Seeing Through Another’s Eyes: How Empathy Expands Our Worldview and Self-Perception

Interest in empathy as a complex phenomenon—encompassing emotional, cognitive, and behavioral components—emerged in psychology a few decades ago. Initially celebrated, empathy later faced skepticism, with critics highlighting its “dark side,” claiming it clouds our judgment, increases bias, and reduces objectivity. Philosophy professor Heidi Maibom, drawing on recent psychological research and the philosophical perspectives of Heidegger, Husserl, and Sartre, explores why our perception of the world and others is inherently biased, how a lack of empathy distorts both personal and social relationships, and how the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes helps us understand not only others, but also ourselves and the gaps in our worldview.

Years ago, my friend Julie and I took a road trip through Maine in my car. I drove most of the way, but one evening she offered to drive us back from a seafood shack so I could have another beer. I gratefully agreed, but as I watched her take sharp turns in fourth gear, I started to regret my decision. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I snapped and demanded she slow down. Of course, after she did, I felt terrible and apologized. Julie thought for a moment and then said, “At first I was surprised you got so upset, but then I thought about how I’d feel if my husband was driving my car, and I understood.”

Julie was able to adopt my perspective through empathy and by identifying with me. In that crucial moment, she entered my reality and saw the world through my eyes. This ability allowed Julie to understand and forgive my transformation into a backseat driver.

Not long ago, writers and scholars praised such feats of empathy. Books like Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization (2009), Martin Hoffman’s Empathy and Moral Development (2000), and Frans de Waal’s The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society (2009) filled our shelves and minds. But today, empathy has fallen out of favor, with critics lining up to point out its flaws. Philosopher Jesse Prinz argues that empathy is not as crucial for moral development as we think and that it actually limits us, making us more biased and focused on a few rather than the many. Psychologist Paul Bloom, in Against Empathy (2016), claims that empathy does more harm than good morally, while Fritz Breithaupt in The Dark Sides of Empathy (2019) suggests it can even fuel violence. Politically, former Republican Senator Jeff Sessions opposed the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor—whom then-President Barack Obama favored for her empathy—arguing that “empathy for one side is always prejudice against the other.”

Conservatives aren’t the only ones targeting empathy. Some of its harshest critics are liberal scholars like Prinz and Bloom, who believe that in moral matters, we should rely on objective, impartial reasoning. They argue that empathy may be useful in private life, strengthening friendships or helping us accept a partner’s flaws, but has no place in public life.

The problem with this criticism is that it ignores how the human mind works. It assumes that without empathy, we think about ourselves, others, and the world objectively and impartially. But this is far from true. We are fragile, limited beings navigating a complex world. This simple fact suggests that our pre-reflective understanding of reality is not a mirror of some objective truth, but a complex picture based on what we perceive from our own interests. Our senses organize the environment according to what we need to survive and thrive.

In other words, we are already biased. And because empathy forces us to see the world from another, albeit biased, perspective, it ultimately makes us more—not less—objective. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe a thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’ be.”

How Our Minds Shape Reality

The idea that understanding is shaped by human nature goes back at least to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781). He argued that we can know the world only as it is shaped by our minds, which impose order on the “manifold of raw intuitions.” We must perceive the world in time and space, even if we have no reason to believe these structures exist outside our minds. What we take for granted as part of the world’s structure—objects, causality—is actually our mind’s way of organizing sensory information.

Building on Kant but rejecting his metaphysical baggage, Edmund Husserl urged philosophers to stop trying to know the world itself and instead focus on our experience of the world and its phenomena. His student, Martin Heidegger, took a similar approach but focused on action rather than perception and understanding. He argued that our primary way of being in the world is through participation and use. Reflection comes later. We are not thinkers first and actors second, as Western philosophy often suggests; it’s the other way around. Heidegger’s philosophy centers on seeing things as “ready-to-hand”—objects we can use in various ways. We see doorways as passages, stones as projectiles, horses as riding animals. This way of evaluating objects may not align with their inner nature, but it relates to how we can use them.

