Thread: Learning from our mistakes or judging people unfairly?

In part I think this is like looking at the difference between psychology and sociology. One deals with the behavior of individuals and the other with large groups. While the behavior of an individual cannot always be predicted, the behavior of groups can be. The larger the group the more predictable - or so says sociology. With over 6 billion people on the planet, with more people in a mid sized city than there used to be in the most populous state, we all interact at some level with a huge number of people and grouping and typing is unaviodable - we can't deal with such numbers individually.

Our minds deal with learning and judging largely through comparison. This is like that, this relates to that. It is very hard, if not impossible, for us to process or deal with something that is completely outside our range of experience. This is how the well known "invisible gorilla in the room" works. I've posted about this before, but essentially if something is outside our experience, makes no sense, has no relevance to us and our experience we may not even "see" it. We have no frame of reference for it, even if it is a familiar, identifiable, such as a gorilla. If it appears someplace completely unexpected and to us, irrational, we may fail to recognize it.

This is how our minds work. For many things the only way we can concepualize them is through ratios or comparisons. We can look at some obects and see immediately that there are 5 or 8 things there. But when the numbers get very large we can't do that. No human can look at a large group and "see" that there are a million or a half million there. We need lables, references: x number of groups, each containing x number of items. We can see that one is much more than another but we cannot at a glance "know" how many there are.

Dealing with people or situations we do the same thing. Granted some people are quicker to it than others. If you've had two lovers and they both treated you the same way, that is 100% of your experience. It's not 100% of the other gender but it is 100% of your experience with that type of interaction with them. We humans aren't always considered in our statements and expressions of feelings. Some never are, others of us usually are but can still slip into generalizations. You've had one bad marriage or LTR and now have a good one. I've been a slower learner and have had multiple bad experiences, I've been married several times, I always looked at positives and when I get into it find there are huge negatives that I glossed over. I can recognize intellectually that this is a result of growing up in an abusive situation, having also been been raped and stalked, but when I get into the reality of living I repeatedly fall into variations of the same pattern. The intelectual hasn't overcome the behavior patterns.

I think you are concerned with negative type casting? Rather than positive? It can be just as dangerous. If you have a positive experience with the member of, say a terrorist group, they help you out, it could be a fatal error to assume they are all like that and simply misunderstood.

All that said, the statement on another thread that, "men are idiots", which triggered the creation of this thread, appears to have been made by a man. I've had far more men than women say things like this to me. Men have told me, speaking about men in general, that they are animals, oblivious, jerks, idiots, users. But then I've picked up women doing a lot of their own gender bashing, saying that women are catty, superficial and will tear each other to pieces. How true is any of this? It all both true and untrue. It depends on perspective and situation. We seen this on the forum over and over. I've commented many times on threads where a series of behaviors or circumstance have been presented and a number of posters have chimed in to say, "guilty" and I've come up with a completely different perspective that says, "innocent". Who's right? We don't know. We can only make assumptions based on our own observations and experiences. But there is enough universality to human behavior that our assumptions are often right.