Why Imagining Their View Makes You Less Judgmental

There's a woman I used to see at my local coffee shop every Tuesday morning. She'd walk in, bypass the small queue near the door, order in a clipped tone that suggested the barista should be taking notes, and leave without making eye contact with anyone.

Three weeks in, I had her completely mapped. Entitled. Self-absorbed. One of those people who move through the world like it owes them a personal apology.

Then one Tuesday she came in with a child in a full-body cast, a stack of medical paperwork jammed under her arm, and eyes that had clearly run out of sleep sometime around last month. I watched her quietly apologize to the barista for being "a bit much lately." The barista — who'd apparently known her for years — just waved it off.

I'd built an entire personality around two minutes of weekly observation. And I'd been completely wrong.

What happened to me in that coffee shop has a formal name in social psychology. Lee Ross documented it in 1977 and called it the fundamental attribution error — the deeply human tendency to explain other people's behavior by their fixed character ("she's rude") while underweighting the situational context that might actually explain everything. We do this automatically, faster than conscious thought, and we do it constantly.

The interesting question isn't whether you do this. You do. Everyone does. The interesting question is whether there's a specific, evidence-based way to interrupt it before it hardens into a verdict — and a 1997 study by C. Daniel Batson, John Early, and Christiana Salvarani suggests there is. But it requires a more precise instruction than anything you've probably heard before.

"Put Yourself in Their Shoes" Is Telling You the Wrong Thing

You've heard it a thousand times: to understand someone, put yourself in their shoes. It sounds straightforward. It isn't, and the gap between two versions of that instruction turns out to matter more than anyone conveniently mentions.

Batson, Early, and Salvarani published their study — "Perspective Taking: Imagining How Another Feels Versus Imagining How You Would Feel" — in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 1997. Their core question was whether these two instructions are actually the same thing in practice:

1. Imagine-other: Imagine how the other person themselves feels, given their specific circumstances and their own point of view.
2. Imagine-self: Imagine how you would feel if the same situation happened to you.

They look almost identical. They're not.

Batson's research found these two forms of perspective-taking produce genuinely different internal experiences and different downstream behavior. The imagine-other instruction tended to generate higher empathic concern for the person — a genuinely other-focused emotional response. The imagine-self instruction tended to generate personal distress — a self-focused emotional response that, while real, is a different thing entirely.

Empathic concern orients you toward the other person's experience. Personal distress orients you toward your own discomfort at imagining a hard situation. The first predicts a greater willingness to understand and help. The second predicts wanting to escape the discomfort, or unconsciously retreating into judgment.

You've probably felt both of these without knowing they were different. The moment of genuine curiosity about what's actually going on for someone else — on their own terms — is distinct from the mild internal wince you get when you briefly picture yourself in a difficult situation. Batson's data suggests those two moments aren't just subjectively different. They produce different outcomes.

What the 1997 Research Actually Found

Here's the practical punchline from Batson's work: the imagine-other instruction measurably raised empathic concern for the person being considered, and it did so without a corresponding spike in personal distress. The imagine-self condition raised distress without reliably producing the other-focused concern that actually translates into understanding someone's situation on their own terms.

If you've ever listened to someone describe a difficult situation and found yourself nodding while mentally rehearsing your own parallel experience — "oh, that's like when I..." — you've experienced the imagine-self drift. You're not fully tracking their experience anymore. You've quietly stepped back into your own.

A related finding, from a 2000 follow-up study by Adam Galinsky and Gordon Moskowitz in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, extended Batson's work into the domain of stereotyping specifically. Galinsky and Moskowitz found that deliberately taking another person's perspective before forming a judgment — using the imagine-other instruction — measurably reduced the automatic pull toward explaining their behavior by fixed character traits. In other words, it directly counteracted the fundamental attribution error that makes snap judgments feel so certain.

This is the missing mechanism in most empathy advice. The instruction to "be more understanding" is correct in direction but vague in execution. Batson's research pins down the specific mental move: center their situation and their reasoning, not your hypothetical reaction to it.

Why the Imagine-Self Version Quietly Backfires

The imagine-self instruction has an intuitive appeal. Of course you'd understand someone better by imagining you were in their position — you know yourself well, so you can model the experience clearly. The problem is that you're not them. Your hypothetical reaction to their situation filters everything through your own history, sensitivities, values, and assumptions.

When I imagined how I would feel if I were as rushed and terse as that woman in the coffee shop, what I got was: I'd be embarrassed. I'd apologize to people. I'd be more self-aware. Which told me exactly nothing useful about her — only that she wasn't responding to the situation the way I would. That difference became the evidence I used to conclude something about her character.

The imagine-other instruction inverts this. Instead of asking "how would I feel?", it asks: given her specific circumstances, history, and vantage point, what might she actually be experiencing right now? This requires genuine, effortful imagination of a perspective that may be quite different from your own. It's harder. It's also what the data suggests actually produces empathic concern rather than distress or judgment.

