Episode 51 - When What Other People Do Just Doesn't Make Sense

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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.