It’s Not The Difficult People, It’s The Difficult Behavior
It’s a human tendency to identify people as being difficult or easy to get along with, and that affects how we interact with them. But the question is, is it that some people are difficult or is it their behavior that bothers us?
How Labeling People As Difficult Causes Problems
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Most if not all of us, talk about difficult people. We think:
“Oh, that’s John again, why is he always a pain in the posterior,”
or
“Why is Mary so darned stubborn and difficult all the time.” We tend to characterize (or label) people and put them into boxes or categories.
If you do that, it’s not a character flaw on your part, but a way of trying to simplify the world. In fact our brains are wired to do this automatically. Brains are wonderful information reduction and labelling machines. They classify, label and organize information to make our lives easier.
This Won’t Work!
Although our brains tend to label people as difficult, that’s not the best way to think about difficult situations. If you label a person as difficult, you are more likely to create more difficult situations with that person, since you will be expecting bad things to happen.
Unfortunately, while our brains do this labelling almost automatically, the process makes dealing with difficult people … well … more difficult. Here’s why.
When you label a person as difficult (or stubborn, boring, untrustworthy), you use that label to predict their behavior and actions in the immediate and long-term future. In other words, you use the labels to create expectations on your part about how the person will behave. In one sense that’s not necessarily bad. Predicting difficulties can help us prepare.
In another way it’s really bad. When we have negative expectations about someone based on a label, we act differently than with someone about whom we have positive expectations.
When we label a person difficult and have poor expectations about the person, we are more likely to:
- Be quicker to interpret their actions as negative
- Be more likely to have strong emotional reactions to them.
- Treat them more abruptly
- Expect less from them
All of these factors can create difficult situations with someone when no difficult situation is actually present in the first place.
In other words, your expectations and labels of people can cause you to create exactly what you believe will happen—a self-fulfilling prophecy situation.
Insider Secrets
Some time ago, researchers looked at the power of expectations in classrooms. They assigned children to classrooms randomly, so no class was smarter or dumber than the others. They told half the teachers their kids were “smart” and the other half that their kids were “less smart”. Then they measured how well the kids did.
Although the kids in each class were equally smart, the kids labelled “less smart” did significantly less well than the kids teachers believed were “smart.” In other words, our expectations affect how we behave and interact with others, and those others react to our behavior in ways that usually reinforce our expectations.
The power of expectations was labelled the “pygmalion effect.”
