Avoiding Initial Interpersonal Perceptions

Video Transcript

"The next thing that you want to do is avoid making an early conclusion without a lot of evidence. Don't form your perceptions based on the initial image or the initial behavior of a person. We tend to do that, we tend to, someone walks in, we take a look at them and we make a perception based on what we see. Or perhaps we see them come in and they're very angry and so we base our perception on that moment. Don't base your perception on one incident. What you basically need to do is form a hypothesis and test it out. It kind of goes along with the concept that everyone's entitled to a bad day. Well this person was, when you first met them was very rude. Well did you stop to think were they having a bad day. O.K. no you formed an automatic perception. So you have to give the people around you, the people that you work with, the people in relationships the benefit of the doubt. Now you get to form your perception after you've seen this behavior over and over and over and over again. You know, that's what I say, form a hypothesis. I bet he was having a bad day and I bet I'm not going to see this kind of behavior again. Try it out, test it out. If you see that behavior over and over and over and over then your initial perception was right but we can't always go with our initial perception based on behavior without testing it."