{"id":6821,"date":"2020-01-27T18:42:27","date_gmt":"2020-01-27T22:42:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=6821"},"modified":"2022-03-24T15:50:16","modified_gmt":"2022-03-24T19:50:16","slug":"assumptions-about-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/assumptions-about-people\/","title":{"rendered":"You Make Assumptions About People All the Time\u2014Here\u2019s Why"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Why do we make assumptions about people, especially strangers? What are the consequences of the assumptions we make? Can we retrain ourselves and our interactions with strangers?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’ll cover Malcolm Gladwell’s theory about why we make assumptions about people, from his book Talking to Strangers<\/a><\/em>. As we’ll see, it’s not hard to correct this tendency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Why Do We Make <\/strong>Assumptions About People?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Meeting a stranger can make it more challenging to make sense of that person than not<\/em> meeting him. That\u2019s because people assume transparency in others. This is why we make assumptions about people.
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Transparency refers to the assumption that the way people present themselves outwardly (through behavior and demeanor) is an accurate and reliable representation of their inner feelings and intentions<\/strong>. But that\u2019s an unrealistic assumption to make when dealing with strangers<\/a>.
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Before we explore further why we make assumptions about people, let\u2019s look at how transparency works.
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Transparency<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Facial expressions are one of the primary ways that we interpret a stranger\u2019s feelings<\/strong> (because we mistakenly assume that a person\u2019s demeanor is an accurate representation of his feelings). 
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When we meet strangers, we tend to believe that they\u2019ll be as transparent as the characters on Friends<\/em>. This is the \u201cFriends<\/em> Fallacy.\u201d It\u2019s a fallacy because real life isn\u2019t like an episode of Friends<\/em>. In reality, strangers often aren\u2019t transparent. So why do we assume they are? Why do we make assumptions about people?
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Is Assuming Transparency Beneficial? <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals<\/em> by Charles Darwin, Darwin argues that it is beneficial to human survival that people are able to quickly and accurately communicate emotions to one another.<\/strong> 
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The ability to smile, frown, and wrinkle the nose in disgust are some examples of how the human face evolved as a tool to represent internal feelings. This will probably strike you as a relatively obvious principle. After all, children everywhere naturally smile when they\u2019re happy and frown when they\u2019re sad, and that helps them get what they need to survive. So it seems reasonable to assume transparency. We make assumptions about people because we assume we can read their faces and body language<\/a>.
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But you should be careful not to assume that every stranger you come across will be transparent. That assumption about people requires everyone you meet to express themselves in the same predictable ways<\/strong>. Unfortunately, that is not the case. 
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Experiment: Transparency Across Different Cultures<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Psychologist Carlos Crivelli spent years testing the limits of human transparency\u2014he wanted to find out if people from entirely different cultures evolved to express the same emotions in the same ways. So in 2013, he teamed up with anthropologist Sergio Jarillo to conduct a social experiment in the remote Trobriands Islands. 
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Crivelli and Jarillo chose the Trobriands Islands because: <\/p>\n\n\n\n