Trying to get some input for someone else. Was thinking of upskilling, finding a group, developing a hobby, guided activities. Any ideas?
Trying to get some input for someone else. Was thinking of upskilling, finding a group, developing a hobby, guided activities. Any ideas?
You get older and stop caring all the time what people think and it starts to get easier.
My first stepping stone was when nobody in my group wanted to ask for napkins when we were out eating. Which is silly, so I stepped up and ask for it because my mouth and fingers are messy. Ok the other thing is we were in a foreign country and our mastery of the language wasn’t great and everyone was shy.
That’s when I realize that random people thinking of me like some kind of weirdo doesn’t matter because it’s almost guaranteed I will never meet them again.
If I need to integrate with a group sooner or later, that’s when I lurk and just sit in with a few people, listen and add in anything
I realize that last part is hard for a lot of people and I really don’t have anything I can offer how to overcome the awkward feeling but I believe you can do it.
It’s very true, though. I think we all deep down want to say the right things or be the star of the show, but sometimes we learn much more just by sitting, observing and waiting to say something that adds to the conversation, instead of just talking about nothing.
We’re social primates. Caring what other people think is hardcoded into us, and it’s not something you can just choose to stop caring about.
As people get older they just get better at tolerating that uncomfortable feeling and accepting that you can’t please everyone. It’s not that people like that don’t care - they do - they just do it anyway. Caring isn’t the issue, but when it starts affecting your behavior it might become one.
That’s not quite true. It is also built into us to not care about certain people. While what you say is true about our in-group, it’s not true about the out-group. So what you can actually do is mentally identify certain people as not belonging to your group, and then you can actually not care about what they think.
Throughout most of human history, the only people you even knew about were those in your tribe and your neighboring tribe. Whether they were friends or enemies, you still very much cared what they thought about you.
The fact that we now have people in our lives we don’t need to care about is a modern luxury that our evolution hasn’t caught up with.
I stand behind everything I said: we care, and when we think we don’t care is when we especially care.
Research disagrees with you, humans are very much capable of not caring about certain people. Also, I’m glad you never had to experience what people truly not caring is like.
I’d like to see that research if you wouldn’t mind linking it.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317615470_Empathy_Group_Identity_and_the_Mechanisms_of_Exclusion_An_Investigation_into_the_Limits_of_Empathy
There are a lot of these kind of studies about empathy. I didn’t find any particularly about “what this other person thinks of me” (I don’t know if there is a specific name for this that would be easier to search), but I think the logical leap from “being able to disable empathy for other people” to “not care what those people think about you” is not really disputable. Though of course it might not be quite the same thing, I think when you can disable empathy for someone, you can also pretty easily disable to care about what they think of you.
Well, I think those are two different things. Empathy is about feeling or understanding someone else’s emotions. Being able to dial that down (like a surgeon or soldier does) doesn’t mean you stop caring what people think of you. Psychopaths are a good example - very low empathy, but often highly attuned to social perception because it helps them manipulate others.
This sounds like some anthropology shower thought I’m not sure I’d hang a theory on.
That’s a very easy way to dismiss an idea without actually engaging with it. Could you explain what specifically you think is wrong with it, or offer a better alternative explanation? Otherwise it just comes across as ‘I don’t like the sound of this.’
It’s really overly simple and makes a lot of assumptions. We only knew people in our immediate area ergo empathy is part of our hardcoded biology. Is there any research backing it up?
Five-Year Olds, but Not Chimpanzees, Attempt to Manage Their Reputations, Jan Engelmann, 2012
Reputation, Pat Barcley, 2015
Reputation and Socio-Ecology in Humans, Angelo Romano, 2021
Nobody’s watching? Subtle cues affect generosity in, Haley, Fessler, 2005
I can link you more after you’re done with these. It’s a highly studied subject and I’m sure you could’ve just googled all this by yourself too.
And where does any of that link it to your theory of only knowing a few people around us made us biologically empathetic?