Putting Oneself in Others' Shoes

CORE DEFINITION

A classical Chinese phrase meaning to place oneself in the position of another, applied in communication and decision making as the practice of adopting another person's viewpoint. The core proposition is that perspective taking is effortful rather than automatic, because the default mode is egocentric, so understanding another requires deliberately loading their constraints, goals, and information state. The key qualification is that this differs from sympathy: empathy here means reconstructing how the situation looks from inside another's position, not feeling sorry for them, and the reconstruction must be checked rather than assumed.