walker 1991, p. 767. Walker is aware that, technically speaking, such de-
bate or interchange is not explicitly excluded from such pictures, but they
are passed over, giving the appearance that the Ideal Observer arrives al-
most instantaneously and privately at a judgment. For more thought along
these lines, see also Friedman 1989.
20. For an introduction to the psychological literature on imagined
interactions, see Honeycutt, Zagacki, and Edwards 1990 and Zagacki,
Edwards, and Honeycutt 1992.
21. Harman 2000. Both quotes are from p. 189.
22. See, e.g., Boyatzis, Rochford, and Jack 2014 and Friedman and Jack 2018.
23. West 2011, Metcalf 2017, and Hayek 1945. On skepticism that each person
is authoritative about what their happiness consists in, see Haybron 2008.
24. The Armstrong quote is from Badruddin 2018. Jesus formulated the
Golden Rule in Matthew, Book 7, verse 12. My complaints about the God
of Job should not be taken as a comment on Judaism. Rabbi Hillel famously
270 Notes
told a Gentile who wanted to be taught the whole Torah that “That which is
despicable to you, do not do to your fellow, this is the whole Torah, and the
rest is commentary.” Talmud Bavli, Shabbat 31a. I ignore here the vigorous
debate about whether the rule is best conceived in its positive version (do
to others) or in its negative one (do not do to others), or possibly both.
25. Breithaupt 2019. The quote is from Lambert 2019. Bloom 2016. For sym-
pathy/compassion increasing punishment, see Pfattheicher, Sassenrath,
and Keller 2019. There are additional problems with Bloom’s preference
for sympathy or compassion. If he has in mind empathic concern, it is sub-
ject to the same biasing effects as empathy, as is clear in Batson’s work (e.g.,
Batson 2011). Sympathy also correlates more heavily with helping, and it
is the indiscriminate helping of victims of disasters more than victims of
more longstanding problems (childhood malaria, malnutrition, etc.) that
worries Bloom.
26. For in-group vs. out-group and perspective taking, see Tarrant, Calitri,
and Weston 2012 and Skorinko and Sinclair 2013. For social conservatives
and homosexuality, see Mooijman and Stern 2016. Tony Jack helped me
think through, more clearly, the errors in this research. For reduction of
the positive effects of interacting with out-group members due to perspec-
tive taking, see Vorauer and Sasaki 2009.
27. For the Fiennes interview, see Darnton 1994. For increases in dislike of
people who transgress moral norms, see Lucas, Galinsky, and Murnighan
2016 and Miller, Hannikainen, and Cushman 2014. Dislike of people we
think dislike us is the topic of much of Vorauer’s work, e.g., Vorauer and
Saski 2009 and Vorauer and Sucharyna 2013; for a summary, see Vorauer
2013. And lastly, for our tendency to seek out less information regarding
things we prefer not to be true, see Ditto and Lopez 1992.
28. Bubandt and Willerslev 2015. The quote is from p. 5.
29. For the original versions of the trolley case, see Foot 1967 and Jarvis
Thomson 1985. For later elaborations used in psychological and neurosci-
ence studies, see Greene et al. 2001 and 2009. For criticisms of the use of
trolley cases, see Kahane et al. 2018.
30. Krznaric 2014.
31. This is also a theme in Robbins and Jack 2006.
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terpersonal conflict: Autobiographical narratives of forgiveness and
unforgiveness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 675–86.
Zimmer, C. 2018. She Has Her Mother’s Laugh. New York: Penguin Random
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Zimmerman, E. 2009. Obama: We need a justice with “empathy.” The
Hill, May 1, 2009. https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/
36170-obama-we-need-a-justice-with-empathy
Zuckerman, M., Klorman, R., Larrance, D.T., and Spiegel, N.H. 1981. Facial,
autonomic, and subjective components of emotion: The facial feedback
hypothesis versus the externalizer- internalizer distinction. Journal of
Name Index
For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on
occasion, appear on only one of those pages.
Adams, John, 184–85 Descartes, René, 20–21, 27–28, 29–31, 51

