Behavioral Context Projection

Have you ever read or seen Jurassic Park?  Remember how they recreated the dinosaurs?  They found old dino DNA in amber and used it to clone them.  At first glance, it sounds feasible.

However the DNA was incomplete.  And you can't clone something without complete DNA.  So - and here is the interesting part - they grafted amphibian DNA into the missing areas.

Why am I talking about this?  Because people do the same thing emotionally.  It is called behavorial context projection.

Humans are very social.  We function in families, communities, organizations, enterprises, cities, and countries.  We need to understand people to operate smoothly with them.  And so a great deal of our prefrontal cortex is used to read the emotions, foci, and intentions of others.  Most of this comes through nonverbal cues: facial expressions, tone of voice, body language, hand gestures, etc.

Even small children do this.  If a baby is playing with some toys, and you put your hands over his, what is the first thing he does?  He looks up at your face.  Are you angry or annoyed?  Or do you want to play with him?  He is trying to read your mind, as we all do every second we are with people.  

Autistic individuals cannot process this data.  And though they may be very high-functioning in other areas, this inability is socially debilitating.

So it is critically important for us to gauge what is going on in others' minds.  We go to great lengths to do so.

But here is the rub:

Sometimes the cues we receive (or at least the ones we choose to pick up on, consciously or subconsciously) are incomplete.  They are like that incomplete dino DNA.  So what do we do?  We fill in the gaps, just like in Jurassic Park.

But what do we use to fill in the gaps?  We use the emotional context that we know of for that person.  So if the person is a close friend, we have a large context with which to fill in the gaps.  We know "how they are."  But what if he is only an acquaintance?  Or someone we just met?  Then we have little to no context for that person.  So what do we use?  That is the question!

We use our own behavorial context!  Because, of course, everyone is like us.  And if not, they should be.  Or so the Pygmalion reasoning goes.  In actuality, though, no one is really like us... especially those of a different temperatment, culture, background, etc, etc.

In other words, this is what happens: We pick up on some nonverbal cue in someone we don't know that well.  In attempting to analyze that cue, we (consciously or unconsciously) reason "well, this is what I would mean if i did that."

So what happens?  Well, you recall what happened to Jurassic Park.

This is why so often, first impressions of people are very different from what we think of them after getting to know them.  Or if a friend of ours meets another friend for the first time and asks, "what's wrong with him?" We respond, "oh, thats just his way."    

Have you ever noticed how pleasant people notice the positive in others?  And how negative people notice the negative?  Granted, part of that is what we choose to focus on.  But I believe a part is also behavioral projection.  We are filling in the gaps in others' cues with our own emotional context.

What does all this mean?  There is nothing we can do to stop others from projecting their emotional contexts on us.  But we can realize that we are projecting ours on them.

So if you find yourself often disliking new people... maybe you dislike yourself.