What do you know about people you don’t know?

[cjsmith]

What do you folks think or guess when you don’t know someone?

Elsewhere I wrote:

I have some vague baseline sort-of-trust of people I don’t know well. MOST of them aren’t psychopaths. MOST won’t steal my stuff if they’re in my house for an hour. MOST will try to hide their misogyny from female-appearing persons. That sort of thing. And then I’m always on the lookout for signals that a stranger does indeed fit this model. It’s as if there’s a Generic Human in my mind, and I make a lot of guesses about what that Generic Human is likely to do.

What are some of your guesses about Generic Humans? Small or large, positive or negative - comment away!

(This is a public entry. An access-limited entry is here for folks who prefer not to comment on public posts.)

Comments

[amaebi]

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.

[cjsmith]

Hmmmm, I think I have that “hierarchical, points-based, advantage-seeking” guess about men more than about women - but this may be my experience in computer-techie-land talking. I think high tech has more than its share of that set of traits, and the vast majority of my coworkers throughout my career have been men. (Also, in much of US culture it is seen as important for men to be “above” women, and I look female.)