Alighieri, Dante, 229 Dilmore, James, 225
Armstrong, Karen, 238–39
Arriaga, Ximena, 227–28 Edwards, Kari, 149–50
Art, Brad, 232–33 Ellsworth, Phoebe, 149–50
Epley, Nicholas, 77–78, 167–69, 171–72
Banas, Kasia, 79
Baumeister, Roy, 91–94, 95, 97, 99, 119–20 Fallon, James, 188–89
Batson, Daniel, 124–25, 159 Feeney, Judith, 173–74
Benhabib, Seyla, 234 Feldman Barrett, Lisa, 55–56
Bergman, Ingrid, 207 Ferenczi, Salvador, 205–6
Bloom, Paul, 2–3, 222, 239 Fiedler, Klaus, 142–43
Borges, Jorge Luis, 18–19, 21 Fiennes, Ralp, 241–42
Botvinick, Matthew, 127 Fincham, Frank, 92
Brandt, Richard, 233 Firth, Roderick, 232
Breithaupt, Fritz, 239 Fiske, Susan, 225
Bubandt, Nils, 242 Foulkes, David, 71
Buddha, 196–97 Frankel, Jay, 206–7
Burton, Huwe, 210–12 Freud, Anna, 205
Freud, Sigmund, 72, 122–23
Cacioppo, John, 113
Cervantes, Miguel, 18–19, 21–22 Gallagher, Shaun, 106
Chemero, Tony, 117–18 Gilbert, Daniel, 160, 163
Chemtob, Claude, 151–52 Gladwell, Malcolm, 209–10
Cleckley, Hervey, 189–90 Glick, Peter, 225
Cohen, Jonathan, 127 Goldie, Peter, 19
Cuddy, Amy, 225 Gombrich, Ernst, 36–37, 39–40
Cusimano, Corey, 79 Goodwin, 79
Gordon, Robert, 33
Damasio, Antonio, 27, 121–22, 141–42
Delgado, Mauricio, 225 Hare, Robert, 187–88
Danielle, Britni, 180 Harman, Gilbert, 236
Davis, Mark Hatfield, Elaine, 113, 118, 151–52
Darwin, Charles, 82–83 Haslam, Nick, 73
Davidson, Donald, 182–83 Hayek, Friedrich, 221, 237–38
De Beauvoir, 199–201, 202, 204–5, 207, Heal, Jane, 18
214–16, 247 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 201,
Decety, Jean, 73, 115 202–4, 207, 214, 247
302 Name Index
Heidegger, Martin, 38, 51–53, 54– Mooijman, Maron, 240–41

55, 57–58 Moulton-Sarkis, Stephanie, 208
Hemings, Sally, 180–82 Morton, Adam, 118–19
Hitchens, Christopher, 155–57, Mummendey, Amélie, 95–96, 99, 101–2
158, 163–64
Hill, Andrew, 173–74 Nagel, Thomas, 3–4, 34–35, 56–57, 65–66
Hitler, Adolf, 182 Neisser, Ulrich, 49, 72
Hsee, Christopher, 151–52 Nietzsche, Friederich, v, 16
Hume, David, 232 Nigro, Giorgia, 72
Husserl, Edmund, 38, 50–51 Noë, Alva, 40
Hutto, Dan, 106 Nordgren, Loran, 79, 159
Nummenmaa, Lauri, 119, 144
Jack, Anthony, 237
Jackson, Philip, 73 Oatley, Keith, 150–51
James, William, 31–32 Obama, Barack, 1–2, 247
Jefferson, Thomas, 180–87, 194–96 Ohbuchi, Ken-Ichi, 158
Jesus of Nazareth, 86, 91, 194 Ogden, Thomas, 120–22
Jonze, Spike, 45
Pearce, Gale, 137
Kant, Immanuel, 50–51, 52–53 Perry, John, 44
Kassin, Saul, 211–12 Pfattheicher, Stefan, 239–40
Kaufman, Charlie, 45 Plato, 51–52
Kearns, Jill, 92 Porter, Stephen, 212
Keller, Johannes, 239–40 Potochnik, Angela, 57–58
Keltner, Dacher, 149–50 Prehn-Kristensen, 114–15
Keysar, Boaz, 172 Pronin, Emily, 76–77
Keysers, Christian, 115 Prinz, Jesse, 2–3, 222
Krznaric, Roman, 159, 244–45
Kurosawa, Akira, 87 Rapson, Richard, 113
Rasmussen, Leslie, 190–91, 192, 193
Lafayette, Marquis de, 184–85 Ratcliffe, Matthew, 106
Laroque, Laurette, 150–51 Roberts, Chief Justice, 1, 222
Lennon, John, 238 Rochat, Philippe, 126–27
Levine, Timothy, 209–10 Romero, Catherine, 92
Locke, John, 46 Ross, Lee, 176
Loewenstein, George, 159–60 Rusbult, Caryl, 227–28
Ruttan, Rachel, 159
Martin, Leonard, 113
MacDonald, Geoff, 79 Samson, Dana, 108–10, 111
Malle, Bertram, 63–65, 66–68, 83, 137 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 46, 177–79, 183–84,
Mancow, Erich, 155, 156–57, 158, 163–64 192, 193–94, 204, 214–15
Maner, Jon, 151 Sasaki, Stacey, 241
McDowell, Mary-Unter, 159 Sassenrath, Claudia, 239–40
McEwan, Ian, 147, 148, 151 Schacter, Daniel, 161–62
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 38, 51–53, 57–58 Scheler, Max, 106–7, 112–13, 126–27
Meltzoff, Andrew, 73 Schroeder, Juliana, 77–78
Melville, Herman, 148 Schwartz, Norbert, 142–43
Name Index 303
Shakespeare, William, 13–16, 104 Trump, Donald, 208

