ABSTRACT
It is typically assumed that we can understand another person better if we put ourselves in her situation. The actual evidence that we have of this activity suggests that people are no more accurate in their ascriptions of psychological targets when they take their perspective. This raises rather alarming concerns about this article of faith in the literature. In this paper, I present the current experimental evidence, and offer a solution to the problem. Instead of focusing on accuracy as a measure of understanding, we need to broaden our horizon of what counts as understanding. This may include things like using our own experiences for stand-ins for the experiences of the other, not because they are just like the other person’s experiences, but because they have the same (or a very similar) significance to us as they have to the other. I go on to defend in more detail such an account of interpersonal understanding.
