Want to know how to see things from different points of view? Then you’re in the right place.
You’ve probably had this moment. Someone does something that makes no sense to you, and the first explanation your brain offers is that they’re careless, rude, or a little dim. Then, later, you learn the backstory. Suddenly it all makes sense, and you feel a bit silly.
That gap between your first read and the fuller picture is what this article is about.
Seeing things from other points of view isn’t some soft, optional skill. It shapes how you argue, how you lead, how you parent, how you vote, and how quickly you patch things up after a fight. It’s also trainable. You don’t need a personality transplant. You need a handful of habits that slow down your first judgment long enough for better information to get in, and if you’ve already been working on your emotional intelligence, a lot of what follows will feel familiar.
Below are 11 of those habits. Each one comes with the research or real-world history behind it, and something small you can do this week.
1. Listen like you’ll have to repeat it back
Most of us listen with half an ear while drafting our reply with the other half. You nod, you wait for a gap, and you pounce.
Good listening flips that. You stay with what the other person is saying, ask about the parts you don’t follow, and hold off on judging. The interesting thing is what this does to them. In four lab experiments, Guy Itzchakov, Avraham Kluger and Dotan Castro (published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2017) found that when speakers were heard by an attentive, non-judgmental listener, they felt less socially anxious and less defensive. As a result, they became more aware of the contradictions in their own views, and their attitudes became less extreme. People who were anxious by nature, or already a little torn on the topic, showed the biggest shift.
So careful listening gives you a better view of the other person, and it often draws out a more nuanced version of their opinion than the one they walked in with. You end up hearing the “yes, but” they’d never have said to someone who was waiting to argue.
Picture this: a friend tells you she’s thinking of quitting a stable job. Your instinct is to list the risks. If you ask “What’s pulling you toward leaving?” and actually wait, you may hear her own doubts come out unprompted. Those doubts are the real conversation.
Give it a go: in your next disagreement, summarize the other person’s point in one sentence and ask “Did I get that right?” before you say anything of your own. For more on keeping a talk two-way, these tips on having a good conversation with anyone pair nicely with this one.
2. Coach yourself like you’re someone else
Here’s an odd fact about human judgment. We are much wiser about other people’s problems than about our own.
Ethan Kross, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan who runs its Emotion & Self Control Lab, has spent years studying what he calls “distanced self-talk.” In a 2021 interview with Michigan Alum, he put it plainly: “coaching yourself through a problem using your own name can be effective” for quieting the mental chatter that narrows your view. His own example was asking himself, by first name, how he was going to deal with a situation.
The research behind this is a 2014 Psychological Science paper by Igor Grossmann (University of Waterloo) and Kross, which named the bias “Solomon’s Paradox.” People in long-term relationships reasoned more wisely about a friend’s partner cheating than about their own partner cheating. When they were asked to think about their own situation from a third-person angle, the gap closed. The pattern held for younger adults (20 to 40) and older adults (60 to 80) alike.
Why would a pronoun matter? Using “she” or your own name pulls you a step back from the emotional centre of the problem, and from there it’s easier to notice that the other person in the story has their own reasons.
Next time you’re stewing over a conflict, write two or three sentences about it in the third person (“Anna is annoyed because…”) and see what the other character’s side looks like from that distance.
3. Ask, don’t guess
“Put yourself in their shoes” is lovely advice. It’s also less reliable than you’d think.
Tal Eyal, Mary Steffel and Nicholas Epley ran 25 experiments on perspective-taking, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2018, to test whether telling people to imagine someone else’s perspective made them better at reading that person. Participants tried to read emotions from faces and body postures, tell fake smiles from real ones, spot lies, and predict a spouse’s preferences. Most people in pretests expected perspective-taking to help. It didn’t, at least not consistently. It made people less self-centred in their guesses, but the new guesses weren’t more accurate. What did improve accuracy, in the final experiment, was simply talking to the other person and asking. The authors’ summary is worth remembering: understanding comes from “getting perspective, not simply taking perspective.”
The lesson is humbling. Your imagination can only work with what’s already in your head, so if the missing piece is in their head, you have to go and get it.
