Think of the last time someone did you wrong. Maybe a colleague took credit for your work. Maybe a stranger leaned on the horn and shouted something ugly. Maybe a friend said something cutting about you, and it got back to you. Whatever the scene, notice the story that formed in your head almost instantly, before you had time to choose it. Something like: they knew that was wrong, and they did it anyway.
That story is the natural one. A Stoic might say it’s also the one keeping you stuck. Epictetus offered a different way to read the same moment, and the gap between the two readings is real enough to examine.
We are not psychologists or therapists, and this is reading and reflection on an old text and some modern research, not advice. The studies mentioned describe patterns across groups of people, which is a different thing from a rule about any one person who has wronged you.
The villain frame comes for free
When someone treats us badly, we tend to explain it by who they are: they’re selfish, they’re careless, they’re malicious. The situation they were in barely registers. This reflex is common enough that psychologists gave it a name. The fundamental attribution error, named by Stanford social psychologist Lee Ross in 1977, is the tendency to explain other people’s behavior by their character while ignoring the circumstances they were in.
There’s a telling detail about how the reflex develops. In Joan Miller’s 1984 study of children’s explanations, American children blamed other people’s character more as they got older, and the gap between American and Indian children widened with age. If the tendency grows rather than shrinks, it looks less like a fixed feature of the human mind and more like a habit we pick up. Which perhaps raises the possibility that we can put it down again.
Epictetus reads the same scene differently
Epictetus was well placed to think about being wronged. Born into slavery around 55 CE in what is now Turkey, he studied Stoicism while still enslaved, gained his freedom, and taught in Rome until the emperor Domitian expelled philosophers from the city. He then moved to Nicopolis, in Greece, where he founded a school and taught until his death.
He wrote nothing down himself; what survives was recorded by his pupil Arrian.
His advice on this exact situation is blunt. Epictetus advises that “when any person does ill by you, or speaks ill of you, remember that he acts or speaks from an impression that it is right for him to do so.” The person who wronged you, on this view, wasn’t acting against their own sense of what was right. They were acting on it. From where they stood, in the story they were telling themselves, the thing looked justified.
He pushes the point further. In Epictetus’s telling, “now it is not possible that he should follow what appears right to you, but only what appears so to himself.” That is a Stoic claim, not a settled fact about all human motivation, but it has teeth. People steer by their own compass, not yours, even when their compass points somewhere you find appalling.
What actually changes when you swap frames
Notice what this second frame does and does not do. It does not decide whether the act was wrong. Someone can act entirely from their own sense of being in the right and still cause real harm. The frame isn’t a verdict on their conduct. It’s a redirection of yours.
The villain frame hands you a target and a feeling to go with it: they knew better, so your anger is owed to them. The other frame removes the target. If the person was following their own picture of what was right, however wrong that picture was, then the outrage you’re carrying has nowhere obvious to land. What’s left is the harm itself, which you still have to deal with, minus the extra weight of imagining a mind that chose to be cruel to you specifically.
Epictetus thought the payoff was a change in temperature. He suggests that “if, therefore, you start from this point of view, you will be gentle with the man who reviles you.” We’d hedge that harder than he does. Seeing it this way can make you gentler; it won’t reliably turn a furious afternoon into a calm one. But the direction is right, and it’s a shift you can actually control, unlike the behavior of the person who annoyed you.
Where the Stoic move runs out
There’s a real risk in this idea, and it deserves plain statement. Reframing someone’s harm as their honest sense of the right thing can slide into excusing it, or into telling yourself the harm wasn’t real. That is not what the tool is for. It’s a device for where your reaction goes, not a rule about what other people are allowed to do to you. Understanding why someone acted the way they did is compatible with holding a firm line about the fact that they can’t do it again.
The other limit is knowledge. You usually don’t have access to the other person’s picture of things. Epictetus leaned into that uncertainty rather than around it. In chapter 45 he asks, “for unless you perfectly understand his motives, how should you know if he acts ill?” Again, that’s not a claim that no one ever does wrong. It’s a nudge toward humility about how confidently you can read a mind you can’t see into.
Where the modern research lines up, and where it refines him
The Stoic move and the psychology of blame point in the same direction, but they aren’t identical. Epictetus is after your peace. The research is after your accuracy, and the two can travel together.
A 2015 experiment by Nic Hooper and colleagues tested whether brief perspective-taking training could reduce the fundamental attribution error — the tendency to explain another person’s behaviour in terms of their character or disposition while underweighting the situation they were in. Participants were randomly assigned either to perspective-taking training or to a no-training control group before completing an attitude-attribution task. Those who received the training showed a significant reduction in the attribution error compared with the control group. In other words, deliberately practising taking another person’s perspective made participants less likely to read behaviour simply as a reflection of that person’s character.
Epictetus’s frame doesn’t require you to be right about the other person’s actual reasons. It works as a story you tell yourself to cool down. Perspective-taking, by contrast, is an attempt to get closer to what was genuinely going on for them. The Stoic version buys you calm even when your guess about their motives is wrong. The psychological version asks you to make the guess less wrong.
In practice you can run both: assume they acted on their own sense of right, and stay curious about what that sense actually was.
If someone’s actions have hurt you in a way that keeps circling back, a good counsellor or therapist is worth talking to; a maxim from a handbook can only carry so much.