1When you are already angry, imagining your way into someone else's head asks the tired part of you to do the heavy lifting. Start with your body instead: look at their face, let your breathing and your shoulders come closer to theirs.
Perspective taking is a fine skill on a calm day. In the middle of a row it tends to slide into arguing with a version of the other person you have built in your head. Watching what is actually in front of you, their hands, their face, the pace of their breath, gives you something real to be moved by, and it costs almost nothing to try.
Islamic evidence
Your suffering distresses him: he is deeply concerned for you and full of kindness and mercy (Quran 9:128). The Prophet is described as feeling people's difficulty rather than working it out, and that is the kind of empathy that survives a hard moment.
“A Messenger has come to you from among yourselves. Your suffering distresses him: he is deeply concerned for you and full of kindness and mercy towards the believers”
Qur'an 9:128
Psychological evidence
In a laboratory perspective-taking task, people made to feel guilty became more other-centred while people made to feel angry tended to become more self-centred. That is one small experiment on visual perspective taking rather than a study of real arguments. It does fit the everyday experience that anger is exactly the moment when imagining someone else's view gets hardest.
Bukowski H, Samson D. (2016). Cognitive neuroscience · doi
Review detail
Why it works. Anger narrows you to your own point of view, so a route that runs through the body is easier to walk than one that runs through reasoning.