Much of the appeal of babies and young children derives from our inclination to project ourselves into their situation, and thereby to experience the world again for the first time through their eyes.
We are inclined to project ourselves onto everyone and everything that seems in any way like us—anyone and anything to which we can relate in some way. Thus, we anthropomorphize animals, attributing human qualities and thoughts and feelings to them. We do this because we see something about them to which we can relate—the way they are acting, or even merely the fact that they have two large eyes—and so we figure that we can relate to them in other, more internal and experiential, ways also. Since other human beings seem so much more like us externally, we are even more inclined to project our own, individual thoughts and feelings and motivations onto them.
It is difficult to imagine that someone could watch as someone else is tortured and killed when it is possible to save that person—difficult, that is, if you would be someone who would jump to save that person. And it is difficult to imagine that someone could just brush off being yelled at when you would be furious and yelling back if you were in that person’s situation.
Notice that so many (in fact, all) of our judgments ultimately arise from our inability to relate to someone else’s behavior. Even when it comes to ourselves, our judgments arise from our inability to relate to what we have thought or felt or done, because now we would think or feel or act differently if presented with the same external physical situation.
Empathy is tremendously important if we ever expect to truly communicate and interact with others. But there are degrees of empathy. In lower forms of it, we merely project ourselves into other people’s actual shoes—into their physical, external situations. This is where much miscommunication and misunderstanding and judgment arise, because we expect of others what we would expect of ourselves in some particular situation. We project our internal experiences of thought and feeling and motivation, and we fail to recognize the extent to which other people actually have different thoughts and feelings and motivations driving their behavior than we have driving ours.
We see ourselves in everyone else, but we do not see everyone else. And so our communication is hindered, because we are really talking with ourselves, and those other people are just receiving our self-talk—along with all of our own expectations and judgments of ourselves.
In higher forms of empathy, we recognize the differences that exist between us and others, and so we begin to recognize where similarities actually lie. We learn to place ourselves not only in the external situation of another, but also in that person’s internal situation. So we can come to understand and relate even to people who are very different from us in such a way that when we are talking with them, we are actually talking with them, and not with ourselves projected onto them.
As human beings—and as beings in this world—we all have the same motivations driving us ultimately, but these are all prioritized differently in each and every one of us. As we come to see other people as other people, truly distinct and separate from us, we learn to extrapolate from different aspects of our own experience what it is actually like to be each individual other person we encounter. It is only then that we truly come to experience the world through other people’s eyes.