Shaw, Julia, 212 Turner, Brock, 190–92
Sessions, Jeff, 2, 223–24, 230
Sillars, Alan, 60–62, 77–78, 167, 168, Von Trier, Lars, 20–21
171, 172–74 Vorauer, Jacquie, 241
Skipper, Matthias, 76–77
Smith, Abigail, 184–85 Walker, Margaret Urban, 233–35
Smith, Adam, 232, 234–35 Washington, George, 184–85
Socrates, 91 Wedgwood, Emma, 82
Sotomayor, Sonia, 1–2, 223–24, 227–28 Weiner, Bernard, 158
Steglich-Petersen, Asbjørn, 76–77 West, Robin, 220–22
Stein, Gertrude, 197 Wicker, Bruno, 115
Stern, Chardley, 240–41 Willerslev, Rane, 242
Stepper, Sabine, 113 Williams, Bernard, 230
Stich, Stephen, 21 Wilson, Beatrice, 189–90
Stillwell, Arlene, 97, 99 Wilson, Timothy, 160, 162–63
Strack, Fritz, 113 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 42–43
Stueber, Karsten, 24, 152 Wolf, Susan, 184
Wojciszke, Bogdan, 68–69
Takaku, Seiji, 158 Wythe, George, 184–85
Thales of Miletus, 194
Taylor, JoAnn, 189–90 Zahavi, Dan, 106, 126–27
Tolstoy, Leo, 204–5 Zechmeister, Jeanne, 92
General Index
For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on
occasion, appear on only one of those pages.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 13–16, explanation, 15, 133

