Most stories in our lives have good guy characters and bad guy characters. For many of us, this resonates, because we seem to see good and bad people in our realities.
But of course we ourselves are part of the good guys, right? The kicker is, that's what everyone else also thinks.
The bad guys we see in movies seem to be driven by some kind of negative spirit - revenge, a desire to do harm, and similar emotional drivers. As we grow up with this content, we come to expect that only these types of acute emotions may drive bad behavior and since we don't feel like we're constantly driven by emotions like this, we conclude that we cannot be bad people.
Based on these stories and mental concepts, we go out into our lives and use them as yard sticks to choose the people we trust, keep away from and so on. If a person seems to be driven by strong negative emotions we notice that and keep our distance, if someone seems to behave unintuitively, we'd be cautious of something malicious going on. We build up our "social immune system" based on this.
The problem, however, is that even good people may do bad things. Things that many others would classify as being unfair or bad. Yet typically from their own perspective, they wouldn't consider them bad and they would honestly defend themselves if accused. They will thus not show any signs of the "bad people" that our social immune systems has been trained to catch, making it very likely that we will accept their behavior as reasonable putting ourselves into danger at the same time.
It it therefore of utmost importance, to have systems in place to ensure that you can't be negatively affected by others.
- Firstly, you need to recalibrate your social immune system to not just react to your standard movie villan type behaviors but be more sensitive.
- Create way in which you can use your rational thinking to double check other's behaviors and potentially spot issues that your social immune system didn't catch
- Ensure you have a sounding board of people you trust that you share key interactions in your life with - they will have a better outsiders perspective and won't be subject to your emotional situation surrounding your relationships.