Give a Dog a Bad Name....

My school librarian in high school was a kind person. Very few students, however, went to the trouble of getting to know her. Rather they chose to believe the rumors spread by students whose sole purpose in attending high school was to be as disruptive as they could and to prove to themselves how mean teachers were.

The negativity bias, or negativity effect, plays a role in social judgments and impression formation, according to a Wikipedia article that I read. As a consequence of this bias, negative information is considered more diagnostic of an individual's character than positive information. It is considered more useful than positive information in forming an overall impression.

People place greater confidence in the accuracy of an impression when it is formed more on the basis of negative traits than on positive ones. They consider negative information more important to impression formation than positive information.

They are also not likely to question or verify that it is accurate or that is logically or factually sound.

In other words, they prefer to believe the worst about other people.

An ordinary person who on rare occasions does something that someone else interprets as scary even it is not from an objective viewpoint something that should elicit a fear reaction will be labeled a scary person. Other people then will treat them as scary person.

It is example of what the English proverb, “Give a dog a bad name and hang him,” means. One only has to besmirch someone’s reputation to cause him to suffer difficulty and hardship.

We may be scary to a few people. We may elicit a reaction of apprehension and uneasiness in them, feelings of anxiety and fear that something bad or unpleasant will happen, feelings of discomfort, and even feelings of embarrassment—self-consciousness, shame, and awkwardness.

Embarrassment may be compared to how we we might feel if we were standing naked in front of someone. We may feel exposed, highly self-conscious, dismayed at being subject to someone else’s rude gaze, and even humiliated. We may feel excited and even aroused. Surprising those feelings may be all mixed together. This itself may further add to our unease.

We are scary to small children who are generally frightened of strangers and unfamiliar people. Babies are easily startled. Even a game of Peek-A-Boo will startle them at first. A child may be naturally fearful by temperament, or they may have had experiences that cause them to distrust strangers and unfamiliar people.

The reaction of adults to us, however, is far more complex. Adults may have had childhood and later life experiences that cause them not to trust other people and to expect the worst from them. They may gravitate to situations where this perception of other people is reinforced.

We may know more about someone than they would like us to know (or they believe that we do whether or not we do) and they do not know how we are going to react (or we are not reacting how they expected us to react).

They are aware that we have knowledge of a socially unacceptable or frowned-upon act that they committed, and they are concerned what we might do with that knowledge and how it might affect how others evaluate them. We may have caught them in telling a lie or in making a mistake.

We may have put them in a socially awkward situation, making them the focus of unwanted attention. I know that on one occasion I innocently put a friend in that kind of situation, intending no harm, but unknowing creating an embarrassing situation for the friend.

We may be more open, straightforward, and honest in expressing my feelings than with which they are comfortable.

We may not react to what they do in the way other people have reacted in the past and they are not able to predict our reactions. Based on their own past experience, they may fear a delayed reaction.

We may elicit unexpected reactions in them, feelings that they did not expect to feel. We may not be scary but what they feel may be scary.

Different things scare different people. We may have ways of thinking and acting which trigger a fear reaction in one individual that do not in others.

These are a few of the things might make us scary to other people.

Most of us are not individuals who goes out of their way to frighten other people and gets off on terrifying them. We simply want to get along with other people and are surprised when they respond to us with fear or apprehension. We are not able to account for their reaction.

Due to the negativity bias it is best to take our time in forming an opinion of other people. Jesus offers us some guidance in this area. He reminds us that we will be measured by the same measurement that we use. He discourages us from focusing on their negative points. He urges us to make allowances and to give them the benefit of the doubt. While Jesus does not specifically refer to the negativity bias, he does exhibit an awareness of that bias in his recognition of our tendency to harshly judge other people and to focus on their faults and to ignore our own.

It is never a good idea to form our opinion of someone based solely on the fear-reaction of someone else to them. Rather than giving us an objective account, they are in all likelihoods sharing with us their perceptions.

I worked as a child protection worker. One of the tasks that we faced in conducting an investigation was sorting out the objective details from the perceptions of those whom we were interviewing. Perceptions are influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or preconceived opinion not based upon reason or actual experience. For example, a neighbor may have developed a strong dislike for the alleged perpetrator due to past conflicts and consequently their account of what occurred may be colored by their feelings toward the alleged perpetrator.

The negativity bias is one of the factors that affects our perceptions. We may interpret behavior as negative, which is not objectively negative. We may exaggerate the frequency, extent, and seriousness of behavior which we are interpreting as negative. We may blow things out of proportion, make mountains out of mole hills.

For this reason, an investigator seeks to get as many accounts of what happened as possible. It is recognized that each person giving an account of what happened will present themselves in a positive light and will seek to make allies who are sympathetic to them and accept their account of what occurred. The alleged perpetrator may also seek to blame someone else for what happened. If two caregivers were involved, each will seek to shift the blame from themselves to the other caregiver.

As Christians one of the principles by which Jesus taught us to live is to treat other people exactly as we would want them to treat us. We would not want people to form their opinion of us solely on a single person’s perceptions of us, shared in a private conversation. Their perceptions of us may be colored by their feelings toward us and the negative bias may be involved in their feelings. We would want people to form their opinion of us, based upon ourselves.

As J. Michael once said, “Remember, there are always two sides to every story. Understanding is a three edged sword. Your side, their side and the truth in the middle. Get all the facts before you jump to conclusions.”

That said, there are times when our fear-reaction to a particular individual or situation may well serve us.

We feel that someone or something is staring at. Our brains are wired to sense things in our environment of which we may not be consciously aware. The feeling of being stared at is our brain’s way of warning us of a possible danger in our environment.

Someone is in a hurry to get us to go someplace to which we do not want to go, to do something that we do not want to do. They are very persistent and will not take “no” for answer. They want us to leave our friends and go with them. They may grab our arm and try to pull us away from our friends.

We are feeling uncomfortable and apprehensive. It does not matter whether or not we know them. Our brain is warning us of danger. Their behavior are red flags that they are up to no good. They are intent on sexually assaulting us or worse.

At this point I recommend that if we cannot break free from their grasp to start screaming as loudly as we can to draw other people’s attention to what is happening. Break away from them and call 911 or get someone else to call 911.

It is better to make a scene that be found dead sometime later in a dumpster, a wooded area, or a river. The key thing is to not let our fear keep us from acting.

We pass a coworker or fellow student. They are very agitated. We are picking up their agitation and it is making us uncomfortable. If we are entering our workplace or school building, turn around and walk back outside and quickly away from the building, putting some distance between us and the building. Call someone in the building and tell them what is happening. Call 911. It may be a false alarm. It also may save lives.

There are situations in which our fear-reaction can protect us and others. We need to learn more about those kinds of situations.