102–3, 104–5, 138–39, 168–69, 247 action, 62–70, 83, 93–94, 186
analytic third, 120–22 behavior (see action)
belief-reason, 66–67, 70
background, 21, 22, 23–25, 60–62 causal-historical, 64–66, 70
Being John Malkovich, 45–47 of experiences, 22–23, 67–68
belief marking, 63–64, 66–67, 70 neurological, 64
bias, 2–3, 4–6, 9, 83–84, 101–2, 166, 172, physiological, 64
186–87, 197–98, 228–29, 230, 231– psychological, 25, 149–50
32, 235, 241–42, 244, 247 reasons, 64–66, 70
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 133–34,
138, 244–45 facial feedback hypothesis, 113–14
false confessions, 210–12
Capital Jury Project, 225–28 false memories, 209–10, 211–13
Cartesianism, 31, 43, 52–53, 106 first-person shooter. See perspective:
cognitive dissonance, 208–10 video-games
communication, 36–37, 172–74 focalizing, 162–63, 164–65, 175–76
compassion, 3, 4, 146–47, 239–40 focusing illusion. See focalizing
competence, 68–69, 70, 173, 225 forgiveness, 86, 91, 158–59, 166, 227–28
fundamental attribution error, 176
egocentricity, 6–7, 17, 33–34, 49–50, 100–1
and center of gravity, 33 gaslighting, 201, 207–10, 211–12, 213,
and frame (of reference), 37, 38, 41–42, 217–18, 219
58–59, 124–25, 175–76 Golden Rule, 194, 197, 238–39
and map of relevance (see frame of
relevance) holism, mental, 21–24
embodiment, 14, 29–30, 33–34, 37, 43,
46–47, 50, 57–58, 62–63, 81, 85, 139, Ideal Observer, 9, 222–23, 232–37
144, 146–47, 176, 245 identification, 16–17, 28–29, 46–47, 166,
emotional contagion, 112–16, 119, 123– 194–95, 202, 205, 241–42, 244–45.
24, 126, 127, 129 See also overidentification
empathic accuracy, 163–64, 165, 168, with the aggressor, 205–7
173, 174 full, 20–21, 23–24
empathic distress, 124–25, 126 partial, 18
entrainment, 116, 118 projective, 18, 123
existentialism, 202, 204, 214–15, 217–18 illusion of transparency, 68
306 General Index
impartial observer. See ideal observer interactive, 7–8, 86–87, 139, 246–47
impartial spectator. See ideal observer Level 1, 129, 137–38, 256n.5
impartiality, 3–4, 5, 9, 56, 222–23, 228– Level 2, 129, 136, 137–38, 256n.5
31, 232, 233, 236, 237, 238–39, 247 memory, 60–62
intersubjectivity, 85, 117–18, 120, 121–22, observer, 7–8, 60–62, 70, 72, 73–75, 76,
202, 214 80–81, 83–85, 128–29, 136–37, 139,
introjection, 122–24, 205–6 177, 183–84, 212–13, 217–19, 231
perpetrator, 86–87, 91–99, 100–5, 136–
justice, 1, 6, 8, 165, 166 37, 158–59, 183–84, 191, 193
psychological, 60–63
master-slave dialectic, 201, 202–7, 214–15 third-person, 71, 72–73, 183–
memory, 23, 60–62 84, 193–94
autobiographical, 136–37, 158, 159–60 uninvolved observer (see observer)
episodic, 161–62 (see also victim, 86–87, 91–99, 100, 105, 136–37,
autobiographical) 158, 183–84, 192, 193
field, 72 visual, 38–43, 108–11, 135–36
implicit, 161 perspective taking
observer, 72, 84 and bias, 9
semantic, 160, 161–62 Buffy example, 133–34, 138
Moby Dick, 148–49 imagine-self, 17–18, 158–59
moods, 129, 142–43 imagine-other, 17
moral dilemma, 242–43 Julie example, 25–26, 138, 170–
mutual recognition. See recognition 71, 244–45
and power, 195–97
negligence, 183 and self-awareness, 179–80, 214
Pierre Menard, el autor del Quijote, 18–
objective. See objectivity 19, 21–22
objectivity, 3–5, 6–8, 56–57, 84, 218, 228, prediction, 24–25, 144
233, 247 problem of others minds, 28–29
On Chesil Beach, 147–48, 149, 153–54 projection, 17–18, 122–24, 138–
overidentification, 202, 207, 239 39, 244–45
projective identification. See introjection
partiality, 2, 228–30 psychopathy, 68, 166, 187–90, 194, 197
personal distress, 107–8, 124–26
perspective Rashomon, 86–91, 94, 97, 102–4
actor (see agent) recognition, 1, 13–14, 202–4, 214, 247
agent, 7–8, 62–70, 75–76, 79–82, 83, Reid interrogation technique, 210–11
85, 137, 139, 177, 217–19, 222– responsibility, 8, 66, 94, 101–2, 149–51,
23, 245–46 179–87, 196–97, 226, 246
and power, 203–5 rubber hand illusion, 127–28
and visual art, 36–37
and videogames, 40–43 self-alienation, 203–4, 217–18
field, 71, 72, 73–75, 128–29, 136– self-awareness, 179, 203
37, 212–13 self-consciousness. See self-awareness
first-person, 7–8, 60–62, 71, 72–73, She Came to Stay, 199–202, 214–17
158–59, 178, 179 simulation, 18, 175–76
General Index 307
simulation theory, 18 The Element of Crime, 20, 21, 22–23, 202

