I overheard a conversation between two people in the gym, commenting on how other gym members were “saying things about them behind their backs.” Although I am not very much into… gym politics (I mean really? This is the last place I was expecting to hear such a conversation) it always amazed me to no end, the ease at which people make up conspiracy theories in their heads. I, for one, had never heard anything against those two people who were complaining of being “targeted” by other gym members…
Or, consider the case where someone joins a company for the first time. As high as 50% (my incredibly accurate, gut feeling of an estimate) of what they’ll hear from the older folks, is guaranteed to be urban myth. “Someone got fired for having a weird laugh,” another “got a promotion due to having an affair with the boss,” or even, “there are cameras in the ceiling that get activated through sound and start recording automatically” are just three of the millions of lunacies that one is often exposed to in these cases. (By the way, in case you are wandering how I came up with that last example about the cameras, it’s not that I have a very wild imagination – It’s that I was actually told this by an employee of a bank here in Cyprus, when I visited their HQ in the context of a consulting engagement!?!)
There are two things at play here:
- We tend to generalize from specifics;
- Our… “primal instincts” are trying to protect us from the dangers of an uncertain future.
On the other hand, of course, we also say that “where there’s smoke, there’s also fire.”
But if my opinion is of any value to you, I would tell you to pay attention to the size of the fire. If it’s just a cigarette burning in the middle of a highway, it is extremely unlikely that it will cause a major fire. Thinking that everyone is out to get you, however, makes people behave erratically, thus bringing perfectly OK situations, completely out of control. It would be the equivalent of you stopping your car in the middle of the aforementioned highway, just to put out the cigarette!
What are the chances that you won’t get hit by another car in the process?