While Heidegger recognized the importance of action for understanding, Maurice Merleau-Ponty highlighted the true importance of the body. The world, he argued, is a space of possibilities partly defined by our ability to move. Our bodily skills open up new ways to interact with the world and, therefore, new ways to think about it. Not concepts or ideas, but our experience organizes our “readiness” to encounter and interact with objects, people, and the environment. Our consciousness is characterized more by “I can” than “I think.” This radical shift from traditional views of the mind has recently regained popularity in cognitive science under terms like “embodied cognition” and “4E cognition” (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended).

Focusing on the body and its possibilities for action leads to the realization that we represent the world relative to our own involvement. For example, to pick up a cup, I need to know where it is in relation to me, how to grasp it, and how firmly to hold it so I don’t drop it. How do I do this? What I see is organized to include or facilitate my actions. This is perspective seeing. If we always perceive the world in relation to ourselves, then considering different perspectives becomes essential for understanding the world, ourselves, and others.

Empathy and Perspective-Taking in Psychology

Philosophical speculation aside, a range of psychological findings supports the importance of perspective. Cognitive scientist and psychologist Bertram Malle and colleagues found that when we think about ourselves, we focus on our own experiences and feelings. In contrast, when we think about others, we focus on their intentions. While we easily recognize that others have beliefs—even strange or confusing ones—we rarely reflect on our own beliefs as beliefs. Instead, we live under the illusion that we directly perceive the world as it is. Similarly, Corey Cusimano and Geoffrey Goodwin found that we think others can change their beliefs if they try, but since we believe our own views are based on solid evidence, it’s much harder for us to do so.

Such asymmetries (“actor–observer bias”) are found throughout social psychology. When we think about our own needs, psychological needs (encouragement, respect, autonomy) seem as important as physical ones (food, shelter, safety). But Juliana Schroeder and Nicholas Epley found that when we think about others, especially those in need, we rate their physical needs as most important. Similarly, we see our own actions as driven by ambition, principles, and ideals, but assume others are more motivated by external rewards like money, prestige, or reputation. We judge our actions by how well they achieve our goals, but judge others’ actions by their interpersonal and moral consequences.

Are these asymmetries just biases rooted in egocentrism? Perhaps. But a simpler, kinder interpretation is that they result from what is directly accessible to us. We access others only through what they express with their bodies, while our own thoughts and feelings are simply present. We know others have rich inner lives, but our direct experience only touches their bodily expressions.

This asymmetry also appears in how we visually recall past experiences. Research by Georgia Nigro and Ulric Neisser shows that while we usually remember events from a first-person perspective, sometimes we see ourselves from the outside—like recalling swimming from above. Lisa Libby and colleagues found that seeing ourselves from another perspective allows us to imagine different aspects of a situation. When we recall events from our own perspective, we focus on immediate details, bodily reactions, feelings, and the time and place. When we recall them from an outside perspective, we focus on context, the significance of actions, and how we and our actions appear to others.

Many of us are familiar with the asymmetry that arises in arguments with spouses and friends. In interpersonal conflict, it’s easy to see big differences in how each side constructs the situation. Social psychologist Roy Baumeister found that when it comes to everyday transgressions—like broken promises or spilled secrets—offenders minimize the importance of what they did, while victims maximize it. More surprisingly, victims see the offender’s motives as incomprehensible—“inconsistent, contradictory, arbitrary, or senseless.” Offenders, on the other hand, tend to think the victim provoked the action, that it was justified by circumstances, or that nothing could be done. Offenders also claim their actions had no serious consequences, even when the victim remains angry or hurt.

Psychological research shows that our understanding of others’ attitudes and actions differs from our understanding of our own, and philosophical theory explains why. Simply put, what we understand arises from why and how we try to understand it; we grasp it in connection with our embodiment, our ability to act, our environment, our needs, and our interests.

Empathy as a Tool for Self-Understanding

To see how this works, recall the story about my friend Julie. When she took my perspective, she didn’t just imagine how she would feel in my situation and assume I felt the same. If she had, she would have imagined herself driving my car from the passenger seat—interesting, but not helpful for understanding me. Instead, she imagined a situation where she was the main character: her husband driving her car. This isn’t my situation, but it mirrors my two central relationships: to her and to my car. That’s how she understood what it meant to me for her to drive my car.

