Every single person I know well has a double standard for something. Such as “I don’t need to improve my driving but everyone else sure does” or a “do as I say not as I do” rule, etc. Though certainly some more than other. This leads me to believe all people do it in some way.
Is it simply human nature?
“We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behaviour.”
― Stephen M.R. Coveythe element that is missed here is that people judge you via their interpretation of your behavior.
two different folks can see the same action in completely different ways, based on their psychology and their cultural expectations. what’s horrible rude to one person, might be a compliment to another.
He’s right, but I’m sure there are better people to quote on the subject
I’ve only heard the quote, never the attribution. I looked the quote up to attribute it, but I really don’t know who Stephen is. Hopefully not someone too horrible…?
Fun fact no one other than you can know your intentions.
If you never check in and see if your actions align with your intentions you delulu kachow 👉💨
Oi boy!
The very short answer is: yes. Usually it’s called psychological biases and literally everyone has them - even people who are studying them daily, to be very clear. They just become way more self aware.
The reason is simple: our brains are gooey, bad calculators - but awesome pattern recognizers. Even if there are no patterns.
This leads to things we observe to be “clear” to us - but our own behavior needs a lot of mental effort to be observed by one self.
Just think about a normal dialogue and try to think about your body language, tone of voice, body odor, social appearance and all the other micro information you’re sending out - while talking.
It’s less about a double standard and more about what we evaluate about ourselves ehwne not investing additional effort.
Oh! Oh! Another good one to know is the Fundamental Attribution Error. That’s the double standard whereby people explain their own behavior in terms of extrinsic influences and pressures on themselves, so that even if they do bad things, it’s not their own fault. They had little choice, you see. But, in contrast, we can’t see the extrinsic influences and pressures on other people, so we explain their bad behavior as the result of intrinsic factors, i.e. they’re bad people.
Well, that explains a lot about why everyone gets all up in arms when you judge others by the same standards you use for yourself. Surely, I’m the only victim of the system, right? It was specifically designed to hold me down.
Standards:
Do they taste good
Can I eat themYeah, it’s probs a good thing in my case
My favorite one of these is when people lie to me and tell me it’s because of systematic oppression FORCED them to lie to me… lol
but if I lie, as I am not systematically oppressed, then it’s bad and wrong.
Likely. Some people do it massively while others minorly. Im sure there are a few things im a hypocrite on but I can’t recall them atm. The old do as I say not as I do thing.
The driving one is called the Lake Wobegon Effect. When everybody rates themselves as above-average at something, like driving, that’s definitionally impossible. The name comes from the segment, the News from Lake Wobegon, on the radio show A Prairie Home Companion, which Garrison Keillor would always sign off, “That’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
But yes, it’s so common that the phenomenon has a name.
Yeah but I know I suck. And I’m still better than the lady doing 25 in the lane next to the fast lane of a 10 lane freeway. .
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Hopelessly true for the general population, but I’ve overcome it through self-examination and reflection because I’m special.
bro that sounds cringe
That’s sarcasm, it’s a joke on themselves
Yes, I believe it is. I think everyone is a bit of a hypocrite by default and we all ought to strive to apply the same rules to ourselves as we do to others
If there were no double standards then there would be no standards at all
You have way more context about your own actions, so it’s much easier to justify yourself than random strangers that you know nothing about.
Have you ever met someone like the people you want everyone to act like? I have. Many times. They are usually either SUPER neurotic or very rigid and extremely unforgiving of themselves when they don’t meet their own standards. Everyone removedes about them or pathologizes them. So no it’s not human nature because humans are not a monolith with default behaviors.
We judge Ourselves by our Intentions
We judge Others by their Actions/Choices/Results
The highest standard is the standard we hold others to. I try holding myself to the same standard, and continually fall short. Teaches a hell of a lot of empathy and humility though
Everyone will be a hypocrite eventually, it’s the ones that don’t care about hypocrisy that you want to stay away from.
some folks openly embrace it and see absolutely nothing wrong with it in themselves, because they are special.
I heard from the psychoanalyst I’ve been consulting with, that it’s something expected from the human psychê (something about the unsolvable conflict between Id, Ego and Superego, as the psychoanalyst is aligned with the Freudian way of psychoanalysis).
And, then, we look at the Nature we came from and belong to, and… isn’t the double standards something inherent to the very predator-prey dynamics? An owl mercilessly hunts and eats a mouse, yet she evolved mechanisms to camouflage herself before the tree bark, so other species don’t cause her harm. She avoids being hunted, but she hunts.
Furher zooming out, this can also be observed throughout cosmos somehow. Poetically speaking, when a star collapses in her own gravitational field and develops a singularity, she tries to win the tug-of-war when faced by another singularity. She doesn’t want to be pulled and consumed by other matter, but she wants to pull and consume matter.
If we go transcendental, Yaodabaoh is trying to dictate and have a creation submissive to his whims, in this timeless effort not to compromise his Yang pole and submit himself to the Yin pole of Cosmic Mother Goddess (Sophia). Similarly, one (especially one aligned with Demiurge and his archons) could find “double standards” at the fact that She had split from him (Demiurge as Her syzygy) seeking to be independent from him, yet She (IMHO, reasonably) doesn’t want him to fulfill his independence through his cosmic creation (because this harms Her own independence).
The very fabric of existence and “non-existence” (the timeless transcendental aka “the pleroma”) reek of double standards, so it seems.
Isn’t that jungian, not freudian?
No, at least not when it comes to the id, ego and superego:
In psychoanalytic theory, the id, ego, and superego are three distinct, interacting agents in the psychic apparatus, outlined in Sigmund Freud’s structural model of the psyche.
(Wikipedia)
One of his books in which he formulated the concept is The id and the ego.
Jung, in turn, is more about archetypes (“universal, inherited idea, pattern of thought, or image that is present in the collective unconscious of all human beings” as per Wikipedia’s definition), and he better integrates religion/spirituality (an integration with which, personally, I identify more than with the Freudian theory; sadly there seems to be no Jungian psychoanalyst around where I reside so I had to stick with a Freudian one).
You are right, I was thinking about jungian archetypes because I’m playing xenogears again
Read this in Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow: human brains are biased towards optimism, but also, to value own decisions above others’. Baggage from thousands of years ago, but it’s there.






