To understand why people act the way they do, we must first realize that everyone sees themselves as behaving normally. Don’t ask what strange, mutant disposition they were born with, which directly corresponds to their surface behavior. Rather, ask what situations people see themselves as being in. Yes, people do have dispositions—but there are not enough heritable quirks of disposition to directly account for all the surface behaviors you see.
Most people see themselves as perfectly normal, from the inside. Even people you hate, people who do terrible things, are not exceptional mutants. No mutations are required, alas. When you understand this, you are ready to stop being surprised by human events.
This topic is something I have noticed is easy to explain to people. They understand it; they nod their head; then they return to being surprised by human events. For some reason it never makes into their predictors.
I remember my moment of epiphany when this topic clicked into place and suddenly people were predictable. The kicking of vending machines returned expectations of, “Wow, they must be having a rough day,” instead of, “Wow, they have anger issues.”
The next step in this process is learning that someone’s output is different than yours. Not everyone kicks vending machines on bad days. Not everyone flashes their lights in road rage. People who are surprised by these events may have grasped the truth in what you have said above can never imagine themselves in a situation where they would kick a vending machine. When they see someone else kicking a vending machine, their internal self-predictor will never return “bad day” as a reason. The best they can come up with is, “angry person.”
The point in me saying this is that acknowledging situational causes only helps when you understand the situational effects that result. Otherwise, you still get the wrong associative cause.
Another area that these predictors break down is in cultural differences. A strange example I can think of is man I knew from Africa. (I think Tanzania.) We were playing basketball and one of the American kids was constantly spitting on the ground. This utterly repulsed the African and he said, “Only pregnant women spit.” This comes as a complete WTF moment for the rest of us and there was no way to compute his disgust without learning about his culture.
So, even if you begin to infer personality from a situational response, there is a small chance that whoever is kicking the vending machine is doing so because wherever he grew up people kick vending machines for good luck. It might be stupid, but so is kicking it because it ate your money.
This topic is something I have noticed is easy to explain to people. They understand it; they nod their head; then they return to being surprised by human events. For some reason it never makes into their predictors.
I remember my moment of epiphany when this topic clicked into place and suddenly people were predictable. The kicking of vending machines returned expectations of, “Wow, they must be having a rough day,” instead of, “Wow, they have anger issues.”
The next step in this process is learning that someone’s output is different than yours. Not everyone kicks vending machines on bad days. Not everyone flashes their lights in road rage. People who are surprised by these events may have grasped the truth in what you have said above can never imagine themselves in a situation where they would kick a vending machine. When they see someone else kicking a vending machine, their internal self-predictor will never return “bad day” as a reason. The best they can come up with is, “angry person.”
The point in me saying this is that acknowledging situational causes only helps when you understand the situational effects that result. Otherwise, you still get the wrong associative cause.
Another area that these predictors break down is in cultural differences. A strange example I can think of is man I knew from Africa. (I think Tanzania.) We were playing basketball and one of the American kids was constantly spitting on the ground. This utterly repulsed the African and he said, “Only pregnant women spit.” This comes as a complete WTF moment for the rest of us and there was no way to compute his disgust without learning about his culture.
So, even if you begin to infer personality from a situational response, there is a small chance that whoever is kicking the vending machine is doing so because wherever he grew up people kick vending machines for good luck. It might be stupid, but so is kicking it because it ate your money.