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

[noelfigart]

Actually, it's rather awful and I have to guard against it:

Generic Human is unlikely to be as intelligent as I am and is probably not going to think things through.

1. Yes, I know where my IQ falls on the bell curve. It's not an excuse to be an arrogant ass.

2. While it is true that you can generalize and say "The average human" doesn't think things through, that doesn't mean ANYTHING for "The Human in Front of Me at This Moment." (Which also rather applies to point 1.)

[cjsmith]

*nod* I share your assessment of point 1 (again, I merely know where I fit in the bell curve) and tbh observation often does seem to support your point 2 (though I don’t think that’s one I tend to have in my own mind - my guesses make no sense sometimes).

I agree completely that neither of those says a blessed thing about any specific person.

If I see some stranger at a bus stop, and I know zilch, I have guesses. Most of these I’ve not been very conscious of. As I get to know a person better those will be confirmed or not, sometimes even shown to be massively blatantly wrong. But it’s interesting to examine what I have as a starting point.