That said, asking well matters. Open questions (“What was that like for you?”) beat leading ones (“You must have been furious, right?”). And if someone’s account keeps rewriting what you both saw happen, that’s a different situation, closer to the patterns covered in how to respond to gaslighting.
Start small: pick one person whose reaction you’re sure you can predict, maybe a partner or a colleague. Before your next decision that affects them, ask them instead of assuming. Note how often your guess was off.
4. Check your picture of “the other side” against reality
When you think about people who vote differently, worship differently, or hold the opposite view on a hot topic, who comes to mind? Usually the loudest example you’ve seen.
The research group More in Common tested how far off that mental picture is. Their 2019 report The Perception Gap, by Daniel Yudkin, Stephen Hawkins and Tim Dixon, surveyed 2,100 American adults through YouGov in November 2018. Both Democrats and Republicans estimated that about 55% of the other side held extreme views. The real figure was about 30%.
| Group being judged | Estimated share with extreme views | Actual share |
|---|---|---|
| Democrats (as judged by Republicans) | 53% | 29% |
| Republicans (as judged by Democrats) | 56% | 34% |
News habits tracked with the size of the gap. People who followed government and public affairs “most of the time” were off by about 28 points, compared with around 10 points for those who followed it only now and then. The report itself flags that this is a correlation, not proof that news causes the distortion. Heavy news readers may differ in other ways too.
Still, the takeaway is practical. Your sense of what “they” believe is probably built from the most extreme cases your feed serves up, and if your scrolling habit leans that way, it may be worth reading up on how to stop doomscrolling.
Your move: the next time you catch yourself saying “they all think…”, look for actual survey data on that group’s views, or a long-form interview with an ordinary member of it. Treat it like a small research project. Some solid research skills help here more than you’d expect.
5. Invite someone to disagree with you
In April 1961, the Bay of Pigs invasion collapsed within days. President John F. Kennedy had approved it after meetings where, by most accounts, nobody pushed back hard. Psychologist Irving Janis later used the episode as a textbook example of groupthink.
Eighteen months later came the Cuban Missile Crisis, in October 1962, and Kennedy ran things differently. As Peter Feuerherd wrote for JSTOR Daily in 2019, decisions moved to a circle of trusted advisers, including his brother Robert Kennedy and Theodore Sorensen, and the discussions were set up so pros and cons could be argued openly. The CIA and National Security Council were still consulted but no longer had the final say. Robert Kennedy, who according to a 2013 Boston Globe column by Paul Hellman would later champion the devil’s advocate role, credited the team’s freedom to “talk, debate, argue, disagree” with shaping the course they finally chose.
Historians still argue about how much any single factor mattered in 1962. But the contrast between the two crises is one of the clearest documented examples of what happens when a group makes room for opposing views.
You don’t need a national crisis to use this. It works at a kitchen table, and it works especially well if you manage people. Building space for dissent is a big part of being a good boss, because the people who report to you rarely volunteer bad news on their own.
Here’s a simple way in: before your next big decision, ask one person you trust to make the strongest possible case against it. Thank them, and don’t argue back for at least a day.
6. Get suspicious when you feel very sure
Certainty feels like clarity. Often it’s the opposite.
The mechanism goes roughly like this. Some emotions come bundled with a feeling of certainty. When you’re in one of them, your brain decides it already has enough information. Because it thinks it has enough, it stops looking carefully, and leans on shortcuts like stereotypes and “who’s saying this” rather than “is this a good argument.” A shortcut-driven judgment almost always defaults to your own point of view, since that’s the one already loaded.
Larissa Tiedens and Susan Linton tested this in four experiments, reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2001. People feeling emotions tied to certainty, compared with emotions tied to uncertainty, relied more on a source’s apparent expertise, stereotyped more, and paid less attention to whether an argument was actually strong. That’s experimental evidence that the emotional state shifts processing, though it was tested with lab-induced feelings and short tasks rather than real-life conflicts.
So when you’re heated and utterly convinced, that’s the moment your view is likely to be at its narrowest. It’s also why dealing with someone else’s anger is so hard: they’re in the same state. If that’s a regular challenge for you, there’s a whole guide on dealing with angry people.
