André Vaz

And then, of course, that means that by necessity, you almost sort of raise your judgments up to make sure that you're not wrong.

And like I said, I think this connects to that functional argument that, yeah, I interact with individuals in my day-to-day life.

I don't want to be wrong.

There's almost a norm that you can't really doubt the moral character of other people.

I would say yes, in big part, yes.

I mean, one of our studies, we don't just show this dissociation between individuals and groups, but, you know, we even differentiate between a group as in just the other participants in the study, right?

Which presumably is a bit closer to the participant because it's other participants like themselves and society in general.

And we find that, you know, for society in general, people were even more cynical.

So definitely, you know, as these groups become more anonymous, more abstract,

there's a tendency to be even more cynical.

And so, of course, I think that really contributes to this effect in day-to-day life.

I mean, to give an example, there's this one study as well that shows that people generally are cynical about congresspeople, but not their own congress, you know, the congressman or woman

of their state.

And so it's like, well, all of them are jerks, but not mine, right?

So mine, I know them and they're good.

So I think to an extent, it also speaks to this dissociation, right?

So Congress people in general versus that one Congress person.

So actually one of my collaborators and my PhD advisor, he keeps bringing this up, that what helps to him is, you know, every time he makes a comment like, yeah, people are the worst, to just ask himself, okay, but who?

Who is the worst?

You know, is it that person?