44
votes
Is there a name for the "this is not who I am" defense?
Basically as the title says. I'm a big proponent of "judging people by what they do, not what they say"; it has been one of my most unshakeable life mottos and I can't, for the life of me, grasp why or how someone with even a modicum of intellectual honesty can believe otherwise.
I'm very interested in the nature of the mental gymnastics going on inside the people who defend themselves with such statements.
Thanks folks !!
EDIT: rephrased for clarity
Just wanted to address this really quickly. A bit tangential but you say:
And I think I understand pretty well why people might be inclined to express this sentiment. Okay. So, my mom's mom doesn't think of herself a racist, and she had evidence to prove it. For years, she taught first graders at an, as she puts it, "inner-city" public school (code for "majority black"), taking a pay cut to work there instead of at private Catholic schools despite being herself a very devout Catholic. In her mind, she sacrificed so much for black kids, so she couldn't possibly be racist. But she has also told me that black people are incapable of swimming because their bones are too heavy, and that they're genetically predisposed to crime. My grandmother is a cartoonish racist. But that doesn't align with her perception of self. And this isn't unique to my grandma.
We all have flaws, thoughts, beliefs that do not align with our own values; with our notions of what's right and wrong, with our conception of self. That's the human condition. No one likes to think that they have a violent temper, an addictive personality; that they are racist or dishonest or unkind. I don't like to admit that I hold people to absurd standards that I myself could never meet, and then distance myself from others when they inevitably fail to live up to my expectations. And not everyone is even that self-critical; most of our flaws can remain comfortably unexamined and unacknowledged for a long time. But uh-oh, you (a liberal white woman who spent your life teaching black first graders) just snapped at a checkout girl and called her the n-word, and now it's on TikTok, and you didn't even know what a TikTok was before today but now you can't stop scrolling the thousands of angry comments calling you a racist. And, you think, they don't know you, don't know what you've sacrificed or how much you care, and you were just having a bad day, what you said isn't representative of you. It's not who you are.
The thing is, when your core beliefs about yourself are contradicted by much of the available evidence, it can be genuinely destabilizing. You can enter a state of "amygdala hijack," where you start thinking with your instinctual fear responses instead of your rational brain. If your belief that you aren't a racist is incorrect, what other parts of your self-conception are wrong? Easier, then, to retreat to cliché: "This isn't who I am. I'm not a bad person. I was just having a bad day." And of course this mindset is wrong, and unhelpful, and precludes growth, but it's also safe and comforting. I find it hard not to empathize, in a way.
When I was a teenager, I got sucked down the GamerGate-to-Reactionary pipeline that successfully inhaled so many people my age. I didn't care about ethics in games journalism; what drew me in was the transphobia. I'm a trans woman now, and I guess I was then, too, but growing up with racist grandparents and homophobic parents it was easier for me to embrace a new generation of bigotry than it was to take a serious look at who I was, to reevaluate and reconstruct my gender identity. It's the same instinct that drives the appeal to character, the same underlying self-defense. It's easier to deflect criticism of yourself, be it internal or external, and embrace a mindset that doesn't demand change. Is it unhealthy? Sure. But I get it.
I loved this, thank you.
I'll reply in more detail when I'm out of the gym.
However, I'd like to, in the meantime, say that as I wrote this the question came up of how to continue to respect, value and love people who clearly are not fully "evil" or with whom I don't interact in one life dimension as to allow isolating them to some select poor actions and behaviors.
I, too, came to the conclusion that contradicting actions, oddly enough, are a redeemable characteristic because it shows that at least in some respects the person strives to do what's "right"; had to post this since you mentioned your mom's mom example.
These days I try to imagine 'difficult' people as their inner 7 year old kid who is just trying to do their best. That brings out my compassionate side right away, usually.
This isn't far off. 7 year olds are narcissists, and its generally accepted that narcissists just never matured past that.
The problem being that 7 year olds have no responsibility or power, and adults do.
Cognitive dissonance.
The thing that happens when people are at that point of having to respond to some kind of happening or new knowledge that contradicts who they think they are, or someone else is.
There are several ways to respond, they have to do with different personality types but can be influenced through life, and it is why good people can do bad things.
It is also why we can see people do bad things and convince ourselves they're still good people.
Cognitive dissonance is a real, and sometimes very damning experience.
