André Vaz

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 with 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, oh, 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?

So there really seems to be something here to be told about, you know, how people look at individuals that really...

motivates them to think positively of individuals, even if you have cynical opinions about society.

Definitely, definitely.

So there's some more

I want to say, cold reasons for that.

So, of course, you know, we judge ourselves better than average in part because we know ourselves, right?

So if I make a mistake, I know that I had good intentions and I don't know that about others.