Reading people
There’s an essay I enjoyed that I think you will too. It’s about how damaged people-people who have actually been abused and traumatized in foundational ways-develop skills out of that experience.
I have some things to say that were sparked by this essay, but first you should have the opportunity to read
‘s piece.
I particularly enjoyed the part where he discussed how some people become master interpreters of the affect, manner, and carriage of other people. They-we, I’m one of them-use it to successfully predict trouble from such people down the line.
Most of the time I take care to acknowledge my shortcomings, which are many. I’m not going to do that here, because doing it helps to shut down any discussion of the things people like me are good at. They get drowned under, “But, you’re not 100 percent perfect, so let’s focus on how your skill is really going to get you and other people in trouble.”
No. My skill at doing this is highly beneficial to me, and, though they don’t know it and won’t acknowledge it, actually helpful to others who are willing to give my view a shot. Most won’t, because it means having to think “not nice” things about people that they only want to think nice things about.
I’m extremely good at reading people quickly and making accurate judgments about their personality and likely future actions. I can, actually, smell narcissism and borderline behavior a mile away. Often within one sentence out of a person’s mouth. Yes, really. Or just one glance at their grooming and the way they hold their mouth or eyes.
I’m almost always right. Almost every time I’ve had a chance to check my initial judgment against later data, I find that the guy I pegged as a scammer fled his company taking other investors’ money. The lady who held herself out as a teacher was actually pocketing student’s money and failing to deliver. The Brilliant Intellectual that everyone thought was the bee’s knees turns out to be the sociopath who flip flops his basic moral position based on what’s most lucrative, just like I said he was.
Almost all the time, I’m right. This is not a brag, it’s a simple factual description of a real skill that I actually have in this domain.
But it’s a lonely skill. Most people like me find that the majority of other people don’t believe us. They say we’re the unstable ones. We’re “paranoid.” Actually, maybe it’s YOU who has a personality disorder, they will sometimes say.
And those who have an opportunity to see that my prediction was right usually won’t acknowledge it. I’ve given warnings to people whose names you absolutely know because they’re quasi-famous in some way about staying clear of X or Y Fresh New Person On the Scene. I’ve been right. My well-known acquaintances did, in fact, get burned by that person in exactly the way I thought they would. Even in those cases, the acquaintance has rarely acknowledged it.
It’s not that I want to be told “you were right” for the sake of that. It’s that I’d appreciate hearing, “I was wrong to doubt you so strongly and act as though what you were saying was ridiculous.” I think that’s a reasonable desire, but it won’t be satisfied.
People who don’t have the experience of prolonged child abuse, domestic abuse, rapes, and other traumas, are fundamentally different from people like me. They’re, well, normal. This makes it hard for them to grasp the hypervigilant, ever-scanning, pattern-detecting obsessives like me and others with similar backgrounds. To them, we’re “looking for trouble.” To them, we’re “usually wrong.” To them, we’re making a bad moral calculus because we might be wrong one time in our snap judgment, and our being wrong that one time is a worse sin than there is good to be had in how we protect ourselves by being right most of the time.
I disagree completely with that view. It’s like the dispute between how two sides see this common formulation:
”Better that 1,000 guilty men go free than that one innocent man be condemned.”
We all, collectively, just assume a priori that the sentiment above is true. You assume it. Check yourself right now. If you’re honest, you’ll have to admit that you feel compelled to believe that’s true.
But is it? Have you really thought about it deeply? What that moral aphorism fails to take into account is the untold suffering of innocent people that comes from attending only to making sure that zero innocent people are ever mistakenly convicted. That is, the much more common suffering of the innocent is not considered a moral wrong that needs any attention at all.
In a similar way, people often deny the people-reading skills and snap judgments of people like me. Even if they admit that we often get it right—and few ever admit that, although it’s true—they still think it’s immoral for us to use this calculus. Why? Because they think it’s morally worse that I misjudge 1 person for every 10 snap judgments than it is that I might be targeted or harmed if I were to be naive and welcoming to everyone despite the signals they send out.
This is wrong. People like me have a legitimate interest in protecting ourselves from manipulators, narcissists, and the exploitative. We are also usually interested in helping protect our friends and colleagues from the same. That’s a legitimate interest. We are not ethically obliged to make ourselves vulnerable just to satisfy onlookers who, strangely, care more about some anonymous person we might misjudge too quickly than they care about our own interest in self-preservation.
That’s all a very long way of saying the following:
We should judge books by their covers, and I do it all the time, and I’m usually right, and it was a wise decision.
That there is an error rate in this type of judgement does not mean that I must put down this tool and never use it again. That’s not a reasonable request.
I accept that there is an error rate in my judgment, but I do not concede that the presence of an error rate makes me “bad” or “irresponsible.” I accept the error rate as the state of such things in nature, and I don’t apologize for not being perfect before I judge.