How Do I Teach Students to Understand Why People in History Did What They Did Without Judging Them by Modern Standards?
Historical empathy is one of the most challenging — and most important — skills in history education. It asks students to set aside their own values and genuinely understand the motives of people who thought and acted very differently from them. Here is how to teach it well.
At some point in every history classroom, a student says it: "How could anyone have done that?" Whether the subject is the Holocaust, the transatlantic slave trade, the Crusades, or the treatment of Indigenous peoples under colonialism, the response is the same — a mixture of shock, moral condemnation, and a complete failure to understand how human beings could have participated in or supported something so clearly, obviously wrong.
The moral instinct behind that reaction is not a problem. The failure of historical understanding is. When students judge the past exclusively through the lens of present-day values, they are not doing history. They are doing moral performance. And while moral reflection has its place, it is not a substitute for the harder, more uncomfortable work of genuinely trying to understand why people acted as they did — on their own terms, within their own world.
That harder work is called historical empathy. It is arguably the most difficult skill history demands of students. It is also one of the most important.
"Judging people from the past by your own cultural norms shows a lack of empathy for their way of life. To understand the people of the past, you must first work out what motivated them."
What Are Motives — and Why Do They Matter?
Before students can develop historical empathy, they need to understand what a motive actually is. A motive is a reason a person had for thinking or acting in a certain way. It is the internal driver — the belief, fear, desire, or value — that explains why someone did what they did.
Motives matter in history because human beings do not act randomly. Every decision made by every historical figure — from the greatest statesman to the most ordinary soldier — was shaped by what they wanted, what they feared, what they believed, and what they thought was worth fighting for or against. When we understand those drivers, behaviour that seems incomprehensible from a modern perspective can begin to make sense — not justifiable, but explicable.
And explicable is what history requires. Understanding why something happened is not the same as approving of it. This distinction is the foundation of everything that follows.
The Four Questions That Unlock Motivation
When students encounter a historical figure or group whose actions they need to understand, these four questions provide the framework for unpacking their motives:
| Question | What It Uncovers | Examples from History |
|---|---|---|
| 1. What did they want? | The positive goals and desires driving their actions | Freedom, safety, food, equality, land, wealth, power, recognition |
| 2. What did they hate or fear? | The threats, enemies, and conditions they were reacting against | Rival ideologies, specific groups, inequality, foreign domination, economic collapse |
| 3. What did they think was important? | Their values — what they considered worth protecting or preserving | Their nation, their religion, their family, their community, their honour |
| 4. What did they want changed? | The conditions or systems they were working to transform | Laws, social attitudes, political borders, economic systems, religious authority |
Working through these four questions systematically prevents students from settling for the shallow explanation — "they were evil," "they were greedy," "they didn't know better" — and pushes them toward the kind of nuanced, contextually grounded analysis that real historical thinking demands.
A Worked Example: Germany and the Rise of Hitler
Consider why ordinary German citizens supported Hitler's rise to power in the early 1930s. Applied to the four questions, the analysis looks like this:
| Question | Answer in Context |
|---|---|
| What did they want? | Economic recovery, national dignity, stable employment, an end to hyperinflation and mass unemployment |
| What did they fear or hate? | Communism, continued economic collapse, national humiliation following Versailles, political instability |
| What did they think was important? | German national identity, order, strength, restoration of Germany's international standing |
| What did they want changed? | The terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the weakness of the Weimar government, the economic conditions devastating their daily lives |
The severe economic hardships Germany suffered as a result of the Treaty of Versailles motivated millions of ordinary people to place their trust in Hitler's proposed solutions. When students see this laid out, they begin to understand something crucial: the German people who voted for Hitler in 1932 were not uniquely monstrous. They were frightened, desperate, and angry — and they were offered simple answers to genuine problems. That understanding does not excuse what followed. But it explains it — and explanation is what history is for.
What Is Historical Empathy?
Once students can identify and articulate the motives of historical figures, they are ready to develop the broader skill those motives feed into: historical empathy.
Historical empathy is the ability to see and understand events from the point of view of those who experienced them firsthand. It means setting aside your own present-day values, assumptions, and cultural framework, and genuinely attempting to understand how the world looked and felt to someone living in a very different time and place.
This is not a natural or easy thing to do. Human beings are instinctively present-centred — we think in the assumptions of our own era, and those assumptions feel so obvious and universal that it takes deliberate effort to recognise them as assumptions at all. The belief that all people are equal regardless of race, for example, is so deeply embedded in contemporary Western values that it can feel like a self-evident truth rather than a historical achievement — one that was contested, fought over, and won at great cost, and that was genuinely not shared by the majority of educated, intelligent people in earlier centuries.
Historical empathy requires students to hold that discomfort — to sit with the fact that people who were, in many respects, intelligent and thoughtful and even morally serious, held views that we now recognise as profoundly wrong. And to ask: given their world, their knowledge, their fears, their beliefs — how did this make sense to them?