In the context of an overwhelmingly negative social media response, especially in the scenario you provided, I can understand the instinct to say 'this is not who I am.' Social media's tendency to push the most outrageous opinions and responses to the forefront has the effect of not just polarizing opinion but simplifying it. In the face of being declared wholly bad by what must feel like everyone on earth, I would probably also feel the urge to say 'I am more than this one action.'
Thank you for your response; I agree with all of it and just wanted to share my thoughts on how social media can be a distorted lens for looking at society and, in these rare scenarios, ourselves.
Character evidence.
haha! This is amazeballs!
Thank you for this source :)
The tidbit that really made me smile was the one about how character evidence may not be brought up by the prosecution unless the defendant does so first! Funnily enough, that's precisely what "this is not who I am" is, the defendant using character evidence first when accused of wrongdoing.
To be honest, I think I may order a judge costume online and keep it around for when my moment to shine comes.
Look up a judge costume online. Focus on the moment. Look around. Take it all in. Note the time, weather, smells, breathing that you now do manually. For if you don't order it, you will forever go back to this memory in regret each time you meet an opportunity to wear it.
You've unmasked yet another motto of mine: YOLO ;)
Here’s the actual federal rule. FRE 404 and FRE 405 are the most relevant to defining character evidence literally. Character evidence can be really confusing because there are a lot of exceptions and rules to keep in mind when applying it.
I didn't want to assume the country. The general idea is almost universal.
The likelihood of OP being in a common law jdx is pretty high, and the rules for character evidence are relatively similar. U.K. Criminal Justice Act of 2003 Section 101, Canadian Evidence Rules, Indian Evidence Rules.
I saw a post somewhere years ago, in reply to yet another “Family of person who committed horrific crimes say he is a good Christian man” headline, saying that some people’s moral structure considers “good” or “bad” to be an intrinsic characteristic of the person, more so than an appraisal of their actions.
I try not to put too much weight on random pop psych social media posts, but it would explain a lot of the negative behaviour we see if that’s accurate:
I find the entire concept terrifying. Those examples made me physically uncomfortable to write, but I don’t think any of us can deny they’re accurate to words and behaviour we see every day, and there must be some very fundamental difference in worldview for that to be happening.
All of us will give friends, people we know, members of our “tribe” the benefit of the doubt to some extent, of course. That’s just human nature. But it’s always been so clear to me as to be self-evident that if that benefit of the doubt is disproven by fact, that person is gone. We were wrong about them, their actions have shown who they really are, end of story. At worst, we perhaps need to examine our own biases and think about whether we were wrong in giving them leeway for too long.
The part I’m really talking about here, and the part that scares me, is the idea that people consider “who they really are” to be predefined, and that it’s not just acceptable, or even inevitable, but actively right to filter the facts through that lens. The action doesn’t define the person, the person defines the action. If that’s really the foundation of their morality, a “good” person can literally get away with murder while a “bad” one goes to prison for stealing bread, and that would be considered a just outcome.
This is what is terrifying about people who subscribe to "magical good person tribe" thinking.
It doesn't matter if it's because they were born a prince/princess, or into a specific caste/class, or carries a special last name, or belonging to an especially virtuous tribe or speak a holy language, or refused a vaccine, or homeschooled, or because they personally chose to accept magical instantly sanctifying creed or dunk or beverage.....
OR the even more poisonous: those who did NOT accept/practice the sanctify magic are therefore totally depraved and impossible to be as virtuous as themselves unless they also accept the same magic.
I think this contributes to the "this isn't who I am" mentality, that, me, as a Totally Virtuous™ person, even at my worst, would be more virtuous than the Totally Depraved™ heathens at their best, so how dare they judge me when they are obviously even worse people than I am?
Before we all get too smug, though, professionally or as a hobby, it's very easy for everyone to get this way.
If that one time bowling I got five strikes in a row, next time I do less well, I'm off my form.
If I can play this musical piece perfectly at home but get nervouse at my recital, I'm not at my best and this isn't who I am.
if I've been staring at this code for 5 hours before my coworker find the obvious bug in 5 minutes, that's not who I am it was just a weird quirk or I was chasing a different rabbit trail.
We all want to be good people and we all like to register ourselves at our personal best as the norm. It isn't helpful to beat ourselves up and do the opposite of insisting we're terrible, but it does take time and energy and honesty and the ability to truly see ourselves to stay in the middle: I'm alright, but I can be better if I'm careful.
