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What I find to be alarming is how often people ignore, downplay, or deny certain basic and deeply ingrained aspects of human nature. Many people don't want to admit how common these impulses, habits, and distortions really are, whether it's because they want to deny them, are too thoughtless to see them, or just don't know how. Instead, there is a persistent tendency to treat the manifestation of such traits in others as though it were some aberration, an extraordinary moral defect confined to a deviant few, rather than a recurring and broadly distributed aspect of the human condition.
To be clear, there are indeed extreme expressions of these tendencies that verge upon, or plainly fall within, the domain of severe dysfunction and/or personality disorders, yet that obvious fact is often used as a rhetorical shield to avoid confronting the more uncomfortable truth: that many of the very same tendencies exist in milder, more ordinary, and far more widespread forms throughout everyday human behavior. People are often eager to pathologize others in the exceptional case precisely so they can avoid recognizing the normalized version of the same phenomenon in themselves, in their contemporaries, and in the social world around them.
What follows from this is a particularly dishonest pattern in conflict. The moment a dispute arises, people frequently begin condemning others for possessing these traits and habits, as though the mere presence of them were uniquely damning in the opposing party. In practice, such accusations are often less a sincere moral diagnosis than a tactical maneuver – a way of poisoning the well, diverting attention from the substance of the disagreement, and discrediting the other person through insinuation rather than argument – individuals tending to accuse and/or vilify others of possessing these traits/habits whenever they find themselves in a dispute with another party; hence, they form an ad hominem that is used to deflect the attention from the real issue.
Essentially, the maneuver is one of deflection. Rather than grapple with the universality, complexity, and often uncomfortable ordinariness of these human tendencies, people externalize them, weaponize them, and pretend they belong chiefly to the other side, thus, when doing so, they transform common flaws of human nature into selectively deployed accusations, not in pursuit of truth, but in service of self-exoneration, tribal loyalty, and rhetorical advantage.
Below is a defensible list of peer-reviewed and academic sources:
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To be clear, there are indeed extreme expressions of these tendencies that verge upon, or plainly fall within, the domain of severe dysfunction and/or personality disorders, yet that obvious fact is often used as a rhetorical shield to avoid confronting the more uncomfortable truth: that many of the very same tendencies exist in milder, more ordinary, and far more widespread forms throughout everyday human behavior. People are often eager to pathologize others in the exceptional case precisely so they can avoid recognizing the normalized version of the same phenomenon in themselves, in their contemporaries, and in the social world around them.
What follows from this is a particularly dishonest pattern in conflict. The moment a dispute arises, people frequently begin condemning others for possessing these traits and habits, as though the mere presence of them were uniquely damning in the opposing party. In practice, such accusations are often less a sincere moral diagnosis than a tactical maneuver – a way of poisoning the well, diverting attention from the substance of the disagreement, and discrediting the other person through insinuation rather than argument – individuals tending to accuse and/or vilify others of possessing these traits/habits whenever they find themselves in a dispute with another party; hence, they form an ad hominem that is used to deflect the attention from the real issue.
Essentially, the maneuver is one of deflection. Rather than grapple with the universality, complexity, and often uncomfortable ordinariness of these human tendencies, people externalize them, weaponize them, and pretend they belong chiefly to the other side, thus, when doing so, they transform common flaws of human nature into selectively deployed accusations, not in pursuit of truth, but in service of self-exoneration, tribal loyalty, and rhetorical advantage.
Below is a defensible list of peer-reviewed and academic sources:
- Self-serving bias (Is there a universal positivity bias in attributions? A meta-analytic review of individual, developmental, and cultural differences in the self-serving attributional bias - PubMed)
- Confirmation bias – The classic scholarly review is Raymond Nickerson's Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises. (nickersonConfirmationBias.pdf)
- Selection bias (Toward a clearer definition of selection bias when estimating causal effects - PMC)
- Attribution bias – The fundamental attribution error / correspondence bias: the tendency to over-attribute others' behavior to disposition and underweight situational causes. (Gilbert & Malone (CORRESPONDENCE BIAS).pdf)
- "Illusory optimism" – In the literature, this is usually called optimism bias or unrealistic optimism. (The optimism bias - PubMed)
- Dunning–Kruger effect – Individuals with limited knowledge or competence in a particular domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence. (krugerdunning99.pdf)
- Ingroup–outgroup bias – Strongly supported. Hewstone, Rubin, & Willis provide a major review, and Brewer's paper is important for distinguishing ingroup favoritism from outright outgroup hate (Intergroup bias - PubMed)
- "Lying being inherent to humans" – Deception is widespread in human social life and emerges early in development (Lying in everyday life - PubMed)
- "Envy being inherent to humans" – Envy is a common human emotion with plausible adaptive roots and measurable cognitive effects. (evolution-of-envy.pdf)
- "Bigotry being inherent to humans" – Humans show robust propensities toward prejudice, stereotyping, and intergroup bias under many conditions. (Stereotypes-and-prejudice.pdf)
- "Revenge/vindictiveness being inherent to humans" – Revenge motivation is a recurrent and well-documented human response to perceived wrongdoing. (Joshua Conrad Jackson)
- Affinity bias – Best grounded in the similarity-attraction literature: people tend to prefer, trust, and affiliate more readily with similar individuals. (Empirical studies of the "similarity leads to attraction" hypothesis in workplace interactions: a systematic review | Management Review Quarterly | Springer Nature Link)
- "Caring what others think" – A need to belong, social acceptance/rejection sensitivity, and reputation management (PubMed)
- "People act more on emotion as opposed to critical thinking" – People default to intuitive rather than reflective responses on common reasoning tasks, and everyday critical thinking varies substantially across people. (Predicting Everyday Critical Thinking: A Review of Critical Thinking Assessments - PMC)
- Humans are prone to making decisions based on emotions rather than logic/reasoning – Emotion is a pervasive and predictable driver of judgment and decision-making. (Emotion and Decision Making)
- People having the proclivity to think in black-and-white – Supported under the construct dichotomous thinking or all-or-nothing thinking. (Seeing Things in Black‐and‐White: A Scoping Review on Dichotomous Thinking Style1)
- Negative responses/attitudes toward criticism being inherent to humans – Criticism is often experienced as threatening or hurtful, and perceived threat increases defensiveness. (Effect of Threat and Social Identity on Reactions to Ingroup Criticism: Defensiveness, Openness, and a Remedy)
- "Gossip being inherent to humans" – Gossip is a ubiquitous human social behavior with important informational, bonding, and reputational functions. (Foster.gossipreview.pdf)
- "Most people are not aware of the common flaws in human thought and behavior" – People detect biases in others more readily than in themselves. (The Bias Blind Spot: Perceptions of Bias in Self Versus Others - Emily Pronin, Daniel Y. Lin, Lee Ross, 2002)
- "Most people possess inconstant ethics and principles" – Moral inconsistency, moral hypocrisy, and self-interest bias in moral judgment. (PubMed)
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