The research shows that effective perspective-taking, attuning yourself with others, hinges on three principles.

1. Increase your power by reducing it…

As the researchers conclude, “power leads individuals to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point, insufficiently adjusting to others’ perspective.”

The results of these studies, part of a larger body of research, point to a single conclusion: an inverse relationship between power and perspective-taking. Power can move you off the proper position on the dial and scramble the signals you receive, distorting clear messages and obscuring more subtle ones…

2. Use your head as much as your heart…

Perspective-taking is a cognitive capacity; it’s mostly about thinking. Empathy is an emotional response; it’s mostly about feeling. Both are crucial…

This second principle of attunement also means recognizing that individuals don’t exist as atomistic units, disconnected from groups, situations, and contexts. And that requires training one’s perspective-taking powers not only on people themselves but also on their relationships and connections to others…

3. Mimic strategically…

People therefore looked to cues in the environment to determine whom they could trust. “One of those cues is the unconscious awareness of whether we are in synch with other people, and a way to do that is to match their behavioral patterns with our own.” Synching our mannerisms and vocal patterns to someone else so that we both understand and can be understood is fundamental to attunement…

The key is to be strategic and human—to be strategic by being human.

Empathy consists of at least three related skills. First, there is the skill of mirroring. This is the act of accurately catching the emotion of the person in front of you.

A person who is good at mirroring is quick to experience the emotions of the person in front of them, is quick to reenact in his own body the emotions the other person is holding in hers. A person who is good at mirroring smiles at smiles, yawns at yawns, and frowns at frowns. He unconsciously attunes his breathing patterns, heart rate, speaking speed,

posture, and gestures and even his vocabulary levels.” (Brooks, “How to Know a Person”,

p.146)

“People who are good at mirroring, by contrast, have high emotional granularity and experience the world in rich, supple ways. They can distinguish between similar emotions, such as anger, frustration, pressure, stress, anxiety, angst, and irritation. These people have educated their emotions by reading literature, listening to music, reflecting on their relationships. They are attuned to their body and have become expert at reading it, and so they have a wide emotional repertoire to draw on as life happens.

Mentalizing also helps us simultaneously sympathize with a person while also detaching to make judgments about them.

The third empathy skill is caring. Con artists are very good at reading people’s emotions, but we don’t call them empathetic, because they don’t have genuine concern for the

people they are reading.