Stephen Covey built an entire habit around a phrase that captures this: seek first to understand, then to be understood. He meant it as a discipline, not a platitude — something you work at, not a feeling that arrives on its own. Batson's research gives that discipline a specific cognitive shape.

There's also a structural reason why imagine-other tends to reduce snap judgment more effectively than general goodwill. When you center someone's own situation and reasoning, you're implicitly invoking situational context — the very thing the fundamental attribution error causes you to underweight. The exercise works partly because it mechanically focuses your attention on the factors you're most likely to miss.

This is what makes it distinct from simply being a kind person or reminding yourself not to jump to conclusions. You can intend to be open-minded and still find your mind gravitating back to a character-based explanation, because the attribution happens fast and automatically. The imagine-other exercise gives you a specific, actionable alternative to fill the gap before the judgment settles in.

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The Difference Between Perspective-Taking and Sympathy

Here's a distinction that Batson's broader research program makes worth noting: deliberate perspective-taking — the imagine-other kind — is genuinely distinct from sympathy, and these two things don't produce the same outcomes.

Sympathy is an emotional response to someone's situation that remains primarily about your own feelings. You feel bad for them, which actually keeps you at the emotional center. Perspective-taking in the Batson sense is an active cognitive exercise that temporarily displaces your own vantage point in favor of theirs. It's less emotionally comfortable and requires more of you, which is probably why people reach for sympathy more readily.

The distinction matters in practice because sympathy doesn't reliably counteract the attribution error. You can feel genuinely sorry for someone while still believing their difficulties stem from their own character flaws. Imagine-other perspective-taking, according to Batson and Galinsky's data, works specifically against that tendency by centering their reasoning rather than your emotional response to their outcome.

There's a reason why books like Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication spend so much time distinguishing observations from evaluations — the goal isn't softer feelings, it's more accurate perception. The research backs this up. Feeling more empathy and seeing more accurately aren't the same thing, though imagine-other perspective-taking appears to produce both.

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How to Start Today

You probably can't do this retroactively for the person you misjudged last week. But you can do it going forward, and the practice is genuinely simple — which doesn't mean easy.

Step 1: Notice the judgment forming. You're already generating an explanation the moment you see someone behave in a way that surprises or frustrates you. The goal isn't to suppress it — it's to catch it early enough to do something. "I'm starting to build a story about this person" is the thought you're aiming to recognize.

Step 2: Ask the imagine-other question explicitly. Not "how would I feel in their situation?" — that's the imagine-self drift. Instead: given what I can actually observe about their specific circumstances, what might they be experiencing right now, from their own perspective? The more specific you get about what's actually visible about their situation, the more useful the exercise becomes.

Step 3: Name what you don't know. The fundamental attribution error is partly a confidence problem — you see behavior and feel like you've seen enough. Actively naming what's missing (their sleep, their week, what just happened before this moment) is a productive check on the certainty that snap judgments carry.

Step 4: Sit with genuine uncertainty. The goal isn't to arrive at a charitable explanation and lock it in. It's to stay genuinely uncertain about a person's character long enough to leave room for a more accurate picture. The woman in the coffee shop didn't need my sympathy. She needed me to stop being confident about who she was before I had any real evidence.

If you want to develop this as a consistent practice rather than a one-off exercise, a short daily log of moments where you noticed a snap judgment and applied the imagine-other question can accelerate the pattern recognition. You're not building a skill so much as building the habit of pausing — and like any habit, the feedback loop is what makes it stick.

Batson's paper came out in 1997. Nearly three decades later, the core finding has held up across replications and extensions: the specific mental act of imagining someone's own experience — not your hypothetical reaction to their situation — is what measurably shifts both the internal experience of understanding and the resulting willingness to stay curious. The instruction sounds like a small edit to familiar advice. The effect in practice is not small.

The Discipline of Staying Uncertain

Here's the uncomfortable thing buried in all of this: being less judgmental isn't fundamentally about being more forgiving or more generous by nature. It's about being better at staying genuinely uncertain about people until you have enough information to know something real.

Most of us overestimate how much we've actually observed and underestimate how much context we've missed. The coffee shop took me three weeks to partially correct. There are probably dozens of other people I've mentally filed under a fixed character assessment that I'll never get the chance to revise, because the situation that would have changed my mind never happened in front of me.

Designing your evolution means choosing to stay in the question rather than the conclusion. Not because it's more virtuous — but because it's more accurate. The imagine-other exercise isn't a technique for becoming a nicer person. It's a specific, documented cognitive move that keeps your perception slightly closer to reality than the default.

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What's one snap judgment you've made recently that you're still fairly confident about — and what would change if you genuinely asked what they might be experiencing, rather than what you would feel in their place?

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Sources:

• Batson, C. D., Early, S., & Salvarani, G. (1997). Perspective taking: Imagining how another feels versus imagining how you would feel. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23(7), 751–758.
• Galinsky, A. D., & Moskowitz, G. B. (2000). Perspective-taking: Decreasing stereotype expression, stereotype accessibility, and in-group favoritism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(4), 708–724.
• Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 10, 173–220.