Ｑ79. What do we need to understand other people?

We need to understand ways of thinking which are different from our own.

　　After emotion, let's examine personality, which is an arrangement of emotions.
　　Why do we often misunderstand others, or get puzzled by another person's actions?
　　The answer to this problem is with our thought process. To guess what a person is thinking we usually imagine that we are the other person. In other words, we think of how we would feel if we were the other person. However, this guess will not be correct unless the other person has the same personality as us.
　　Therefore, we cannot understand people with a different personality from ours even if we stand in their position. You and other people are different people.
　　If we want to understand others we need to learn what the difference between the personalities is.
　　The Burnham Effect is famous in psychology. It is a tendency to feel that an explanation of your personality is correct when you read it. For example, you are always brooding, you have an irresponsible side, you are two-faced, or you are not steady and cannot make long commitments.
　　Human personality has a complicated structure, and normally has every kind of feature. Whether they are expressed or not is the only difference. So there is no meaning for personality descriptions such as short-tempered, or suspicious because absolutely everyone has aspects of these. If you wonder if a trait is true and think about it, you can always find it.
　　Therefore we cannot understand human personality by expressions which are ambiguous and lack conditions like those previously stated.
　　When we talk about personality, what do people truly want to know about the other person?
　　It is useless to make predictions about instances in which all people would do the same action. For example, people escape from a fire. All people do the same thing so there is no relation to personality. I think that what people want to know is what action the other person would choose from among several options.
　　So well made personality classification can predict the target person's action when he or she can freely select from options.
　　We first check whether a person is the same type as us by using a proper personality classification based on actions, and then imagine their mind, and finally we can understand another person well.