Judging Character

I do think it is interesting these days that people can no longer accurately judge character. This seems to be a borderline-esque example of a lack of object constancy—where a person has a difficult time averaging out another person’s behaviour and only looks at the last thing they did to assess them. This is all probably due to the indoctrination we are all experiencing now, and have been experiencing for years.

I also think we have been inundated with movies for decades that show people acting out of character in surprising unexpected ways. For example, the really nice guy next door who ends up being a serial killer. That sort of character shift just doesn’t happen in real life (explanation to follow). Yet people always think it could happen—or even that it is likely to happen, no matter how clear it is made that it most likely would not happen. It is a huge fear of human beings that someone they trust will suddenly turn on them—they are then apt to trust them too thoroughly in order to avoid that risk. But again, this turning typically doesn’t happen in real life (not in radical ways). If someone is an asshole, you usually can tell, intuitively, that they are an asshole, and if someone has good character, usually that good character is consistent in their actions and behaviour. There are outliers, of course, and you do have to nurture the skill of intuitive assessment to be decent at making a reasonably reliable evaluation.