What Happened When I Spent a Week Assuming Only the Best in Others
I never considered myself to be a negative person. In fact, if you had asked me whether I assumed the best in people, I would have said, “Almost always.” But was this really true? How I respond to the behavior of others and what actually goes through my mind can often be at odds. I find myself reading into situations long after they’ve happened, adding layers of meaning that might not even be there.
That’s hostile attribution bias, the tendency to assume malevolence in the intentions of others. You get offended when someone bumps your shoulder while stepping out of the elevator or when someone snags the last two jars of peanut butter on the shelf as you’re reaching to grab one. But new research published in the Journal of Happiness Studies suggests you’ll be happier if you didn’t. Participants in the study read hypothetical ambiguous scenarios — for instance, you say hello to a new co-worker on the street, but they pass you and say nothing — and rated how much they’d blame that person and how angry they would feel. The people with higher scores were less happy than those with lower ones.
Since I’ve been in the habit of setting weekly challenges for myself, I decided to spend seven days assuming the best in others. How hard could this be?
Extremely hard, it turns out. Here’s how things went.
One day, a friend didn’t reply to my text. This is something that happens to just about everyone, but I only now saw how it threatens our assumptions about courtesy and friendship. When it happened to me, a string of thoughts began unwinding in my head. The first was sympathetic. “Oh, she must be in the middle of a big work project.” The second was a little suspicious. “That’s weird, normally she would have replied by now. I hope everything is okay.” The third was veering into neuroticism. “I hope she’s not offended by something I said.” The fourth thought kicked things into full-blown resentment. “Jeez, this is immature. She should have just told me she was annoyed at me and we could have hashed it out like adults.”
Four days later, she texted me to say she’d been fired from her job.
