Areas › Anger › Growing empathy
When you are already angry, imagining your way into someone else's head asks the tired part of you to do the heavy lifting. Start with your body instead: look at their face, let your breathing and your shoulders come closer to theirs.
Perspective taking is a fine skill on a calm day. In the middle of a row it tends to slide into arguing with a version of the other person you have built in your head. Watching what is actually in front of you, their hands, their face, the pace of their breath, gives you something real to be moved by, and it costs almost nothing to try.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Your suffering distresses him: he is deeply concerned for you and full of kindness and mercy (Quran 9:128). The Prophet is described as feeling people's difficulty rather than working it out, and that is the kind of empathy that survives a hard moment.
لَقَدۡ جَآءَكُمۡ رَسُولࣱ مِّنۡ أَنفُسِكُمۡ عَزِيزٌ عَلَيۡهِ مَا عَنِتُّمۡ حَرِيصٌ عَلَيۡكُم بِٱلۡمُؤۡمِنِينَ رَءُوفࣱ رَّحِيمࣱ
A Messenger has come to you from among yourselves. Your suffering distresses him: he is deeply concerned for you and full of kindness and mercy towards the believers
Qur’an 9:128read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a laboratory perspective-taking task, people made to feel guilty became more other-centred while people made to feel angry tended to become more self-centred. That is one small experiment on visual perspective taking rather than a study of real arguments. It does fit the everyday experience that anger is exactly the moment when imagining someone else's view gets hardest.
Bukowski H, Samson D. (2016). Can emotions influence level-1 visual perspective taking?. Cognitive neuroscience doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Anger narrows you to your own point of view, so a route that runs through the body is easier to walk than one that runs through reasoning.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
When you notice you have stopped really being there with someone, change your body before you try to change your effort. Sit forward, unfold your arms, turn to face them properly.
Find a photograph of someone caught unguarded, ashamed or frightened or relieved, and look at it for a while. Notice what happens in your chest and around your own eyes.
Two people who spend time in step really do become more attuned. Nothing passes between your brains while it happens, though, so put the hours in rather than waiting for the wiring.