Do Humans Understand Each Other?

Understanding is the foundation of all relationships

Humans are social beings who reside together in communities. With a developed sense of thinking, we are at the epitome of wisdom and consciousness. The most important thing about living together in society is formed based on understanding. Humans have evolved to an indefinite extent surviving the cruel Stone Age era. It will be apt to say that this was all possible only because of a mutual sense of understanding between humans. Being the elite group in the food cycle and most self-aware organisms, we human beings often tend to ascribe great importance to our intellectual processes: We are logical and reasoning creatures, we believe we can assess our behaviour and nature through an analytical lens of wisdom. Like any other living entity, however, we humans are a part of the bigger picture and are interacting our environment in myriad ways well beyond the realm of our conscious perception. We often tend to take these subconscious and autonomic aspects of our being for granted, but instinctively, they are all elemental to both our appreciation of the world around us and, critically, our day-to-day understanding of others.

We humans can't practically see ourselves truly objectively, and neither can anyone else. We have a strong habit to distort other people's feedback to fit our premeditated views. We know this intellectually, and yet we rarely seem to recognize it as it's happening. Much of this process of perceiving other people isn't even rational.It is biased, incomplete, and inflexible.It is also largely (but not entirely) automatic. In many ways, we believe that everyone is different from us is a bewildering, inexplicable enigma and at some extent they indeed are but we also presume that these people hate the things we like and like the things we hate, and behave in ways we can't predict. That makes us hate them a little even without knowing someone. This is how our understanding mechanism works for everyone. We end up concluding that these people are just one-dimensional stock characters placed as foils in the movie that is our life.

Humans more or less understand each other based on social cognition, communication and physical expression. Social cognition is part of our intelligence to understand other people, and it empowers us to envisage their behaviour, demeanour and share experiences and develop intimacy. In essence, social cognition or understanding involves us being able to recognise the mental states of others – putting ourselves in someone else's shoes. This helps us understand their beliefs, feelings, experiences and intentions and create a bond of intimacy. We can empathise and comprehend things from someone else's point of view. It thus allows us to alter easily between our perspective or thought process to another. Interestingly, social cognition or awareness relies on information that cannot be directly observed but must be inferred from incoming information and our knowledge of the social world. But we need to understand that to parse out our behavioural and emotional nuances, it is necessary to look at a zoomed-in picture of the tempos of all kinds of physical and psychological networks – and a holistic, big-picture perspective of how those networks interface with one another. It is also critical to understand that the many nuances underpinning everyday speech are always a subject of understanding their meaning.

Understanding through body language is the ancient universal language

Self-assessment and introspection remains a powerful and useful tool for understanding the how and the why of human behaviour but it has some major limitations. Approaching this question in a classical way we can realise that often we hesitate to understand others. Humans are weird creatures. With higher intellect, we have developed the ability to hide and neglect emotions, lie about it and also manipulate it. But we must realise that the key to survival comes from being together, living harmoniously in a society which thus put forth the importance of understanding each other. Pre conditioning often plays a determining criteria on our level of understanding other people. It can be aptly said that we are hindered by the gender, race, colour and background of other people. This inhibits our understanding and thinking abilities. We need to build ourselves in terms of maturity to overcome such blockages. Humans do understand each other but we still need to work on this better to help be a part of a better world.