Character Reference

The other day, a friend of mine said: “People can surprise you, but they never break character.” I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. He may well be right, but it depends on what you mean by character.

Often, I think, we confuse character with caricature. We look at someone and see only our own beliefs about who they are, what they think, and why they do what they do. Invariably, that set of beliefs turns out to be far more superficial and two-dimensional than the actual person.

This is the root of the fundamental attribution error: our tendency to see other people’s actions (especially their flaws and mistakes) as the product of stable character traits, and our own as influenced by external forces. The truth is, no one’s character is static. Not only do we change and evolve over time, we also shift our behavior from one situation to the next. 

Have you ever seen a movie or read a book and felt that a character was flat and two dimensional? If we’re honest, the way we see the people around us often suffers from that same problem. Rather than seeing the full range of circumstances and motivations that shape their actions in any given moment, we ascribe a few stock characteristics to them and use those to explain what we see.

People are complex, mercurial, deeply layered creatures. They should surprise us--even the ones we think we know best. We should even surprise ourselves once in a while. But that can only happen if our view of character is as nuanced and mysterious as real human beings. 

I just read a book where one of the characters remarked how freeing it was not to have immediate opinions about everything. Sometimes, as soon as we formulate an opinion, we stop seeing deeply. In the end, it all comes back to curiosity. With people, as with everything else, we learn much more if we focus on what we don’t know rather than what we think we do know.