Should Mediators Put Themselves in Their Clients “Shoes?”

Mediators must be good listeners. And they must encourage disputants to listen to their adversaries. Some say that this is the most important skill a mediator must develop.  But exactly what does it mean to listen?

To improve listening we’re frequently told to “put yourself in the other person’s shoes.” The phrase is a variant of the phrase “walk a mile in the other person’s shoes.” Variations of the phrase can be found in Cherokee, German, French, Italian and Spanish. All urge us to “look at issues from the adversary’s point of view.” But does looking at issues from the adversary’s point of view really improve listening and understanding?

Recent research has helped us understand exactly what we must do to improve our listening. Researchers from University of Chicago and Northeastern University and Ben Gurion University in Israel conducted a series of experiments with strangers, friends, couples and spouses to assess the accuracy of insights (or listening) into other’s thoughts, feelings, attitudes and mental states. Their studies found no evidence that intentionally imagining oneself “in another person’s shoes” improved one’s ability to understand the other person.  If anything, imagining oneself “in another person’s shoes” may decrease accuracy while occasionally increasing confidence in the accuracy of one’s judgment. What could explain these results? It might be quite simple. For most of us “putting ourselves in another’s shoes” means just that, that is imagining how we would understand the other person’s world. That is, we understand the other person based on our own history and experiences, not on the other person’s history and experiences.

The researchers did find a simple, concrete way to improve the accuracy of insights into others. When the people in their studies were given time to engage the other person in conversation about their opinions the accuracy of insights improved.

The researchers have shown that “taking other person’s perspective” does not improve understanding if that means how we would understand their point of view. On the other hand, if we engage first in “perspective getting” our accuracy improves. That means not trying to understand the other person’s world as we would if we were in their position, but trying to understand first the other person and then trying to understand how that person sees their situation—not how we would see it if our circumstance were the same.

Mediators like myself know we must work to understand how disputants see their situation, but not by envisioning ourselves in that position.

I can’t help but see the application to political discussions. True understanding does not come from assuming that others see the world as we would see it. True understanding comes from first learning enough of the other person’s history and experiences and how that impacts how that person feels about their plight.