In today’s article you’re going to learn everything you need to know about how to be an understanding person.
Most of us think we’re pretty good at understanding other people. The data says otherwise.
In Businessolver’s 2026 State of Workplace Empathy survey (fielded in March and April 2026 by Edelman Data & Intelligence, covering more than 300 C-suite executives and 1,000 employees across six industries), 98% of senior leaders described themselves as empathetic. Meanwhile, 40% of employees said their workplace was toxic, an 18-point jump on the previous year. Somebody in that picture is misreading the room. Probably a lot of somebodies.
That gap is the whole problem in miniature. Being understanding is less a warm feeling than a set of habits: how you listen, what you assume, which questions you ask, and what you do when someone’s reality doesn’t match yours. The good news is that habits can be practiced, and a fair amount of recent research shows which ones actually work.
If you’ve already read our guide on how to show empathy to someone, think of this as the step before it. Empathy is how you respond. Understanding is getting the picture right in the first place.
Here are 12 ways to do that.
1. Treat your first impression as a rough draft
You meet someone, and within seconds your brain has written a short biography. Cold. Arrogant. Shy. Fine, that’s how brains work. The trouble starts when the draft quietly becomes the final version.
A study by Gul Gunaydin, Emre Selcuk and Vivian Zayas (Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2017) shows how that happens. Fifty-five participants rated women from photographs, then met one of them for a 20-minute conversation somewhere between one and six months later. Their photo-based liking predicted how much they liked the woman after meeting her in person. The mechanism is the interesting part. People who liked the photo behaved more warmly during the conversation, which drew more warmth back from the other person, which then “confirmed” the original impression. Psychologists call this behavioral confirmation. Your assumption shapes your behavior, your behavior shapes their response, and their response looks like proof. It’s a loop, and it runs in both directions: a cool first read can produce a cool conversation that seems to justify it. (One caveat: it’s a single, fairly small study, and behavioral confirmation explained only part of the consistency.)
Picture this, as a hypothetical: a new colleague barely looks up when you say hello on their first day. You file them under “unfriendly,” keep your distance, and three weeks later they still seem distant. Of course they do. You never gave them a second chance to be anything else. Being warm on purpose, even when your first read is lukewarm, is one of the simplest ways to be friendly and kind without faking anything.
Next time, do this: when you catch yourself labeling someone after one meeting, add the words “so far” to the label, and give them one more deliberately warm interaction before you decide anything.
2. Ask, don’t guess
“Put yourself in their shoes” is the most common advice on this topic. It’s also less reliable than you’d hope.
Tal Eyal, Mary Steffel and Nicholas Epley tested it properly in a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2018). Across 25 experiments, they instructed people to imagine another person’s perspective and then predict that person’s thoughts, feelings and preferences. Most pretest participants were sure this would make them more accurate. It didn’t. If anything, accuracy dropped slightly, while confidence sometimes went up. What did work, in the final experiment, was simply talking to the other person and asking. The researchers called it perspective getting rather than perspective taking.
Epley, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, put it bluntly in an essay for NPR in March 2018: imagining someone’s viewpoint may help your social life in other ways, but “understanding another person better does not seem to be one of those wonders.” When you imagine their situation, you’re mostly imagining yourself in it. Your values, your history, your reactions, wearing their clothes. That’s why the other approach in our piece on seeing things from different points of view matters so much: you need new information, not a better guess.
So the next time you’re tempted to explain someone’s behavior to yourself, swap the theory for a question such as “How did that land for you?” or “What was the hardest part?”, and then actually wait for the answer.
3. Give people your full attention, not most of it
Listening sounds passive. It isn’t.
The largest synthesis so far comes from Avraham Kluger and colleagues, published in the Journal of Business and Psychology (2024). They pooled 664 effect sizes from 144 samples, covering 400,020 observations, on how “perceived listening” at work relates to outcomes. The overall correlation between feeling listened to and job outcomes was 0.39. The strongest link was with relationship quality (0.51), things like trust and satisfaction with the relationship. Most of the data is correlational, and many studies measured both listening and outcomes on the same questionnaire, which inflates the numbers. Even when the authors kept only studies that used different sources or methods, the relationship link stayed at 0.44. That’s large by social-science standards.
Experimental work points the same way. In five experiments with 1,643 participants, researchers at the University of Haifa found that high-quality listening reduced speakers’ loneliness after they talked about a past experience of social rejection (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2023). Feeling heard made people feel more connected and more able to say what they really thought.
