Adi-lila 7.68, PURPORT BY SRILA PRABHUPADA: […] One must be very humble and meek, more tolerant than a tree and more humble than the grass. One should not claim respect for himself but should be prepared to give all respect to others. One must have these qualifications to be eligible to understand Vedic knowledge. Full Chapter
“Satisfaction Study: Arrogance causes Unhappiness”
Arrogance: "How we look upon others tells a lot about our own character"
Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, August 4 2010: Who thinks bad about others has a problem: Scientists discovered that arrogant people are often unhappy – and have a higher risk for bad mental health and psychological illness.
Some people are real scandalmongers: The till-girl is too slow, the workmate tells only boring stories and the neighbor has nothing better to do than polish his car the whole weekend.
One who talks like that does not only explain a lot about his surroundings but lots of his own personality. The degree how positive – as well as negative – one estimates other people, discloses, how happy he is.
“The way how we perceive others, tells a lot about our own personality”, says Dustin Woods, Psychology Professor at the Wake Forest University at Winston-Salem (North Carolina). Dustin Woods studied this phenomenon with other teams of scientists and published the results in “Journal of Personality and Social Psychology”.
For their study the researchers gave participants the task to enumerate positive and negative character characteristics of three persons.
Either friends had to evaluate themselves mutually, beginners at the college should say something about their room partners, or members in a brother- or a sisterhood had to judge others in their organization.
From the descriptions alone the researchers could conclude, how well the critics feel themselves, how mentally stable they are and how others were judged.
“To see others positive, has also a positive influence upon oneself” , Wood says.
People are often happy, enthusiastic, good-natured and emotional stable. However, who judges rather negatively of others, has with high probability a tendency to narcissism and antisocial behavior.
“People with a negative personality regard others frequently also very negative”, Wood says. Not enough: Who bad-talks his surrounding field, should be afraid of his own health.
According to the results of the study grumblers have a higher probability to get sick with depressions and different personality disorders.
The negative way of thinking can form even the basis of several psychological illnesses, say the scientists.
Therapies, by which patients can see their surrounding field again more positive, could give the impact for healing. Without a therapy the way of judging upon others remains the same: When Wood and his research team repeated their attempts one year later with the same persons, they found these persons in their surrounding field again just as positively or negatively as already in the year before.
According the scientists, with the results of this investigation each layman can become the psychologist according to the researchers: Who would like to know something from his opposite, had only to ask to describe the characteristics from a colleague or an acquaintance.
If the valuation is very negative this can naturally also mean that the descriptive person is in fact intolerable but one who really thinks positively, finds something good in everybody.
Abstract: In 3 studies, we document various properties of perceiver effects—or how an individual generally tends to describe other people in a population. First, we document that perceiver effects have consistent relationships with dispositional characteristics of the perceiver, ranging from self-reported personality traits and academic performance to well-being and measures of personality disorders, to how liked the person is by peers.
Second, we document that the covariation in perceiver effects among trait dimensions can be adequately captured by a single factor consisting of how positively others are seen across a wide range of traits (e.g., how nice, interesting, trustworthy, happy, and stable others are generally seen).
Third, we estimate the 1-year stability of perceiver effects and show that individual differences in the typical perception of others have a level of stability comparable to that of personality traits. The results provide compelling evidence that how individuals generally perceive others is a stable individual difference that reveals much about the perceiver’s own personality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
Perceiver effects as projective tests: What your perceptions of others say about you.
Wood, Dustin; Harms, Peter; Vazire, Simine
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 99(1), Jul 2010, 174-190.
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