Next time, do this: when you notice the “I’m completely right” feeling, treat it as a signal to pause rather than a green light. Even a few minutes using one of these quick resets for your nervous system can loosen your grip enough to ask, “What would someone who disagrees notice that I’m missing?”
7. Spend real time with people who aren’t like you
This might be the most thoroughly tested idea on the list.
Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp pulled together 515 studies with 713 independent samples for a review in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Pettigrew and Tropp’s 2006 meta-analysis concluded that contact between groups typically reduces prejudice. The effect didn’t seem to come from prejudiced people simply avoiding contact, or from publication bias. The more rigorous studies actually found larger effects. And the change didn’t stay with the individual you met: it tended to spread to how people felt about the whole group.
One more detail is reassuring. Gordon Allport’s classic “optimal conditions” for contact, things like equal status and shared goals, made the effect stronger, but they weren’t required for it to happen.
There’s an obvious limit. Most of these studies measure attitudes, and a kinder attitude on a survey isn’t the same as a changed life. But as evidence goes, 500-plus studies pointing the same way is about as solid as social psychology gets.
The practical point is that reading about people is a start, but sharing time with them, especially working on something together, does more. If striking up those conversations feels awkward, these tips on improving your social skills can make the first steps easier.
Test it this week: join one thing (a class, a volunteer shift, a local club) where most people differ from you in age, background, politics or faith. Go more than once. Contact works through repetition, not a single visit.
8. Read stories told from inside other lives
Keith Oatley, professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, has argued for years that fiction works like a flight simulator for social life. Writing in The Psychologist in 2008, he described fiction as “a kind of simulation that runs on minds.” When you read a novel, you track characters’ intentions, feel their plans succeed or collapse, and practise the “what ifs” of social situations without real-world consequences.
The flight-simulator comparison holds up in one way: both let you rehearse complex situations safely. It breaks down in another. A flight simulator is designed to match reality, while a novel is shaped by one author’s view, which can be just as narrow as yours.
And how big is the actual effect? A 2018 meta-analysis by David Dodell-Feder and Diana Tamir in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General combined 14 studies (53 effect sizes) and found that fiction reading gave a small but statistically significant boost to social-cognitive performance compared with reading non-fiction or nothing at all (g = 0.15 to 0.16). Small is the key word. The authors also called for stronger reading manipulations and for tests of whether the effect carries over into everyday social life.
So, reading fiction won’t transform you overnight. It’s a gentle, enjoyable nudge in the right direction, and nudges add up over a lifetime of reading.
A quick experiment: choose your next novel specifically because its narrator lives a life far from yours, in a different country, class, era or belief system. Notice the moments where you’d have judged the character from outside, but don’t from inside.
9. Trade stories, not talking points
If you’ve ever tried to change someone’s mind with a list of facts, you know how that usually goes.
In 2016, David Broockman and Joshua Kalla published a field experiment in Science that tested something different. Fifty-six canvassers knocked on doors in South Florida and had single conversations of about 10 minutes with 501 voters about transgender rights. Instead of arguing, the canvassers built rapport and asked voters to share a time they had been judged or treated unfairly themselves, then connect it to what transgender people face. Prejudice dropped substantially, by more than the average American decline in homophobia between 1998 and 2012, and the effect lasted at least three months. Support for a non-discrimination law also rose, even after voters heard counterarguments. Broockman described it to Stanford Graduate School of Business as roughly “a decade and a half of change in 10 minutes.”
Two caveats are worth knowing. This study arrived in the shadow of an earlier canvassing paper (LaCour and Green, 2014) that was retracted after Broockman and Kalla themselves spotted problems in its data. And Broockman told Stanford it is one study, noting that a similar test on abortion found no effect.
Even with those limits, the method makes sense. A story from your own life lets you meet the other person’s experience on familiar ground, and that does work an argument can’t. Ordinary chit-chat often opens that door, which is one reason being good at small talk is more useful than it sounds.
When a disagreement gets stuck, stop debating positions and ask, “Has anything like this ever happened to you?” Then offer your own story in return.
10. Go and see their world for yourself
Some perspectives can’t be explained in a meeting room. You have to go there.
