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Today I had an interesting conversation with somebody who I would call a colleague, somebody working in my building who was hoping to actually get some advice from me about a situation that they had to deal with earlier on in the week.

And it’s the sort of thing that comes up, at least in one respect that I’ll tell you about in just a second. 0ver and over and over again. I think that going back as far as I can remember, there have always been people (including myself at times) who had raised this sort of complaint about the bad behavior of another person.

So here’s what it’s really about. They say: “I don’t understand why they did this, or do this sort of thing, or behave in this sort of way. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

And that is a pretty common reaction to the kinds of situations where we feel like somebody has treated us or somebody else that we care about wrongly. We might feel hurt. We might feel disappointed. We might feel irritated. We might even feel afraid or sorry. We’re sort of resourceless. We don’t understand how this situation came to be, because here’s the crux.

We’re attributing to the other person the same sort of motivational structure and evaluation of things, and the ways in which they see good and bad, right and wrong, their own responsibility, as we ourselves have.

And if you think about that for a moment, you step back from the situation and you think, is this a rational thing to do? The answer very clearly, quickly and clearly, is No, because people are indeed different from each other, and they have been throughout all of history.

I mean, whether you go to mythological stories, or whether you look at history, or whether you look at other things, or just consult your own experience, if you’re really being honest with yourself, people don’t always see things the same way, value the same things, behave in the same way.

Their characters are sometimes established in good or bad ways, or not even really that well established. So it would be rather imprudent to hold on to a deeply set belief that I think many many people carry (I won’t estimate what the percentage could possibly be), and this deeply held belief is that at bottom we’re all basically the same. Now we are the same in certain important respects, but that sameness maybe doesn’t go as far up from the deep-down as we might expect it to.

So when somebody does behave in a way that, as we say, doesn’t make sense, why would they do that? Why would they behave that way? It tends to catch people off guard because they’re experienced, expecting, desiring, planning even for a different kind of behavior that’s more like theirs.

So for example (and this isn’t the case that we’re talking about here): You’re out with some people who have invited you to dinner. You could expect that: well they’re going to pay for dinner because they’re the ones who made the invitation. Or perhaps we’re all going to share the check in some sort of fair and equitable way. You don’t think, for example, that they would look at you and expect you to pay the bill, or push it over by you and kind of nod at it or ask you to do that, make a claim about missing their wallet or any of those sorts of things. That goes against expectations.

And yet there are some people who will do that. How do we know that There are people who actually do that sort of thing. And some of us may have more experiences of that, or we might have to rely on other people’s experiences that they tell us about. But these things do indeed happen.

People can be unjust. They can be ungenerous. They can be unfriendly. They can betray our trust or confidences. And those are the sorts of things that happen. So when we say, well that doesn’t make sense, we’re not asserting that it’s out of the realm of possibility. Not if we’re actually rational human beings. But we are caught off guard, because what they’re doing, what they’re saying, their attitudes, what they fail to do, seems incongruous or inconsistent with what we’re expecting of them.

We could even say that there’s a claim made that what they’re doing is unintelligible, but I think that goes too far. It’s not unintelligible. It’s not as if we can’t understand it at all. And here’s where we’re going to get eventually to two practices that I think can be quite helpful in if you’re running into these sorts of situations for recalibrating your own attitude and mindset.

So the first thing I want to say is that these sort of difficulties typically arise out of making a assumption over and over and over again. So it’s probably, as I said, deeply rooted. It’s probably something habitual. It’s probably something that one is doing, and carrying out processes of what we could call unconscious or implicit reasoning that then lead to an emotional reaction of feeling bad, feeling upset and saying: I don’t understand what’s going on here.

And this assumption is simply that people in general and in their particulars are very similar or even the same as oneself in terms of what they value, what they think matters, how they expect to be treated and how they want to treat other people, how they understand situations, the amount of impulse control that they have. All of those sorts of things that go into making up a human being with a motivational structure and probably like a narrative of their life up to this point, what kind of person they are and how they’ve developed and displayed it.

