André Vaz

That's an excellent question.

To be sure, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure, actually, if it's that people downgrade others or if it's just individuals themselves that are kind of raised above the default cynicism.

So, I mean, even before mentioning my own specific research, I can tell there's already some research over the last few years that

Kind of looks at, yeah, different reasons.

And of course, I think one, to me, interesting, maybe less so for lay people is just that when people are making judgments about others, they tend to think about, you know, like the constraints that they consider when they're predicting the behavior of others.

And they adjust these constraints differently, depending if it's, you know, an individual or a group.

So, you know, when you think of groups, you think, ah, what's the group norm here?

And when you think of individuals, you think, you know, what does the moral conscience of an individual do?

And just this alone already kind of makes judgments be different.

But, you know, I'd say on top of this, there's also a functional argument that we interact with individuals, right?

I mean, of course, now it's social media.

Maybe this changes a little bit, but generally we don't interact with groups.

We interact with individuals.

And so I would say we too have some particular motivation or kind of an interest in

well, not thinking that the individuals we interact with are jerks because we have to interact with them.

And so, you know, even if we're very cynical about people in general, it's always like people in general, right?

And then if you go, okay, but what about this guy?

I know this guy seems all right, right?

And of course, there's research that shows, you know, even just the expectation that you're going to interact with a certain individual already makes you judge this individual, you know, a bit more positively, right?

Or I think there's even some cool studies that show that people, you know, when playing certain games, they estimate that their partners in the games are less trustworthy than their partners actually are, but then they trust those partners more than they should given their own lack of confidence in the partners' trustworthiness, right?