Why Advice to Empathize is Misguided

The scientific reason why 'putting yourself in someone else's shoes' backfires.

You know that moment when your partner loads the dishwasher in a way that makes absolutely no sense to you? The forks facing down, plates randomly scattered, mugs balanced precariously on wine glasses? Your brain immediately starts generating explanations: They're being passive-aggressive. They don't care about efficiency. They're deliberately testing my patience.

But despite your certainty, you're likely wrong about all of it (even if the mug situation is objectively questionable).

Misguided overconfidence in reading others' minds isn't just about domestic disputes. In fact, it's so pervasive that philosophers have been wrestling with it for decades.

Several weeks ago I attended a writer’s workshop that included philosophers and psychologists as the attendees. After the workshop day was done, we all headed out for a festive dinner. Cocktails in hand, we started chatting about subjective reality—you know, the kind of conversation that happens when you put a bunch of academics in a room together.

I was excited to share some thoughts from Ed Yong’s An Immense World, a fascinating book about animal perception. Yong explains the limitations in our ability to imagine into other creatures' experiences:

We can study the physics of an animal’s environment, look at what they respond to or ignore, and trace the web of neurons that connects their sense organs to their brains. But the ultimate feats of understanding—working out what it’s like to be a bat, or an elephant, or a spider—always require… “an informed imaginative leap.”

I thought I was bringing something fresh to the conversation by referencing Yong. But these wise philosophers nodded politely and pointed me to a 1974 paper by Thomas Nagel called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” It’s apparently required reading for all philosophy students.¹ (Note to self: study up on philosophy before dinner with philosophers.)

Here’s Nagel’s insight: We humans are amazing at imagining experiences. We can close our eyes and imagine sleeping upside down, navigating by sounds, even savoring crunchy insects. But no matter how vividly we imagine it, we can never truly know “what it is like for a bat to be a bat.”

Which raises the fascinating question: if our imagination is so powerful, why can’t we crack the code of another mind?

This perennially human question brought me back to psychological research that reveals something similar, but applied to human relationships: how predictably we fail in perspective-taking. We cannot truly step into another’s subjective experience, even with other humans, including those we know and love, sitting right beside us.

Understanding other people’s perspectives is an "other minds problem" with an extra twist: It’s much easier to accept that you can’t know a bat’s mind than it is to accept you can’t know another human’s.

Why empathy makes you worse at understanding people.

Psychologist Nicholas Epley has spent years studying whether all this perspective-taking we're told to do actually works.²

Spoiler alert: it doesn't just fail. It makes us worse at understanding people. (And maybe bats.)

Want to guess which activities your spouse will enjoy most on vacation? Perspective-taking won't help. Trying to predict how attractive someone will find you based on your photo? Also a no-go.

As Epley puts it, "We've now looked many times for evidence that perspective-taking systematically increases mind reading and have yet to find any supportive evidence."

It gets worse: not only does perspective-taking fail to improve our accuracy, it can actually backfire. We end up projecting our own assumptions and blind spots onto others while feeling confident we're being empathetic.

We put so much effort into being empathetic by imagining ourselves in others' shoes—and it turns out we're just walking in circles wearing the wrong footwear.³

Or putting on a left and right shoe when the person whose world we’re trying to imagine has two left feet—like Gerry Fleck in Best in Show.

This explains so much:

• How partners can live in the same house but have completely different perceptual worlds.

• How two people can come out of the same exchange with totally different narratives about what happened.

• Why we are so confident our interpretation of someone's behavior is correct, even when they tell us we’re wrong.

• Why your teenager rolls their eyes when you suggest that if you “just talk to someone” about their problems, they’ll feel better.

It’s why the golden rule of "putting yourself in someone else's shoes” fails so often. When we try to walk in their shoes, we still use our own feet.

When I share this concept with couples, they're always shocked—and then relieved.

What happens when you stop trying to read minds

Here's what may be unexpectedly freeing about all this: accepting our mind-reading limitations takes enormous pressure off our relationships.

Instead of exhausting yourself trying to decode what your partner "really means" or why they loaded the dishwasher that particular way, you can simply operate from the assumption that whatever you think you "know" about their inner experience could be wrong. They probably had good reasons that make sense to them, even if they don’t make sense to you.

How to Stop Mind-Reading

When I work with couples, one of the most helpful things I tell them is to know when to stop mind-reading. (How do you know when to stop? Almost always.)

What might this look like in action? Here are some examples:

Instead of: “I know exactly what you’re thinking.”

Try: "You seem frustrated about something. But am I reading you right?"

Instead of: "You did that because..."
Try: "Help me understand what was going on for you when you made that decision."

Instead of: Confident mind-reading
Try: "I'm making up a story in my head about why you did that, but maybe it's better if you tell me what was actually going on for you?""

This isn't about giving up on understanding. It's about trading the impossible task of mind-reading for the entirely possible task of understanding each other just a little better.

It's the difference between "I know exactly how you feel" (which puts pressure on both of you to confirm your brilliant psychological insights) and "I don't know how you feel, but I'd like to understand better" (which creates space for actual discovery).

The Mystery is The Magic

We can't truly know what it's like to be a bat, and we probably shouldn't be so confident about knowing what it's like to be the person sitting across the breakfast table from us, especially before coffee (because nobody can know anything before coffee).

And thank goodness for that—imagine how boring relationships would be if we actually could read each other's minds perfectly. An additional thank goodness because I’d be out of a job if I had to compete with actual telepaths.

The mystery is the magic. Our job isn't to solve other people; it's to stay interested in the puzzle.

Your turn: What's your most epic mind-reading fail? Reply and tell me about it—I collect these stories like, well, someone writing a book about this topic (more on misunderstandings becoming writing material below…).

If this resonated, hit the heart below, and if someone in your life is a confident mind-reader who needs a gentle reality check, feel free to share this with them.

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Behind the Scenes: How Misunderstandings Become Book Material

I'll periodically pull back the curtain with paid subscribers to share the journey of writing my second book. Today, I’m sharing about how I am writing a book about why people misunderstand each other, while keeping up with a day job. And three kids. And a crazy dog.

Q: How does someone sustain creative immersion while juggling multiple demanding roles?

A: Frantically! (Only half kidding.) The real answer is that I draw on the science described in my first book,Work, Parent, Thrive. This book is a deep dive into how people juggling multiple demanding roles can extract benefits from role conflict. (Incidentally, this book was written mostly during the pandemic while I had three unhappy kids stuck at home, a time when these kinds of insights were especially useful.)