The problem with people (always a good way to start a post) is that we seem to like things that agree with our pre-existing view of the world. This is an experimentally provable effect called “confirmation bias” and there are all sorts of neat experiments that have been done to demonstrate that this is often how we work.
It seems to be the case that a huge part of who we are and the way we behave is based on who we’re expected to be or even our own perception of ourselves. Sometimes it’s as though we live by the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves (I’ll do this because I’m that kind of person but I would never do that because that’s not the way I am).
Even the way we think about and relate to other people is profoundly affected by whether we identify them as “someone like me” or “other”. An interesting experiment was done in which a group of students sat a test where they were presented with a biography of Rasputin and then asked to write an essay about him. Unbeknown to them, for half of the students the test papers had been tailored so that in the biography Rasputin’s birthday was the same date as theirs. The rest were given Rasputin’s real birthday as a control group.
Strangely, the group who thought that Rasputin shared their birthday were much more sympathetic in their assessment of him and tended to paint him as a misunderstood character who’d been unfairly demonised by history. Something as simple as sharing the same birthday immediately predisposed these students to be kinder in their treatment of him. How can we trust our ability to make judgements about anything when we’re so easily swayed by seemingly insignificant factors?
Also, I now can’t think of Rasputin without thinking of this video – Ra-Ra-Rasputin, lover of the Russian Queen…
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