We tend to assume that someone else’s behaviour is due to their personality rather than their circumstances, and do exactly the reverse to ourselves!
There’s a saying in psychology: every good thing that ever happens to us starts with meeting a stranger. But there also are rogues out there, so making new friends can be risky. Which means you need to become skilled at making a judgement about someone new. Who to date, who to avoid and so on.
With practice you can size up a stranger within seconds. But you’ll still make mistakes, so you also need to be careful about first impressions!
You’ve probably met new people before and thought they’re great, only to discover a few weeks later that they’re unreliable or annoying. This means that your initial impressions were wrong.
Maybe that happened because you only noticed their more obvious traits, such as being outgoing, and missed their more private feelings, like a tendency towards insecurity. We also rarely take account of how our own feelings affect our judgement. So you’re much more likely to like someone new when you’re feeling energised, and might well have ruled them out if you’d happened to be feeling quieter that day.
We also have some built in biases. Like you probably tend to think that physically attractive people are intelligent, and that people with big eyes are honest. That tall people make good leaders and a deep voice means he’ll be a good lover. Needless to say there’s not much truth in any of them!
We tend to assume that someone else’s behaviour is due to their personality rather than their circumstances, and do exactly the reverse to ourselves! So when my friend fails an exam, I think he’s been lazy. But if I do badly, it’s because the wrong questions came up!
But that also means that you’ll overlook how someone’s behaviour might be affected by their environment. Like how your date isn’t showing their usual everyday persona, because they’re on their best behaviour.
Feelings
You probably assume that you’ll like someone better when you spend more time with them, while the opposite’s much more likely. You assess people as members of a social group rather than as individuals, so your judgement’s coloured by your preference for some groups over others, like particular professions and so on.
You also judge people from your own social group more harshly than others, and once you’ve made an initial impression, you only notice things that seem to back up your feelings. Which is why it’s so difficult to recover from a bad reputation, no matter how much you’ve improved!
Biases like these have built up because it can take weeks to make a completely accurate judgement of a stranger’s character. And it’s better to be 70 percent right in a few seconds rather than absolutely right after a month - by which time your new companion’s done you a lot of harm!
But don’t let all the risks and uncertainties put you off! Because meeting a stranger really can change your life. Just make sure it’s always for the better!
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