What does “high-quality” mean in practice? Undivided attention, a real attempt to understand, and no judgment while the other person talks. If you want more on the mechanics, our guide to having a good conversation with anyone covers the basics.
Test it this week: in one conversation, don’t plan your reply while the other person is speaking. When they finish, summarize what you heard in one sentence and ask whether you got it right.
4. Validate the feeling before you fix the problem
When someone’s upset, the urge to solve it is strong. Hold off for a minute.
Cinthia Benitez, Kristen Howard and Jennifer Cheavens at Ohio State University ran three experiments, published online in the Journal of Positive Psychology in December 2020. Participants wrote about a time they’d felt intense anger, then talked about it with an experimenter who responded either with validation (signaling that the reaction made sense) or invalidation (questioning or dismissing it). Validation didn’t make people less angry; there was no difference in negative emotion between conditions. What it did was protect positive emotion. Validated participants’ positive mood dropped less, while invalidated participants’ positive mood didn’t recover during the conversation. Cheavens’ interpretation was that validation keeps people open and curious enough to keep engaging. Worth noting: the participants were students, and the study looked at one emotion, anger.
Think of it like the “you are here” dot on a shopping-center map. You can’t plan a route until you know where you’re starting. Validation is that dot: it tells the other person you’ve located them correctly. The comparison has limits, though. A map dot is neutral, while validation is relational, and it doesn’t mean agreeing with everything they did. “That sounds incredibly frustrating” is validation. “You were completely right to scream at him” is something else.
This is one of the core skills behind emotional intelligence, and it’s easy to skip when you’re in a hurry.
Start small: before offering any advice, say one sentence that names the feeling (“No wonder you’re fed up”), then ask whether they want ideas or just want to vent.
5. Assume it stings a little more than it looks
This next finding cuts against the usual advice to be perfectly accurate.
Shir Genzer, Anat Perry and colleagues at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Haifa, Bar-Ilan University and Columbia University ran a preliminary survey plus seven studies with 2,866 participants (Nature Communications, published December 2025). People consistently rated other people’s emotions as more intense than those people rated themselves, especially negative emotions like anger, sadness and fear. The pattern showed up in text messages, recorded videos and live conversations, with strangers and with romantic partners. Ironically, participants believed they were accurate, or that others tended to underestimate their feelings.
The twist is that the overestimation seemed useful. People who slightly overestimated others’ negative emotions responded with more empathy toward strangers, and their romantic partners reported higher relationship satisfaction. Perry, who led the work, argued that emotional accuracy may not be the only thing that matters: leaning a little toward “this probably hurts” seems to prompt more care. Keep the limits in mind. The links with empathy and satisfaction are associations, and people in the study still said they’d prefer others to judge their own feelings accurately.
That last point matters. Telling someone “you’re clearly devastated” when they said they’re a bit annoyed will backfire. The bias works best quietly, in what you do rather than what you declare. It’s also handy when emotions run hot, as our guide to dealing with angry people explains.
When a friend shrugs off a bad week, take their words at face value but act as if it might be weighing on them a bit more: check in again tomorrow, or offer something small and practical.
6. Swap stories, not just arguments
When you disagree with someone, the instinct is to bring better facts. Facts matter. They just rarely move people on their own.
Political scientists Joshua Kalla (Yale) and David Broockman (UC Berkeley) tested this in the field, working with seven organizations that had never used the technique before. In three pre-registered experiments reported in the American Political Science Review (February 2020), 230 canvassers held conversations with 6,869 voters across seven US locations, on attitudes toward unauthorized immigrants and transgender people. In the first experiment, conversations that relied on arguments alone had no measurable effect on prejudice. Otherwise identical conversations that added what the researchers called the “non-judgmental exchange of narratives” (sharing a personal story, inviting the voter to share one, and listening without judgment) reduced exclusionary attitudes for at least four months. Two further experiments replicated the result, including one done by phone.
The effects were small in statistical terms (standardized effects of 0.04 to 0.08), and the organizations involved had clear persuasion goals. Still, the lesson for everyday life is plain. People lower their guard when they feel listened to and when the conversation is about experiences rather than positions. A story invites a story back. A statistic invites a counter-statistic. If you’re working on your social skills more broadly, this is a good one to add.
Here’s a simple way in: the next time a disagreement starts, ask “Has something happened in your life that made this matter to you?” and share a relevant experience of your own before making any argument.
7. Put the phone face down
You already know this one. Doing it is harder.
