Practice like a Stoic: 4, Take another's perspective

Train yourself to look at things from the point of view of other people

Marcus Aurelius, Louvre Museum, photo by the Author.

[This series of posts is based on A Handbook for New Stoics—How to Thrive in a World out of Your Control, co-authored by yours truly and Greg Lopez. It is a collection of 52 exercises, which we propose reader try out one per week during a whole year, to actually live like a Stoic. In Europe/UK the book is published by Rider under the title Live Like A Stoic. Below is this week’s prompt and a brief explanation of the pertinent philosophical background. Check the book for details on how to practice the exercise, download the exercise forms from The Experiment’s website, and comment below on how things are going. Greg and/or I will try our best to help out! This week’s exercise is found at pp. 15-19 of the paperback edition.]

"Does a man do you a wrong? Go to and mark what notion of good and evil was his that did the wrong. Once [you] perceive that . . . you will feel compassion, not surprise or anger. For you have still yourself either the same notion of good and evil as he, or another not unlike it. You need to forgive him then. But if [your] notions of good and evil are no longer such, all the more easily shall you be gracious to him that sees awry.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7.26)

It’s easy to feel righteous when we perceive that others are in the wrong. Our righteousness leads us to feel justified in retaliating, since we see ourselves as punishing them for their bad actions—which stem from their bad character. We are blind to the reality that the other person won’t see it our way. They will likely see their actions as justified, given the circumstances, and our actions as stemming from our bad character!

This tendency to think that other people’s actions reflect their character while our own actions depend on circumstance is called the fundamental attribution error, a term first coined by psychologist Lee Ross. We favor our own skewed perceptions of things, mistaking them for objective truths, while at the same time downplaying how and why our fellow human beings may have a different perception. We easily convince ourselves that the asymmetry between how we behave and how we would want others to behave is, after all, perfectly justified.

Except that it isn’t justified, as Marcus Aurelius reminds himself. It’s likely that he, too, suffered the same error. The emperor-philosopher, unlike most of us, engages in a remarkable dissection of the problem, allowing him to see more clearly. We have a lot to learn from him.

When we perceive that another person has behaved wrongly toward us, the first step is to figure out what incorrect notion led them to act as they did. We can imagine ourselves in the other person’s situation, and, by thinking about what they value, can make sense of their actions—even if we don’t agree with them—immediately squashing the rising sense of righteous anger we might experience.

Which leads to the next step: Now that we know what they value, we should ask ourselves whether we sometimes have the same values. If we don’t—and we are reasonably confident that our judgment is on the mark—then we know that they were acting on the basis of a wrong judgment, and we should pity them, just as we would be sorry for someone who made an elementary mistake in logic or math.

As Marcus suggests, our own views of what is good and bad may have changed, because we have learned from our mistakes and are a little less unwise than we used to be. We can then afford to be charitable toward someone who hasn’t had the same breakthrough, just as we would toward someone who had not yet mastered logic or math as well as we have.

A similar technique appears in modern psychology, based on the empirically supported idea that people become more compassionate toward others when they take another person’s perspective. As Sara Hodges of the University of Oregon and her colleagues put it:

People behave better—more acceptably, more admirably, more prosocially—after perspective taking. First, perspective-taking has been consistently found to increase compassionate emotions . . . toward the person whose perspective has been taken. Second, perspective-taking leads people to view and treat other people more like the self, viewing them as possessing more traits in common with the self, and symbolically having ‘merged,’ at least partially, with the self in terms of cognitive representations and descriptions of personality and explanations of behavior.

Just as the Stoics maintained, forcing ourselves to take seriously the point of view of another broadens our understanding. It reduces the likelihood that we will feel so emotionally attached to a particular perspective as to become angry when that view is challenged. Crucially, the Stoics are not suggesting that we necessarily agree with the other person; only that we give them a fair opportunity to make their case, in the spirit of human compassion and understanding.

A basic tenet of Stoicism is that nobody wants to do wrong on purpose, and everyone thinks they have good reasons for their actions. But it is up to us whether to indulge our anger, which the Stoics refer to as a “temporary madness,” and likely make things even worse for both parties, or to be charitable and open-minded instead—ending up agreeing with our interlocutor if they are right, or just feeling sorry for them if it turns out that they are, after all, mistaken.