When Toyota redesigned its Sienna minivan for the 2004 model year, chief engineer Yuji Yokoya didn’t rely mainly on focus groups. According to a 2003 report by Alisa Priddle in WardsAuto, he drove about 53,000 miles (85,300 km) across North America in the old Sienna and in prototypes of the new one. WardsAuto reported that many of the improvements came out of that trip. The new van was 4 inches wider, had about 45 cubic feet more interior space, a turning circle more than 3 feet tighter, a choice of seven or eight seats, and a third row that folded flat into the floor. The old model’s main complaints from buyers who turned it down had been its size and how hard it was to get in and out.
What makes this a good case is the method. Yokoya was a Japanese engineer designing for North American families, and instead of guessing what they needed, he lived in their conditions for months. One caution: a car magazine’s account of a product launch isn’t a controlled study, so you can’t separate the road trip’s contribution from everything else Toyota’s team did.
You can scale this right down. If you have a dispute with a colleague in another department, spend an hour shadowing their day. If you don’t get why your teenager is glued to a particular app, sit beside them and let them show you how they use it. Take one afternoon this month to physically step into the environment of someone you tend to misjudge, and just watch.
11. Learn their language, literally or figuratively
Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 prison years on Robben Island, guarded largely by Afrikaner warders who represented the system that jailed him. He chose to learn Afrikaans.
His lawyer and friend George Bizos, interviewed for PBS Frontline, said Mandela spoke Afrikaans with the warders “not in a patronizing way” but because he genuinely wanted to learn their language. Bizos also described Mandela asking the Minister of Justice for an Afrikaans poet’s collected works for the prison library, then writing his thank-you letter in Afrikaans; it was published in an Afrikaans newspaper. In Bizos’s view, Mandela understood that he could never lead South Africa while ignoring what Afrikaners wanted. These are one close friend’s interpretations, of course, but the language study itself is well documented, including in Mandela’s own memoir, Long Walk to Freedom (1994).
Language shapes how you hear people. When you learn the words someone uses for their own experience, you stop translating them into your categories. That applies to a foreign language, but also to the vocabulary of a profession, a generation, or a community.
Start small: pick one group you find hard to understand and learn ten of their own terms, the ones they use among themselves, along with what those terms mean to them. Use them only when you’ve got them right.
What to do when you slip
You will slip. You’ll interrupt someone mid-sentence, assume the worst about a driver who cut you off, or fire off a message you regret. Everybody does, including people who’ve worked on this for years.
What matters is how you respond to yourself afterwards. Juliana Breines and Serena Chen at the University of California, Berkeley, tested this in a 2012 study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. In one experiment, 86 undergraduates took a hard vocabulary quiz and did poorly. One group was then told, in effect, that finding it difficult is common and they shouldn’t be too hard on themselves. A second group got a self-esteem boost instead, and a third got nothing. Given a chance to prepare for a second test, the self-compassion group studied 33% longer than the self-esteem group and 51% longer than the control group. That’s a small lab sample and a study-time measure rather than real-world behaviour, but it fits the idea that kindness toward yourself after a failure keeps you trying, while harshness makes you defensive.
That defensiveness matters here. If you beat yourself up for being judgmental, you’re likely to justify the judgment instead of revisiting it. If self-criticism is a heavy pattern for you, the guide on how to stop hating yourself goes deeper.
A few recovery moves that help:
- Name it plainly. “I assumed she was being lazy, and I didn’t ask.” No drama, no excuses.
- Repair if you can. A short “I jumped to conclusions earlier, can you tell me what happened?” goes a long way.
- Go back to one habit, not all eleven. Asking instead of guessing (item 3) is usually the easiest restart.
- Reset the day, not your identity. One snap judgment doesn’t define you. If the whole day’s gone sideways, here’s how to turn a bad day around.
Over time, these small corrections become automatic, which is what turns an intention into one of your good habits.
Conclusion
Seeing other points of view mostly comes down to a few steady practices. Listen fully. Ask instead of assuming. Distrust your certainty when it runs hottest. Put yourself in rooms, books and conversations that don’t automatically agree with you. None of that requires you to drop your own convictions. It just means checking them against more of the world before you act on them.
Pick one item from this list, the one that made you a little uncomfortable, and practise it for the next seven days. Then come back for the next one. If you want more practical ideas on growing in small, realistic steps, browse our self-improvement articles.
