Myth #10
To listen empathically, you must walk a mile in the other person’s shoes
The idea that empathy is walking a mile in someone else’s shoes is an old one. It can be traced back to the 1895 poem, Judge Softly, written by Mary T. Lathrap. In the poem, Lathrap references wearing or walking in another’s moccasins four times, in the first stanza:
start at 48:03
Pray, don’t find fault with the man that limps,
Or stumbles along the road.
Unless you have worn the moccasins he wears,
Or stumbled beneath the same load.
the seventh stanza:
Just walk a mile in his moccasins
Before you abuse, criticize and accuse.
If just for one hour, you could find a way
To see through his eyes, instead of your own muse.
the tenth stanza:
Remember to walk a mile in his moccasins
And remember the lessons of humanity taught to you by your elders.
We will be known forever by the tracks we leave
In other people’s lives, our kindnesses and generosity.
and the eleventh and final stanza (which is only one line):
Take the time to walk a mile in his moccasins.
The poem is a beautiful reminder that before you judge another, you should take on their perspective. In all my time teaching listening, no one has disagreed with the importance of perspective taking, defined most often as thinking about a situation from a frame of reference other than one’s own. For empathetic listening, it means putting oneself in the mind of another before you begin listening.
In the academic literature there are two distinct ways that you can take the perspective of another. The differences between these two forms of perspective taking (PT) are clear in the instructions that often appear in published research.
Wearing Your Shoes (Imagine-Other PT)
Wearing Their Shoes (Imagine-Self PT)
While you are reading about the other participant’s problem, try to imagine how the other participant feels about what has happened and how it has affected his or her life. Try not to concern yourself with attending to all the information presented. Just concentrate on trying to imagine how the other participant feels.
While you are reading about the other participant’s problem, try to imagine how you yourself would feel if you were experiencing what has happened to the other participant and how this experience would affect your life. Try not to concern yourself with attending to all the information presented. Just concentrate on trying to imagine how you yourself would feel.
Importantly, while both forms of perspective taking lead to empathic concern and feelings of compassion toward others, compared to IOPT, ISPT generates more negative feelings, including
more negative self-focused affect
greater self-other merging
cognitive and emotional contagion
unintentional or automatic processing
experiencing the other's suffering as one's own.
In their study, Buffone et al. asked participants to either engage in no perspective-taking, ISPT, or IOPT before reading a fictional hardship and addressing a video-based supportive message to the writer. Distress was reported in all groups, but ISPT led to a physiological threat response, while IOPT encouraged a more invigorating, challenge-based mindset. This suggests that imagining oneself in another’s shoes can be more stressful, whereas IOPT fosters a positive helping response.
Why, then, does imagining others’ feelings persist as advice, given its drawbacks? In Mindwise, Nicholas Epley offers an explanation.
A “rampant overconfidence in our [ability to take the perspective of others] helps explain why people may avoid asking others for their perspective in the first place … Getting perspective first requires knowing that you need it.”
In other words, humans falsely believe that we can imagine what it’s like in someone else’s shoes.
The term getting perspective is key. Getting perspective requires a suspension of belief as to what’s on someone’s mind, asking questions, and paying genuine attention to their answers. In other words, we shouldn’t take another’s perspective; we should get another’s perspective.
A “good listener” isn’t someone who hears, comprehends, understands, and responds appropriately. Even “walking a mile in [someone’s] moccasins,” doesn’t cut it. Rather, a good listener remains present with someone long enough to enter their world, and the only real way to do that is not by imagining you’re there or sliding into their shoes, but by actually being there (shoes are optional anyway, in my opinion). As Epley put it: