Pitfalls to Labelling People Good or Bad

In this seventeenth episode of the Wisdom for Life radio show, hosts Dan Hayes and Greg Sadler discuss some of the problems and pitfalls that arise when labeling people as entirely good or entirely bad.  Most people fit somewhere in between being perfectly good or bad, so a realistic assessment of other people - or of oneself - would avoid categorizing people uncritically along those lines.

 

This is somewhat of a meandering conversation, ranging over topics such as the Stanford Prison experiment, insights about goodness and badness in Plato's dialogues, Solzhenitsyn's caution that the line through good and evil runs through human hearts, how we can become aware of our biases, and the difference between stagnant and growth mindsets.

 

They end the show by discussing a practice that listeners could engage in - reserving judgement when witnessing people doing things that we typically view as bad.

 

Show Music is by Scott Tarulli - https://www.scotttarulli.com/