If we assume wrongly, without good evidence, that most people are going to be like us, well that may be the case if we are living a rather sheltered life where somebody else is doing the shock absorption and keeping us from having to deal with that or where we are indeed in a rather homogenous community, or where we have you might say a cognitive vice of having ignored evidence that is actually staring us in the face, well then we are setting ourselves up once we get into a wider world that includes people of all different varieties, some of whom may be very good and some of whom may be very bad, and other people who are kind of a mess in between, and some people who are rather kind of blah and who don’t have much character at all.

When we’re in that wider world, we are going to encounter a lot of these situations where what other people are doing doesn’t make sense because we expect them to be like us. And I’m not saying that’s morally wrong. What I’m saying is that’s actually rather imprudent, not least because then you misjudge what they’re doing and you are setting yourselves up for feeling bad about things.

It is indeed an odd conclusion for one to draw from experience of dealing with human beings. And I think that if you are going to pursue this line of thinking, applying it to yourself, you could say that. How did you arrive at thinking everybody was going to be like you. You had to not be paying adequate attention to how people do in fact behave and what they tell you about their motivations, whether in words or in the character

And so that lack of attentiveness is something that I think has a root as well in a lack of self-knowledge on the part of the person who is surprised. Certainly a lack of self-knowledge about the fact that you aren’t paying adequate attention to the world that you live in, which includes other people of many different varieties, but probably also a lack of self-knowledge in other important ways. And this is what makes you vulnerable to those sorts of situations.

So that’s one useful practice that I think can come out of this. Another one, as I was thinking about what might I say to that person who ran into that situation yet once again, is you can make distinctions, very important distinctions. And this is actually what I did in the situation the dialogue with the person as a matter of fact. We made some of these distinctions, not in a very formal way. I just did it through dialogue.

So the first thing you can do is distinguish between what the person did or didn’t do, which is more factual. You can describe it in essentially factual language from two other things. One of those things is also going to be, we could say, matters of fact, the mindset that led that person to doing it, their motivational structure, the why. There’s the that, and there’s the why. And we’re going to put aside the why for just a moment, because the other thing that we can do is distinguish what it is that the person did or didn’t do from how we feel about it, how we think about it, how we judge it.

And that last word leads us to realizing that what we’re talking about there is evaluation, moral qualities. We can say what they did was just or unjust, or it was good or bad or it was ugly or it was morally fine or beautiful or we can say it was harmful or helpful we can say that it was prudent or foolish we can do a lot of things with it. There’s nothing wrong with doing that. It’s just that we don’t want to glom these things together too tightly.

We actually can make better evaluations when we realize that we’re making evaluations. We should evaluate. We just want to make sure those evaluations are actually correct. So you’re already starting to make some distinctions. And we go then to the motivational structure of the person. And we can, as I mentioned, realize that yes, the person doesn’t see things the way that we do, and that’s why they’re behaving differently than we would behave in those circumstances.

So they have a different mindset, they have a different motivational structure, they have a different, we could say, hierarchy of values. Whatever you want to use to make sense of that, something that’s deeply rooted in that person, in their very character. And once you do that, you don’t actually have to let them off the hook, which is I think what a lot of people think.

If they say: well, they just see things differently than me, maybe I shouldn’t be judging them. Maybe I shouldn’t be evaluating them at all. No, you can actually evaluate other people’s moral character. You can say that somebody is virtuous or vicious. You can use other terms if you want to, and you’re perfectly justified in doing so.

You just want to be careful about how easily you ascribe them to people on the basis of what evidence you have, and you also want to make sure that you understand what these terms mean yourself. So you don’t want to be kind of slipshod with this. And I think if you do that, if you do these two sorts of exercises or practices, whatever you want to call them, if you’re prone to these sorts of experiences, if they’re happening over and over again to you, you’ll probably enable yourself to live, if not a happier life in full, at least a life with less troubles and problems and getting upset.

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Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, the co-founder of The Stoic Heart®, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

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