One Room, Two People, Three Faces

How would you treat someone you meet for the first time?

You’d probably try to be nice and accommodating, I’m sure. What about when you meet your best friend? You’d probably still be nice to them (I hope), but you’d be much more relaxed and not as concerned about making a good impression. The contrast between the way we treat different people in our social circles is a given. However, this difference in treatment has led to a prevailing narrative of “fakeness” being cultivated in recent discourse. Take, for example, your friend who couldn’t hangout today because they were busy, but you see them hanging out with someone else. They seem to be a lot more talkative with the person they are talking to, which makes you feel a bit betrayed. Usually, they’re not that talkative around you. Does that mean that they don’t enjoy your company as much? Or that they are fake friends?

If we put aside the overthinking part, that I’m sure most of us are very familiar with, what you have just experienced was a negative reaction triggered by seeing a different part of your friend. By putting on a different face and acting differently towards others, it makes you question how genuine your friendship is. If you have ever had a similar experience, I’m happy to tell you two important things: first, you’re not alone in this experience, and second, you’ve just fallen into what psychologists call the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE for short). FAE is the tendency for people to attribute the actions of others to their disposition (aka personality), while attributing their own actions to situation. In the situation with your friend earlier, we attributed them being more talkative to their personality by assuming that they did not enjoy our company as much, when in reality they may have just watched a surprisingly interesting show and were trying to convince their other friend how great it was.

FAE is a common cognitive error where we ignore a situation in favor of a simpler explanation like “Oh, they don’t like me” or “They are fake”. It’s a common occurrence thanks to our egocentric bias (thinking that the world revolves around us), which leads us to oversimplify the relationships we have in order to come up with a quick and satisfying conclusion. Unfortunately, FAE is usually wrong and just leads to even more overthinking on our part. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how complicated human relationships are and how they often become very messy. We need to be more aware of what we do unconsciously, because reducing a person’s entire existence to one action and then judging them by that said action often leads to disaster.

To borrow from a Japanese proverb

Leaving aside the depressing underlying message we can never show others our true selves because our existence should be molded into something palatable for society, the message is (somewhat) positive. People have different faces put on for different people in their lives. Moreover, the way we treat our friends also varies from friend to friend. No two friends are the same, they have different personalities, preferences, and things they’re comfortable with, so of course you’re going to treat them differently. I guess what I’m trying to get at in this mishmash of an article is that we should try to be more accepting of our friends and their different faces. While there may only be two of us in this room, there are multiple faces hiding under each of us. I wish for a day in which friends can accept and cherish their friends, not just the face shown to you, but the collection of faces that make up these wonderful individuals we call friends.