Helping People Get Better at Walking in Others’ Shoes

From the Marshall Memo #426

In this Teachers College Record article, Harvard researchers Hunter Gehlbach, Maureen Brinkworth, and Ming-Te Wang start off with a quote from an Elvis Presley song – “If I could be you, if you could be me… Walk a mile in my shoes/Just walk a mile in my shoes…” Now that’s something we don’t see too often in academic journals! “As Elvis observed,” say the authors, “people often wish to get inside the heads of others as a means to better understand their point of view. Perhaps even more frequently, individuals wish that others could better see and understand the world from their perspective. Yet, people are often frustrated that others never seem to even attempt ‘walking a mile in their shoes.’” 

For school administrators, teachers, counselors, and students, social perspective taking (jargon for walking in another’s shoes) is a vital skill for living and working in a global society in which we rub shoulders with people quite different from ourselves. Gehlbach, Brinkworth, and Wang define social perspective taking as the motivation and ability to discern the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of others – being willing to try and having the skills to succeed. Researchers have found strong correlations between social perspective taking and a number of important school outcomes: better communication skills, less stereotyping of others, better negotiation and problem-solving skills, being less aggressive when provoked, great social self-efficacy, healthier attachments to others, increased altruistic behavior, and higher grades. 

Researchers are just beginning to explore how to motivate people to get better at social perspective taking, and, once they’re motivated, how to train them in the specific skills involved. Gehlbach, Brinkworth, and Wang acknowledge that it’s difficult to change people’s personalities, but their study explored conditions under which people might be motivated to engage in and get better at social perspective taking. “In other words,” they say, “whereas getting a highly egocentric adolescent or a ‘my-way-or-the-highway’ school administrator to change his or her personality seems destined for failure, assigning him or her roles to engage in social perspective taking in certain situations may well change his or her approach in different interactions.” 

In their study, the authors found there were multiple pathways to get people to engage in social perspective taking. Seven factors were at the top of the list:

• A high-stakes situation – For example, helping protect oneself or others;
• Pro-social goals – There’s a relationship reason to help another person;
• Desire to know more – Wanting to better understand the situation and/or reduce one’s own uncertainty;
• Relationship goals – Wanting to initiate, maintain, or repair a relationship;
• Social influence – Wanting to get another person to cooperate or comply;
• Intrinsic interest – Being curious and/or needing to understand others;
• Desire for self-knowledge – Wanting to understand more about oneself or how one’s actions are interpreted by others.

There were three factors that could foster or inhibit social perspective taking, depending on the situation:

• Emotional regulation – Wanting to regulate one’s own emotions or the motivations of others;
• Identity – Wanting to fulfill a temporary role (e.g., advising a friend) or a more permanent identity (e.g., caring parent);
• Familiarity – Knowing another person well (familiarity can breed contempt).

And there were three factors that inhibited motivation to engage in social perspective taking:

• Lack of energy;
• Hubris – Being convinced that one’s point of view is correct; 
• Cognitive load – Too much on one’s mind to engage in social perspective taking.

How does this apply to the real world of schools? Imagine a teacher who doesn’t think it’s her job to try to discern the thoughts and feelings of her students. That’s the school counselor’s job, she says. Gehlbach, Brinkworth, and Wang believe there are ways to motivate this teacher to engage in social perspective taking: for starters, the principal might encourage her to see this as a way to improve her students’ learning. 

Or imagine students who have fixed views on a subject being asked to argue that point of view and then being asked to work with a team arguing the opposite view.

The authors’ biggest take-away from the study is that there are multiple pathways to getting adults and students to engage in social perspective taking, and the best strategy is to use more than one in hopes of hitting the sweet spot with a number of different people.

“The Social Perspective Taking Process: What Motivates Individuals to Take Another’s Perspective?” by Hunter Gehlbach, Maureen Brinkworth, and Ming-Te Wang in Teachers College Record, January 2012 (Vol. 114, # 1, p. 1-29),