I’m curious if anyone does, I’ve hear about “EQ” emotional intelligence (which basically means a part of your mind is made fantastically geared for processing social information).
Can you tell who a person is by looking at the clothes they where?
Can you guess what happened to a person in their lives by looking at their style of dress, mannerisms and the movements of their body language? (general disposition).
Can you read what other people are thinking, or intuit what to do next in all social interactions without getting bogged down or lost?
Lastly, if you are good with people and can’t answer the above questions, do you think it is unconscious/instinctual (i.e. automatically processed by your nervous system/mind and you don’t have to be consciously aware of it)
I think that maybe the people who are exceptional at making accurate generalizations in social settings may have some hard wiring toward it, but that what it takes to do so is something that everyone should be able to learn by conciously thinking about it for a while.
I experience it as intuitive now… but there was a time where I recall studying people in order to understand them…
I believe what happens is that you create different models in your mind (like catagories) and stick people into those models… the more models you have the more accurate your understanding becomes… the fewer models you have the less likely it is that you do well with people until you get to know them.
Say if you met a beautiful happy cheerful blond woman who laughed allot… naturally you would not attempt to innitiate a philosophical conversation with her (at least not as step one)… if you DID catagorize her as the type that would be interrested in philosophy you would more often than not be wrong…
Of course there are so many different factors to take into account when estimating what “type” a person is… But that too depends on how many models you have… If you only have two models “guy” and “girl” say… you really don’t take too much into account when classifying people…