Articles On psychology

• Resiliency
• It Would Never Happen To Me
• Respect As A Limited Commodity
• Inhibitors to Action
• Internal & External Aggression
• Try Me - The Confusion Between Empowerment And Safety
• Interpreting Faces
• Rituals & Conflicts
• Social Information Processing
• Social Information Processing (Part Two)
• Socially Sanctioned Violence
• Groupthink And Conformity
• Self-Defense And Pavlov's Dogs
• Interpreting Emotions
• Violence And Pull Factors
• Survivor Bias
• Trauma Bonding
• Stockholm Syndrome

All Personal Safety Articles

Increasing Personal Safety With Human Psychology

It would be nice and reassuring to think that we were born with, or would develop, the understanding, knowledge, and skills to recognize threats and danger and keep ourselves safe etc., however unfortunately this is not the case. In fact, we have certain coping mechanisms that help us in daily life which actively work against us when facing violence e.g., if we have a terminal disease being able to deny our downplay its seriousness helps us to get on with our lives without fixating on the reality of our situation, however this same mechanism doesn’t help us deal with an aggressive individual who is looking to cause us harm – in this situation denying our reality puts us in greater danger i.e., we should be accepting what is happening and formulating a solution to deal with incident rather than pretend it isn’t happening to us etc. Understanding why and how we interpret danger, and in turn how we respond to it, is an important part of personal safety and self-protection.

We may believe that we are good at interpreting facial expressions, and recognizing aggressive body-language etc. however, without repeated exposure to anger and aggression, or actively learning to recognize these things, the chances are we will misread people and situations that could see us believing we are safe when we are not. We are brought up to believe certain things, such as liars avoid eye contact when engaged in deception, however such urban myths go to show that we are reliant on external information to inform us of what we should be searching for when detecting lies, rather than using inherent skills that we ae born with etc. It is by understanding our psychological failings and how predatory individuals exploit them that we can start to increase our own personal safety etc.

By understanding how we process information and use it we can start to understand how we can misread what is presented to us and jump to/reach the wrong conclusion e.g., we assume that somebody who is nice to us, must have our best interests at heart, without recognizing that people when they try to con us are usually overly pleasant and nice. By incorrectly connecting a behavior (niceness), with a character trait (being caring and considerate), we can put ourselves at risk of being exploited by predatory individuals.

By understanding human psychology, we can start to see how we have inherent weaknesses that those who have harmful intent towards us can exploit. Our egos may tell us we are good and effective judges of character, and that we know who we can trust and who we can’t etc., but the truth is that those who wish to cause us harm are usually thinking about this on a 24x7 basis, whereas we are only occasionally thinking about preventative measure to stop this happening. By learning about some of our cognitive biases and default inabilities to make good character judgments we can be on our guard when we are either falling for deception or recognize that we may need to question a person’s intent towards us more fully.