And for some, that ability is not something they can mentally afford due to their own fragile or shame based upbringing.
This is bonkers! Thank you for making me think about that, it's a very relevant conversation to have here.
You and me both.
I like to believe I don't, for the most part at least, and I've often been told that I'm too strict with my dear ones; if they only knew how I sometimes judge myself.
You might enjoy reading about the differences between a growth and a fixed mindset: https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/growth-mindset-vs-fixed-mindset
I’d like to think the same of myself, but I guess to an extent that’s part of the point: even if one of us achieved perfect objectivity and the other were a million miles from that, we’d at least both be aiming for the same goal. The core value is shared, and we could speak with common language about how well we’re reaching it.
That was fascinating! What they describe as a growth mindset is something that’s very natural to my worldview, and I think on balance it’s absolutely a positive, but I will say the other side of that coin is that I need to keep a very conscious eye on avoiding judging that people - either others or myself - could or should have avoided failure by just trying harder.
An old Reddit post summed it up pretty well I think:
People judge other by their actions, and themselves by their intentions.
I don't think this is relevant here.
By stating "this is not who I am" the person being judged admits, whether truthfully or not we'll never know,that their actions weren't aligned with their belief system and therefore neither their intentions; knowing fully well how their actions made them look.
In psychology this phenomenon is called the "fundamental attribution error".
I find the geopolitical stance of China to embody this to a tee. You can't judge them by their words because they're practically meaningless. Their defense is always that China is virtuous, especially in comparison with the ~boogieman~ West, that nothing they do is bad. Except, y'know, purposefully wiping peoples off the map.
It's almost always a bad defense strategy. Nevertheless, I think by looking at others and determining their -for lack of a better term- value it becomes worthwhile to look at what they do and not what they say.
Is "cognitive dissonance" the phrase you're looking for - where people believe two contradictory things at the same time?
Not necessarily in this case IMHO. Here we are observing a discrepancy between beliefs and actions, not two contradictory beliefs.
You could argue that “It is acceptable / necessary / forgivable for me to have taken that action” is a contradictory belief, even if it’s only implicit. I agree, though: as a one liner it doesn’t quite capture the nuance.
[Edit] Ah, you beat me to it by 30 seconds!
muahaha, up your game kiddo :)
Exactly!
You put it better into words than I did.
I'm just trying to find an answer to your question. We've already seen that I can't understand a single word of your post, so it's not surprising that I can't answer your titular question.
Although, now that I come think about it, if we asume an action reflects a person's beliefs and an action by said person contradicts one of their own stated beliefs then we seem to indeed be dealing with cognitive dissonance.
I kind of like the Fargo series for exploring kind of the opposite of this. You say judge people by their actions, but many people might go through life without actually facing a legitimate moral dilemma. So you put the average person in the right situation, and they do something horrible.
This makes me sympathetic to “this is not who I am”. I remember reading an article years back where the author told a story about writing on his hand what groceries to buy. “It’s because I might forget”. We don’t know ourselves! And that can lead to startling revelations.
Cognitive dissonance.
I tried that already.
Are you implying that we can not judge people by what they do?
So, if someone picks up a knife and stabs their mother to death, we can't judge them for that?
I now see why you might have thought that.
Is referring to "this is not who I am".
Oh.
Well, in my defence, your post does not say what you think it says. The "can't grasp how someone can believe such a thing" statement is in the sentence about "judge people by what they do, not what they say". There's no reference back to the title in that sentence, so you're obviously claiming that people can't believe in "judge people by what they do".
I am judging you on what you wrote, not what you say. :P
Touchè!
He is referring to the defense in the title, not the motto.
There's nothing in that sentence to indicate that reference. I am the victim of bad writing! :D
How are you coming to that conclusion? I'm stating precisely the opposite.
The question is a bit unclear and I have only a vague understanding of the context (when do people say it?), but I see it as someone distancing themselves from behavior they're ashamed of. Repenting and asking for forgiveness would be a better way to do that, but I guess it sounds weak to them, or they'd rather see it as a temporary lapse. At least they admit it was bad. That's a start.
here's an article about the phenomenon on a website called SorryWatch, which seems to be devoted to cataloging this sort of thing. they give examples (with receipts - each example they give has a link to the specific case they're talking about):