Existential Psychology

Give People Another Chance

By  | 

You can use some psychological ideas to make yourself a gentler, more forgiving person in how your characterize and regard the people you know. We always hear the expression ‘you never get a second chance to make a first impression’, and the sad part is that for most of us this holds true, both in the way we view others and the way they view us. How idiotic that one tiny slice of time, one data point amongst countless, is used as the sole criteria for how to think about someone and the resulting way we behave towards them.

The cognitive bias that is probably to blame is called consistency. This is where we seek to align our current thoughts and actions with a past decision we have taken. Most of the time consistency is a good thing. It makes us trustworthy in the eyes of others, and in our evolutionary past, where working together in groups on a moment by moment basis was essential for survival, consistency was a favorable trait for natural selection.

But the consistency bias can work against us in the way we form our perceptions of others, because unconsciously we will try to make future encounters align with the perceptions we already have, discarding or ignoring information that contradicts these perceptions and narrowly focusing on the information that reinforces them, thereby achieving psychological equilibrium ourselves by making our perceptions align with the decision we have already made regarding them.

This is one of the reasons that people can have such a hard time breaking out of their reputations and easily fall back into old habits. Those around them unconsciously work to block anything that feels new or foreign, keeping them locked into the role that was carved out for them, with or without their approval.

All of us have infinite data points representing different thoughts and behaviors that could be used to construct a plausible narrative about us, winnowing us down to a single label and ignoring the rich tapestry of our lives. Remembering this about ourselves can help us accept that there are probably many sides to the people we have judged too, and if we just accept this truth we will see examples during encounters that we would have either ignored or blocked before.

It’s liberating not confining to realize that your perceptions about someone probably aren’t telling the whole story. If you can accept the wrong perceptions you have towards others you’ll understand the wrong perceptions others have had towards you and they won’ bug you as much. You’ll be a kinder, more forgiving person who looks for and sees good qualities in people even if their reputations or your first impression say otherwise, and you’ll rise above a way of seeing the world determined by your unconscious instincts rather than your human choice.

Related posts:

  1. Learning How To Say No If you feel like you are constantly being pressured into doing things for people even though you don’t really want to this article is for you. The crafty people around us have various methods to secure our compliance; you could say that all of us are salespeople to a certain extent. Rather than talking about […]...
  2. Helping People Change Maladaptive Behaviors The same rules apply for helping people change in therapy as in the wider sphere of life. Probably the most fundamental, inalterable rule is that no one changes in a lasting way unless they decide they really want to, unless they decide it’s in their own best interests and the best interests of those around them […]...
  3. People Pleasers While the veneer is friendly and easygoing, people pleasers tend to have a lot of built up hostility and resentment roiling and broiling underneath the surface. They feel put out and taken advantage of. They tend to unleash their negativity onto the wrong targets, onto safe targets, onto close friends and family members. Of course […]...
  4. Not Wanting To Cede Control To Controlling People Many relationships come to be defined by one person’s endeavor to amass and maintain control over the other person’s life. The controller will usually secretly rationalize this controlling behavior on the grounds of knowing better and only wanting what’s best for someone they care about. Control disguised as help. The controlee, assuming the relationship is […]...
  5. Separate People From Their Problems If you’re trying to help someone struggling with life issues it’s useful to start with the narrative therapy premise that “You’re not the problem, the problem is the problem.” When we separate people from their problems we invariably get better results. When we treat people and their problems as one and the same thing unwanted, […]...
  6. Spending Time Alone And Spending Time Around People Good mental health means finding a healthy balance between spending time alone and spending time around people. But actually it’s not the presence or absence of people that counts as much as that we interpret being alone as solitude rather than existential isolation and that we interpret being around others as community rather than existential […]...
  7. Critical People There is no great psychological mystery around critical people. They feel bad about themselves and their lives. Their critical attitude is a projection, a way to try to make others feel bad about themselves too in order to transfer some of that built up unpleasant psychic pressure. The reason this strategy works is that there […]...
  8. Talking To Your Kids About Dangerous People You love your kids and you want to make sure they stay safe when you can’t be around to protect them. Unfortunately this means alerting them to the reality that some adults are dangerous and could harm them. If you’re a caring parent you’ve probably helped cultivate a sort of fairy tale reality for your […]...
  9. Helping People Move Through Conflict The critical mistake most of us make when people experiencing life conflicts come to us for help is that we think what they want is our advice. Of course they often think what they want is our advice too. But more often than not our supposedly well-intentioned advice is actually a cover for the chance […]...
  10. Every Activity is a Chance to Meditate In the West we have this strange idea, probably thanks in large part to how Eastern monks and monasteries are portrayed in movies, that meditation is something you do in silence on a mat, maybe with some incense, sitting for hours with your legs crossed contemplating the nature of existence. Yet these same monks would […]...
  11. All You Need To Do Is Give Your Best There are just as many people who take credit for accomplishments when many of the necessary components for a successful outcome were outside of their power to control or influence as there are people who wallow in failure even though many of the things that went wrong were outside of their power to control or […]...
  12. Give Thanks Thanksgiving is a great opportunity to consciously take time to appreciate your life. We’ve written in several contexts about the difference between a having culture and a being culture. In a having culture, we try in vain to get important emotional and psychological needs met through external sources. These external sources are physical objects like […]...
  13. Give Your Body The Gift Of Stillness And Your Mind The Gift Of Clarity Near the end of class, while we were all lying in final savasana, our yoga teacher Miranda told us, “Give your body the gift of stillness and your mind the gift of clarity.” I told her afterwards I thought it was a great line and she happily responded that she came up with it in […]...
  14. When To Give Up When should you throw in the towel and give up? The short answer is never. I’m reminded of the start of the movie ‘Gladiator’ where Quintus says “People should know when they’re conquered” and Maximus replies “Would you Quintus? Would I?” Refusing to surrender means you still have that internal striving and it means you […]...
  15. Give Everything You Have To Your Pursuit You have to be willing to give everything you have to the pursuit you’ve taken up, to make this endeavor the center of your existence, to eat, breathe, and sleep what you’re doing. If you’re not ready for a total commitment then we can predict the outcome right now. You’re going to get average results, […]...
  16. Give Yourself Permission to Grieve Many of us carry around our unfinished grief our whole lives. We don’t give ourselves permission to grieve because we’re afraid of what letting down our guard might do to us. Grief is a dark, unknown abyss and the secret fear is that if we allow ourselves to sink into it we’ll never find our […]...
  17. Give Your Anxiety A Personality Narrative therapy separates the problem from the person in order to get some perspective, viewing the problem objectively from a distance, as a distinctly separate entity from the person experiencing it. This idea works particularly well when thinking about existential anxiety since like we have written in many other places anxiety is the threat of […]...
  18. Advice On How To Give Advice When you let people know that they’re doing a good job and that they can add to their life skill tool belt by doing such and such a little differently they tend to be much more receptive than if you start with the premise that they’re doing badly and need to fix what they’re doing wrong. It should […]...
  19. When People Feel They Have Been Seriously Wronged When people feel they’ve been seriously wronged they don’t always know what to do with those hurt feelings. One of the most common responses is a form of reaction formation where they repress the discomfiting sense of being vulnerable and alternatively present a strong, even aggressive facade to the world. And they usually feel an […]...
  20. Helping People Be Happy When we try to help the people we care about achieve happiness and fulfillment in their lives one of the biggest challenges we face is overcoming our own narcissism. Consciously we may tell ourselves that our words and actions are in the best interests of the other but unconsciously these words and actions are actually […]...
Related Items