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!

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Comments

[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.