What Lies Beneath the Behaviour We Judge in Others?

Have you ever met someone and almost immediately decided what you think of them? Maybe they were rude to you, seemed angry, hardly spoke, or there was simply something about them that made you keep your distance. Sometimes there is good reason for that. We don’t have to like everyone we meet, and there are behaviours we shouldn’t accept. But there is also a lot we don’t know about the people we come across every day. We see what is happening now. We don’t see everything that happened before.

Where does anger come from?

Anger can be particularly difficult to see beyond. When someone is angry with us, our attention naturally goes to their behaviour and how it affects us. We don’t necessarily stop to wonder where that anger came from, and perhaps in the moment we shouldn’t have to. Yet there is often much more behind someone’s behaviour than we could possibly know from our experience of them.

That became an important part of my conversation with Aaron Watts. Aaron was eleven when his father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He remembers being a happy child before that, but as his father’s illness progressed, Aaron became increasingly angry. He was watching someone he loved slowly change and couldn’t do anything to stop it. Later his parents divorced and, while still a teenager, Aaron began taking on more responsibility for his father’s care. There was anger around that too, along with the feeling that life wasn’t turning out as he had expected.

Someone meeting Aaron during those years wouldn’t necessarily have known any of this. They would have met the person he was on that particular day, perhaps seen some of the anger, and formed an opinion based on what was in front of them. How often do we do the same thing with people we meet?

We don’t know what came before

There are all sorts of reasons people behave as they do. Someone may be grieving or caring for somebody who is ill. There may be problems at home. They may be frightened, exhausted or lonely. Something may have happened years ago that still affects the way they respond to people today. Or none of those things may be true. The difficulty is that we simply don’t know, yet we can become very certain about people with very little information. I’ve certainly done it, and I think most of us have. Perhaps somebody has done it to you too. They’ve seen one part of you and assumed they know the rest.

We do this with appearances as well as behaviour. Aaron has a beard, tattoos and what he describes as a biker look. He told me people have approached him assuming he smokes, drinks or uses drugs, when none of those assumptions are true. It is an obvious example of judging someone by what we see, but I wonder whether the judgments we make about behaviour are any different. In both cases, we take the information available to us and fill in everything we don’t know.

The problem may not be that we form impressions. That is probably impossible to avoid. The question is how firmly we hold onto them once they are formed, and whether we leave enough room to discover that we might have got someone wrong.

Knowing someone’s story can change how we see them

Aaron thought he had hidden much of his anger from his friends. When he recently talked about it with one of the friends who had known him since childhood, he discovered that he hadn’t hidden it nearly as well as he thought. His friend told him they had all seen it.

There was an important difference, though. His friends knew what was happening in his life. They knew his dad and watched his illness progress. They knew about the changes within the family and had some understanding of what Aaron was dealing with at home. They weren’t seeing his behaviour without any context, and those friendships became an important part of his life during those years.

Knowing someone’s story doesn’t mean that everything they do suddenly becomes acceptable. Understanding and accepting someone’s behaviour are not the same thing. There will still be times when we need to say no, disagree, walk away or set a boundary. Perhaps knowing more simply allows us to respond to the behaviour without deciding that it tells us everything there is to know about the person.

What if we’ve got someone wrong?

How many people have we formed an opinion about without ever really talking to them. It might be the person at work we find difficult, the neighbour who never seems particularly friendly, someone who always appears angry, or even a person in our family whose behaviour we stopped trying to understand a long time ago.

What would happen if we became curious about one of them? They may still be difficult. We may still disagree with them or decide we don’t particularly want a relationship with them. But we might also discover something we didn’t know, something that helps us understand a little more about why they are the way they are.

Of course, people don’t owe us their stories. Someone may not want to tell us what they have lived through, and curiosity doesn’t give us permission to push into places we haven’t been invited. Sometimes simply remembering that there may be more than we know is enough to soften the certainty with which we judge.

A conversation can change what we know

This week’s Brew the Change is to have a conversation with someone whose story you don’t know. This time, choose someone you’ve already formed an opinion about. Maybe they’re angry, maybe they’re quiet, or maybe they’re difficult to understand. Instead of making another assumption, spend a little time getting to know their story. You may discover there’s far more beneath the surface than you first imagined.

We can’t know the story of every person we meet, and we’re certainly not going to sit down for chocolate and coffee with everyone who annoys us. But perhaps there is one person we’ve already decided we understand without ever really getting to know them.

What if we’ve only seen a small part of their story?