Empathy vs Sympathy: A Critical Distinction
One of the most important things to establish early — and to return to repeatedly — is the difference between empathy and sympathy. Students frequently conflate the two, and the confusion leads to significant problems.
| Empathy | Sympathy | |
|---|---|---|
| What it means | Understanding why someone thought or acted as they did | Agreeing with or endorsing what they thought or did |
| The question it asks | "Why did this make sense to them in their world?" | "Was what they did right?" |
| What it requires | Setting aside your own values to understand theirs | Applying your own values to their actions |
| In history, we want… | ✅ Yes — always | ❌ No — this is not historical thinking |
Empathy is appreciating why things occurred — understanding the internal logic of another person's worldview without necessarily endorsing it. Sympathy is placing yourself in someone else's shoes and agreeing with them. In history, we want the former. The latter is not historical thinking — it is moral alignment across centuries, which is both anachronistic and analytically useless.
The example that makes this clearest for students: we can appreciate that Adolf Hitler's extreme actions may have been shaped in part by his own brutal upbringing under a violent, alcoholic father — and by the national humiliation and economic desperation of the world he inhabited. That is empathy. It explains something. It does not make us condone what he did. It does not make his actions less monstrous. It simply makes them historically intelligible — and intelligibility is what allows us to learn from the past rather than merely being horrified by it.
The Danger of Presentism: Judging the Past by the Present
The error that historical empathy guards against has a name: presentism. Presentism is the tendency to interpret and judge the past through the values, assumptions, and knowledge of the present — to hold historical figures to standards they could not have known, in a world they did not inhabit.
Presentism is tempting because it feels morally serious. But it is actually a form of intellectual laziness. It requires no effort to declare that people from the past were wrong by modern standards — they almost always will be, in some respects, because knowledge, values, and social norms change over time. The difficult, demanding, genuinely historical work is asking: given what they knew, given their world, given the choices available to them, what drove their decisions?
This does not mean the past is beyond moral criticism. Some actions were recognised as wrong even by the standards of their own time — slaveholders who read abolitionist arguments and rejected them; generals who knew their tactics would kill thousands and ordered them anyway; rulers who were warned of the consequences of their decisions and ignored those warnings. Historical empathy is not a blanket defence of everything that has ever happened. It is a tool for understanding, not a tool for excusing.
"Empathy is the ability to see and understand events from the point of view of those who experienced them firsthand — appreciating their motives, but not necessarily endorsing them."
Why Historical Empathy Matters Beyond the Classroom
It is worth stepping back to ask why this skill receives such emphasis in history education — because the answer goes well beyond academic assessment.
Historical empathy is, at its core, a practice of intellectual humility. It trains students to ask, before judging: do I understand this fully? Do I know enough about this person's world, their options, their knowledge, and their fears to make a fair assessment? It trains them to hold the discomfort of understanding without endorsing — to appreciate a perspective without adopting it.
These are not merely historical skills. In a world of increasing polarisation, where the instinct to condemn those who think differently is stronger than the instinct to understand them, the habit of seeking to comprehend before judging is arguably one of the most important capacities education can develop. History, taught well, is one of the few subjects that makes that practice systematic and rigorous.
Students who graduate with genuine historical empathy are better equipped to engage with people whose values and experiences differ from their own — not because they will always agree, but because they have practised the discipline of understanding first.
A Practical Framework for Teaching Motives and Historical Empathy
Translating these ideas into classroom practice requires deliberate, structured approaches. Here are the most effective strategies:
Step 1 — Establish Context Before Asking for Empathy
Historical empathy is impossible without historical knowledge. Before asking students to understand a person's motives, make sure they have the contextual knowledge to do so. What was the political situation? What were the economic conditions? What did people in that time and place believe about the world? Empathy without context produces guesswork, not understanding.
Step 2 — Use the Four Motive Questions as a Scaffold
Apply the four questions — what did they want, fear, value, and wish to change — systematically to the historical figure or group under examination. Do this as a whole class activity first, modelling the process, before asking students to apply it independently.
Step 3 — Explicitly Teach the Empathy/Sympathy Distinction
Do not assume students understand the difference. Name it directly, give examples, and return to it whenever a student's response slips from empathy into either condemnation (refusing to understand) or sympathy (uncritically endorsing). Both errors are equally problematic.
Step 4 — Use Primary Sources to Give Voice to Historical Perspectives
There is no better way to develop historical empathy than to read what people from the past actually said — in their own words, for their own purposes. Primary sources that express the values, fears, and beliefs of historical figures make the abstract task of understanding concrete. They also provide the evidence students need to support their empathy-based arguments.
Step 5 — Debate and Structured Discussion
Assign students perspectives to argue from — perspectives they may personally find uncomfortable — and require them to articulate those perspectives using evidence from the period. This is not the same as asking them to endorse those views; it is asking them to understand them well enough to represent them accurately. The discomfort of that exercise is often the most powerful learning moment in historical empathy education.
Conclusion
Historical empathy is not softness. It is not excusing the inexcusable or refusing to make moral judgements. It is the disciplined, demanding practice of understanding human beings in their own terms — before, and separate from, any judgement we make about them.
When students learn to ask what motivated the people of the past, to set aside present-day assumptions long enough to understand a different world, and to distinguish between understanding and endorsing, they become capable of a kind of historical thinking that goes far beyond the exam room.
They become people who know how to understand those who are different from them. And in any century, that is a skill worth developing with great care.