I think it's easy to think this one. One typically knows only the outward face and performance of another, and knows all one's own hesitations and uncertainties and quavering.

Another confusing thing is that a lot of people do friendships of convenience that don't outlast the convenience, making everything hard to evaluate and for fools like me, distressing.

I definitely have had that view of Generic Humans, but mostly don't now.

I now tend to think that Generic Humans in the USian Whiteworld tend to operate on extremely hierarchical bases and that they're likely to poke people including me for some perceived rank advantage.