After spending the day running errands and finishing chores, my friends and I sat down to relax last Saturday night. Between snacking on some Chinese food and sipping on lemonade, we decided to play a small game.
The game was to choose an adjective — diligent, adventurous, arrogant, etc. — and rate everyone present on that quality. As we started the game and began taking rounds giving each other our ratings, I began to realize a very should-have-been-obvious-before thing:
How much importance we give to others perception of us, yet how skewed these perceptions are based on three things:
Context: No one sees you in your entirety but through the small pieces and bits of your shared interactions. So, in our game, when one person was giving a rating and sharing the reason for that rating, they were referring to very specific instances, based on parts of the other person they have retained in their memory.
For instance, one of them was a friend of a friend and when that person was giving me a rating that was based on very limited knowledge and dependent on specific contexts he has seen me in.
Even in the case of people who know you very well, there will be recency bias, for example. Someone would remember a recent incident of you being unreasonable even if that had been a one off situation in your entire life — that’s what they see and that’s what the rating would reflect. Now, does that mean that your being unreasonable is a fact and that’s how you are always? No.
I was once having a tough conversation with a friend. I wanted to share how alone I was feeling because we hadn’t spent a lot of time together recently. What I wanted to say was, “I want more of you. Can we spend more time together?” and what she heard, as a result of being in a bad mood post a fight with her boyfriend, was “you are not capable of being there for me”.
Personal experiences: One of the most interesting revelations for me during the game was everyone perceived every adjective in a very different way.
For example, compassion meant something very different to everyone in the team. There were very few words for which we actually had the same definition, which was surprising but it is true.
What I understand as independence is, for instance, the ability to get things done without unnecessary dependence on others. At the same time, for another friend, independence meant a sense of stoicism where you are able to manage your emotions without depending on another for fulfilling your emotional needs.
How people perceive you is based on their own personal experiences around a certain quality. For instance, one of my friends perceived freedom on the lines of being irresponsible, which means the more free you are, the more irresponsible, and another perceived it as the opposite of stability. Lesser freedom means more stability.
Relative: There is no universal benchmark for any of these adjectives like beauty, arrogance, anger, diligence, etc. It is largely relative. We judge beauty against what we have been culturally conditioned to believe is beauty. We judge arrogance based on, maybe, the arrogance we’ve seen in people around us.
Given how relative each of these words are, someone who works 14 hours a day might see another who works only eight hours as lazy. Now that’s not a fact. It is a perception based on their relative experiences.
But…
The unfortunate thing with perceptions is when more and more people share the same perception about you, you start to believe it is a fact!
But in reality, nothing a person shares about you — appreciation or criticism is a universal fact. It is skewed by context, personal experiences and relative understanding.
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