The most comprehensive look so far is a meta-analysis by Nie Ni and colleagues in Frontiers in Psychology (May 2025), pooling 52 studies with 58 samples and 19,698 participants on partner “phubbing” (ignoring a partner in favor of your phone). The 2025 Frontiers meta-analysis on partner phubbing found it was linked with lower satisfaction, less intimacy, lower responsiveness and more conflict:
| Outcome | Correlation with partner phubbing | Samples | People |
|---|---|---|---|
| Relationship satisfaction | −0.22 | 30 | 9,040 |
| Intimacy quality | −0.27 | 5 | 1,785 |
| Partner responsiveness | −0.29 | 4 | 1,372 |
| Conflict | +0.57 | 7 | 1,885 |
The authors are careful to say most of these studies are cross-sectional, so we can’t tell whether phones damage relationships or whether unhappy partners reach for their phones more. Probably some of both. But responsiveness, the sense that someone notices and responds to your needs, is basically what being understood feels like, and it’s hard to offer while you’re scrolling. If the scroll has its hooks in you, our guide on how to stop doomscrolling has practical fixes.
A quick experiment: for one week, put your phone screen-down and out of reach during meals and any conversation that lasts longer than a couple of minutes. Notice whether people talk for longer.
8. Disagree in a way that shows you heard them
Understanding someone doesn’t mean agreeing with them. It means engaging with what they actually said.
Michael Yeomans (Imperial College London), Julia Minson (Harvard) and colleagues call this “conversational receptiveness.” In a 2020 paper in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, they used machine learning to identify the language that signals it: acknowledging the other view (“I understand that…”), framing your own claims as yours (“I think”), and hedging where honest (“sometimes,” “in some cases”). Government executives who used more of it were rated as better teammates and advisors, and Wikipedia editors who wrote more receptive posts were less likely to receive personal attacks.
Their follow-up, accepted for publication by the American Psychological Association in June 2024, found that receptiveness is contagious. When one person in a disagreement used it, the other person tended to use it back, in online class forums and among government leaders in the lab. In pre-registered experiments, training just one person increased receptive language from their political opponent, and a single receptive message improved how the other side was viewed.
That’s useful for anyone who manages people too. A leader who can disagree without dismissing is a big part of being a good boss.
Your move: before you disagree with someone this week, restate their point in your own words, start your reply with “I understand that…” and present your view as your view, not as a fact they’ve missed.
9. Treat empathy as a skill you can build
Some people believe understanding others is a fixed trait. You either have it or you don’t. That belief turns out to matter.
Jamil Zaki, a psychology professor at Stanford and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, argued in a June 2019 interview with Stanford News that empathy can be cultivated with practice, even in fairly closed-minded people. He pointed to his lab’s work: people who were led to adopt a “growth mindset” about empathy, the belief that it can improve with effort, spent more time listening to the suffering of someone of another race and worked harder to understand someone from the other side of the political spectrum. Related intervention work by Erika Weisz and Zaki with first-year college students tried to raise motivation to empathize, rather than only training skills.
This is an expert view built on experimental work, not a settled law. Mindset interventions in general have produced mixed results in other areas, so treat this as encouraging rather than guaranteed. But the logic is solid. If you think you’re simply “bad with people,” you’ll avoid the awkward conversations where understanding is actually built. If you think it’s trainable, you’ll keep practicing.
So drop the “I’m just not a people person” line. Pick one skill from this list, practice it on purpose for a month, and judge yourself on effort rather than on whether it felt natural.
10. Read fiction that makes you work
Reading won’t turn you into a mind reader. It does seem to help a little, under the right conditions.
The newest synthesis, a systematic review and meta-analysis by Liu Chang of Qingdao University in Frontiers in Psychology (September 2026), pooled 14 effect sizes from 12 studies published between 2000 and 2025. Reading literary or prosocial texts was associated with a small but reliable advantage in social-cognitive performance (an effect size of 0.23), and slightly more for cognitive empathy and theory of mind in experiments (0.27). The gains were clearest when readers were engaged with demanding stories and nudged to simulate characters’ minds. Several newer, pre-registered replications found little or no effect from a single reading session, which suggests early results were overstated.
A larger pre-registered pair of meta-analyses by Lena Wimmer, Gregory Currie, Stacie Friend and colleagues (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, published online April 2024) points in the same direction. Across 69 experiments, reading fiction produced a small benefit (0.14), and the positive effects showed up only for empathy and mentalizing, the ability to think about what others are thinking. Across 111 correlational studies, lifetime fiction reading was associated with small cognitive benefits (a correlation of 0.17).
