Why is it so difficult for us to understand each other and how to deal with it

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

It seems to us that our inner world is more complex and deeper than that of others.

Imagine the situation: you come to the doctor's office and see a wonderful and friendly specialist in front of you, who listens to you attentively and tries very hard to help. Later you have a few questions, you find the doctor on Facebook. And suddenly you realize that on his personal page he is not at all as cute as he was in his office. He posts poisonous quotes from medical groups, jokes cynically and flatly refuses to communicate with patients outside of work.

You are at a loss, because even in the morning he seemed so charming. And you wonder what happened to him. However, nothing really happened. You have simply fallen prey to a cognitive trap called character bias. It is the tendency to perceive oneself as a volatile and complex person, and others as understandable, primitive and predictable people. Let's figure out why this is happening.

Why we do not understand each other well

We forget about external conditions

In the 70s, psychologists Edward Jones and Richard Nisbet discovered an interesting fact. As an observer, we focus only on a specific person and his actions, in other words, on dispositional factors. And in the role of a participant, we focus on external, situational circumstances: how we felt, whether we were comfortable, whether someone was interfering with us.

As if we ourselves are changeable, complex and sensitive, and the other person is a robot unaffected by circumstances and external factors.

So, a student, explaining to the professor why he wrote a bad report, will say that he is tired, he was asked a lot, that he is sick or quarreled with a girl. But the teacher will see in front of him only a careless student who has not coped with the work. The circumstances that influenced the student do not exist for the teacher. This misconception is called the observer participant effect.

The findings of Jones and Nisbet were confirmed in 1982 by psychologist Daniel Kammer. He asked subjects to rate their own behavior and that of friends using a questionnaire with polar answers: calm - hot-tempered, cautious - courageous, and so on. It turned out that people consider themselves more flexible, changeable and versatile than those around them, and are more willing to listen to their worries, thoughts and feelings than to strangers. No wonder, right?

We cannot live without stereotypes

To make it easier for us to navigate the world and make decisions, we classify objects, phenomena and people. This is called categorization. It is because of her that stereotypes appear: we attribute certain features to each group of objects or phenomena and extend them to all of its representatives as a whole.

When evaluating an unfamiliar person, we look at his gender, nationality, clothes and, with the help of a set of ready-made stereotypes, make quick and most often superficial conclusions.

In them, as a rule, there is no place for a real personality - we just create a collective image in our head.

Here, by the way, there are two more cognitive traps. Thanks to distortion in favor of their group, people believe that “theirs” are better than “outsiders” in everything. A distortion in assessing the similarity of another group leads to the fact that we consider “ours” to be more diverse. For example, it seems to us that representatives of another race are similar to each other so that they can hardly be distinguished: "They are all the same person!"

We rely on available examples

Everyone has probably heard about the availability heuristic. This is one of the most popular (so to speak) mistakes of thinking. The bottom line is that a person makes predictions and conclusions based on the available examples, which are the first to pop up in his memory.

We know a lot about ourselves - more than about anyone else. And when talking about others, we can only rely on memories, images and patterns that memory slips us. “Doctors help people, they are kind and selfless. Is this man a doctor. This means that he must be nice and must help me at any time,”- it works like this.

We just don't have enough information about the person. And from here many illusions originate.

For example, the illusion of transparency - when it seems to us that everything that we know about ourselves is known to others. Participants in one experiment had to hide their real feelings - not to show that the drink they were trying was bitter. Then they were asked to assess whether they did well. It seemed to most that observers easily recognized their lies. This happens because it is difficult for us to abstract ourselves from knowledge about ourselves.

Where does the misjudgment of others lead?

Illusions and standardized images often have nothing to do with real people. And such dissonance can lead to mistakes, misunderstandings and conflicts. We expect certain actions and reactions from a person, but he does not feel at all what we imagined. For example, a boss, wanting to improve the results of his team, writes bonuses to subordinates, forgetting that they need not only money, but also praise and support.

Personal conflicts are not so bad.

The misjudgment and oversimplification of other people - the “perversion trait,” as researcher David Fander called it, leads to hostility, prejudice, dangerous stereotypes, and all kinds of discrimination. We deny others that they are also living people - changeable and multifaceted.

The fact that they are not similar to each other, even if they are united by common characteristics: race, gender, income level, sexual orientation. As a result, a dangerous illusion arises that we are facing not a person, but a certain template, a social category: “migrant”, “woman”, “son of rich parents”. This means that you can treat him accordingly.

How not to fall into the trap

This will require sensitivity and awareness. In order not to become a victim of superficial judgments and not to provoke a conflict, it is worth keeping in mind all the time that there is a living person in front of you and he is torn apart by hundreds of conflicting thoughts and feelings. That his behavior is influenced by many internal and external factors and he does not have to meet your expectations.

It will not be superfluous to learn more about a person: what he enjoys, what he reads, what he dreams of. Then, in your eyes, it will become more voluminous, solid and alive, and it will be more difficult for you to hang non-existent features and features on it.

Develop empathy - the ability to empathize. Listen carefully to your interlocutors, take an interest in their thoughts and emotions, and often put yourself in the place of another. And learn to recognize and express your own emotions - after all, this is the key to understanding others.