Psychology + Self Improvement
There’s a right way and a wrong way to help people.
It’s important to remember that even when you act with the best intentions, you don’t always know what is best for someone else.
Here are some guidelines to determine if you’re really helping someone or not.
The human mind has a tendency to categorize people into social groups. And often these social groups can create an “Us vs. Them” mentality toward people who may be different than us in some way, whether it’s race, gender, age, nationality, culture, religion, or socioeconomic status.
In the early 1970s, British social psychologist Henri Tajfel explored a phenomenon he called the minimal group paradigm. The basic idea behind this concept was to investigate the minimal conditions required for discrimination to occur within groups.
Amazingly, studies on this approach have shown that people tend to favor a group bias even when they are categorized on relatively meaningless distinctions, for example: eye color, what kind of paintings they like, or even the flip of a coin.
This tells us that we can potentially separate ourselves from a certain group of people on any random and arbitrary characteristic. Therefore, everyone is susceptible to be a perpetrator and/or victims of social prejudice and ostracism.
If you’re acting like a machine, don’t be surprised when I start pushing your buttons.
Success in any area of life never happens in a complete vacuum. Often it is just as much dependent on an individual’s will-power and intelligence as it is on their environment and outside circumstances.
To find happiness and success, you therefore need to pay attention and take some control over the type of environments you are surrounding yourself in on a daily basis; even the strongest and brightest of minds will find it difficult to achieve their goals if they are in a completely wrong environment for them.
This is because every aspect of your external life has some influence over your internal thoughts and behaviors, especially the people you surround yourself with on a daily basis, and the type of places where you spend most of your time.