Translation: one short story won’t change you, but years of reading complex characters might nudge you a bit.
Give it a go: choose a novel narrated by someone very unlike you, and every few chapters pause to predict what a character will do next and why. Then check whether you were right.
11. Remember that most people care more than you think
Being understanding includes understanding other people’s kindness. We’re surprisingly bad at that.
Stanford ran a revealing test through its Stanford Community Project, which Jamil Zaki founded in 2018 in collaboration with communication professor Gabriella Harari and economist Matthew Jackson. In a study reported by Stanford in October 2025, published in Nature Human Behaviour and led by postdoctoral scholar Rui Pei, a survey of more than 5,000 undergraduates found that students who saw their peers as more empathic reported better well-being and more friends. Yet students consistently rated their peers as less caring than those peers rated themselves.
Then the university tried to fix it. Posters in residence halls shared real statistics about how much students cared, drawn from the previous term’s survey. Students in those halls saw their peers as more empathic than students in control halls and reported more “social risk” behaviors, like starting conversations with unfamiliar classmates or sharing their struggles. A second intervention sent practical prompts through a phone app, such as complimenting a stranger. After three weeks, those students were nearly 90% more likely to step outside their comfort zone and reach out. The obvious limit: this is one elite university’s students, and it needs testing more widely.
The broader point holds up. If you assume people are indifferent, you withdraw, and they read your withdrawal as indifference. Breaking the loop starts with a slightly more generous assumption. Our guide on being good at small talk can help with the first few lines.
Your move: this week, message one person you’ve lost touch with, assuming they’ll be glad to hear from you. Most likely, they will be.
12. Choose compassion over empathic distress
Understanding people has an uncomfortable side. If you feel everyone’s pain at full volume, you’ll burn out, and burned-out people stop listening.
The mechanism is fairly well described. Feeling with someone (resonating with their suffering) activates your own distress. If that distress grows large enough, your attention shifts to managing your own discomfort, and the easiest way to do that is to pull back. Compassion works differently: it pairs awareness of someone’s pain with warmth and a wish to help, which keeps you oriented toward them.
A training study by Olga Klimecki, Tania Singer and colleagues (2014) tested this directly. Participants were first trained in empathy, resonating with others’ suffering, and afterward in compassion. Empathy training increased negative feelings when they watched others in distress. The later compassion training reversed that and strengthened positive feelings and brain networks linked to affiliation and reward. The design was small and lab-based, so it shows the mechanism is plausible and trainable rather than proving it for everyone.
Debbie Ling, who led the development of Monash University’s compassion training course for healthcare workers and sits on the Australian Compassion Council, recommended in April 2024 that anyone overwhelmed by others’ suffering, including in the news, try shifting from empathy to compassion. Your distress, she noted, does nothing for the person who’s already hurting. If your body is already in alarm mode, it helps to calm your nervous system first.
When you notice you’re absorbing someone’s pain, take one slow breath and shift the question from “How bad does this feel?” to “What would help them right now?”, then do the smallest version of that.
What to do when you slip
You will slip. You’ll interrupt, jump to conclusions, check your phone mid-sentence, or offer advice to someone who just wanted to be heard. Everyone does. What matters is the repair.
A 2025 study in Contemporary Family Therapy by M. Valipour and colleagues interviewed seven experienced couples and family therapists about what makes apologies work. Their answers converged on three things: empathy for the hurt person, genuine remorse, and actions that repair the damage. Words alone rarely did it. It’s a small qualitative study, but it matches older experimental work. In two studies by Thomas Carpenter and colleagues at Baylor University (2014), with 269 and 208 participants, making amends predicted, and in the second study caused, greater self-forgiveness. Repair, in other words, also helps the person who slipped to let go.
So don’t spiral. Beating yourself up isn’t the same as making it right, and our guide on how to stop hating yourself is worth a read if that’s your default. Instead, go back. Name what you did (“I cut you off earlier, and I’m sorry”), ask them to tell you again, and this time listen properly.
Start small: pick one recent moment where you know you misread someone, and reopen it with a single question: “Can I hear that again? I don’t think I really listened.”
Conclusion
Nobody has a special talent for reading minds; the research above mostly suggests we overrate our own. What separates understanding people is a handful of habits: holding first impressions loosely, asking instead of guessing, listening without one eye on your phone, validating before fixing, and repairing quickly when you get it wrong.
None of this needs to happen all at once. Pick two or three ideas from this list, practice them this week, and pay attention to how people respond. For more on building stronger connections, explore our relationships guides.