Stanford rape case, 190–92 theory theory, 24–25, 255–56n.1
stereotyping, 166, 175–76 triangulation, 236–37, 238–39
subjective. See subjectivity
subjectivity, 2–3, 6–8, 10, 56–57, 58, view from nowhere, 3–4, 6, 56–57
120, 244 visceral experiences, 157–58, 159–61,
sympathy, 100–1, 124–25, 145– 163–65, 174, 175–76
47, 239–40
synchrony, 115–17, 119, 144, 145 warmth, 68–69, 70, 173, 225–26
synergy, 117–20 welfare, 146–47, 221–22, 237–38, 245
synthesis, 201, 207, 214–17, 218–19, well-being, 3–4, 6–7, 145–46, 190, 221,
230–31, 236 223–24, 238, 245–46

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The Space Between

The Space Between

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930912

—​Friedrich Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morals III, 12

1. The Space Between  13

6. Perspective Taking  133

The book was written while I was a professor of philosophy at the

On May 1, 2009, President Barack Obama interrupted the afternoon

someone who understands that justice isn’t about some abstract

This seemingly innocuous statement provoked the opposition and the

This statement was widely interpreted to mean that Obama wanted to

That is, of course, the logical flaw in the empathy standard. . . .

It was therefore paramount for Sotomayor to allay these concerns in

This seemed to satisfy conservative senators and interest groups. There

as opposed to facts or reason is widespread. Left-​leaning intellectuals

through it by presenting us with theirs. It is the encounter with other

I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people

Here Sotomayor acknowledges that her way of viewing the world is

As another former law school classmate, Professor Martha Minow

What is to be done? It seems obvious that we must first all recognize

these interactions, we momentarily leave our individuality behind and

By Chapter 10 we will be in a position to provide solid answers to the

are interwoven throughout the book, hopefully satisfying the phil-

Hermia: “I would my father look’d but with my eyes.”

Thou, thou, Lysander, thou hast given her rhymes,

Were Egeus, then, to take Hermia’s perspective on things, he would

1.1 The Philosophy and Psychology

Psychologists talk as if there were just two options when it comes to

situation. What might he think? He, a middle-​aged respectable citizen,

The first method he conceived of was relatively simple. Know

1.2 A Method of Identification

It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’s.

. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of

Menard reproduces perfectly the written words of Cervantes. But

Fischer. There would be no thrill, for instance, at the thought of mur-

you, I have to understand your experiences using my own background

1.3 Perspective Taking as Reenactment

There are many reasons some philosophers believe we simulate others’

for understanding others, of course. We must bring other people’s

1.4 The Problem of Understanding Other People

Understanding others by imagining ourselves in their situation

We rely on reason, not the senses, to get to knowledge. This is why

own thoughts outside of the present moment is not fundamentally

In cases where we have changed substantially, we often have to iden-

1.5 The Space Between

To take another person’s point of view, then, it is neither possible, nor

interpreting it, but what we can do is come up with a more impartial

The notion of “perspective” as we use it today originated with visual art.

Everything was charmingly arranged in these pictures, and all the

large, but the law of regular diminution of objects as they become

In this chapter I give substance to the idea of perspectives. We

2.1 Visual Perspective

Figure 2.1 Simple one-​point perspective drawing. Illustration by

Figure 2.2 Pong. Illustration by Peter Bruce.

Figure 2.3 First person shooter. Illustration by Peter Bruce.

2.2 The Empty Self and the Body Snatcher

In a well-​known article (to philosophers, at least), “The Essential

an experience in a way that is unique, yet naked. It is this nakedness

Maxine is unimpressed until she realizes the financial implications of

—Friedrich Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morals III, 12

1. The Space Between 13

6. Perspective Taking 133

as opposed to facts or reason is widespread. Left-leaning intellectuals

situation. What might he think? He, a middle-aged respectable citizen,

Figure 2.1 Simple one-point perspective drawing. Illustration by

In a well-known article (to philosophers, at least), “The Essential

therefore the competence of the person, or to their community-

Years ago, I swam the length of a lake close to my then-home in

Children—(if it please God)— Freedom to go where one likes—

From Darwin 1838/1985.

thinking about decision-making that is common in philosophy and