Julie, consciously or not, realized that to understand why I was upset, she had to think about the situation as if she were connected to it in the same way I was. Why? Because our primary way of thinking about the world is thinking about ourselves, and what matters to me is what she tried to grasp. Thanks to our similarities—both of us have cars, both let others drive them—Julie could pick up on what was unique in my perception of the situation.

In Being and Nothingness (1943), Jean-Paul Sartre asks us to imagine peeking through a keyhole and eavesdropping at a door. Maybe we’re jealous lovers, or just curious. While we’re there, we’re absorbed in finding out what’s happening in the room. As far as we’re concerned, we’re just gathering information. Then we hear a noise in the hallway—someone’s coming! At that moment, we realize we’re spying; we become aware that we’re a “Peeping Tom.”

Sartre would say this awareness results from the presence of another consciousness. I’d put it this way: the shift happens because we think about how we might appear to someone coming down the hall, pulling us out of our absorbed, unreflective way of evaluating our actions. We see ourselves through another’s eyes, and thus become more fully aware of what we’re doing. We look at ourselves as we would look at someone else doing what we’re doing. We reverse the “agent–observer” asymmetry described above.

It’s commonly believed that putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes helps us understand others better. But it can also help us understand ourselves. Every action has at least two sides: the inner reality of the person acting, and the external reality of those affected. We naturally think about our actions from the inside, in terms of what we intend to achieve. In Sartre’s example, I’m gathering important information about my lover. But this action is also spying, whether I think of it that way or not. And another person is likely to see it in those terms. Sartre says we can’t decide for ourselves what we’re doing; rather, how others see us serves as a guide to the real situation. The other’s perspective has authority. It’s not something we can simply dismiss (though sometimes we should). This is another reason why empathy is so important: it gives us a clearer, more nuanced understanding not only of others, but also of ourselves.

Empathy in Public Life

In the abstract, it’s easy to agree that multiple perspectives are better than one. But how does this work in public life? Are critics right that empathy only helps us understand ourselves and a few others a little better?

Jeff Sessions’ challenge—that empathy for one side is always prejudice against the other—reveals two problems with current criticism of empathy. First, when considering the claims of two people, nothing requires us to empathize with only one side. We can, of course, take both perspectives—not necessarily at the same time, but in turn. Second, legal culture suffers from the dubious assumption that in the absence of empathy, judges are impartial and objective. Yet evidence shows that white men fare better in the justice system than women or people of color. This is hardly a coincidence. Judges, most of whom in Western countries are still white men, already see the world from their group’s perspective.

Judges often insist they simply apply the law to the facts, as if facts are just lying around, ready to be perceived by anyone. But much of the law concerns questions of intent. If there are facts about intentions, they are of a different order. And these are the facts on which judgments must be based. Without considering another’s perspective, only certain things stand out in a person’s actions—and how judges evaluate these things partly reflects their worldview. To compensate for this inconvenient and inevitable fact, a judge must look at the defendant anew and reconsider their own pre-reflective ways of assessing the case. Properly considering different perspectives helps them do just that.

One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons shows a woman in a bookstore asking the owner, “Do you have any books about the experiences of white men?” It’s funny, of course, because most books in any given store fit that description. More seriously, our legal and ethical systems reflect the perspective of a minority that has historically held the most power. Insisting on the impartiality of this perspective is just another way to maintain that power.

Facts about right and wrong, good and bad, are not the result of power or unchanging facts built into the universe. Instead, they arise from the shared life of conscious, rational beings and the exchange of resources. That’s why it’s so important to consider the perspectives of a wide range of people (and other beings) who participate in social, legal, and moral order. This can’t be achieved by imagination alone, as Julie did on the way back from the seafood restaurant. Being participants in the situation and being very similar to each other is crucial. But to take the perspective of people different from us, we must learn to listen to what they want to say—and listen from their position, not our own.