This article will give you some sound tips for handling “stupid people” more friendly and effectively, while minimizing conflict and hostility.

Defining “stupid.”

Without being too judgmental, I think we can all agree that everyone has varying degrees of intelligence in certain domains of life.

The wizard mathematician may be socially inept. The virtuoso guitar player may be scientifically illiterate. And the all-star athlete may be emotionally immature.

As Albert Einstein once said, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

I agree with Einstein in the sense that I believe everyone has their strengths. At the same time, everyone has their weakness too. And when we find ourselves to be significantly more intelligent in something than another person, it can sometimes be difficult to deal with that person because our differences are so great.

Despite these differences, however, we still have to deal with “stupid people” every now and then. The fact is we are social animals, we need to cooperate with others to get along and be civilized, yet by simple chance we are going to occasionally come across people who we find stubborn, irrational, or just plain annoying. Here are some helpful tips to deal with these so-called “stupid people” more effectively:

Try to see from their worldview.

Empathy is our ability to think and feel from another person’s perspective. It is one of the best ways to diminish hostility and intolerance toward others.

When we actively step outside of our limited worldview, and instead look through the eyes of others, we often find that their worldview isn’t as irrational or nonsensical as we may have first thought. When we are willing to step into another person’s perspective, we better understand why they think, feel, and behave the way they do.

And once we gain a better understanding into that person’s mental state, it is often much easier to accept the differences we may have with them, and perhaps even admire them.

Acknowledge their strengths.

I advocate as much as possible that we try to find the good in everyone. Because as I mentioned before, “stupid people” are often not really stupid at all.

There are hundreds of children who have severe ADHD and very poor test grades, yet they can probably kick anyone’s ass in the Xbox game Call of Duty. The simple truth is everyone has the capacity to become really good at something, especially when they find an activity that they have an intrinsic interest and passion for.

Once you understand this, you are much more capable of finding strengths in others. You may even be surprised by how talented most people are when they find something they enjoy doing. So the next time you find yourself labeling “stupid people,” see it as a personal challenge to find something good about that person.

Be respectful for no good reason.

Let’s pretend you can’t understand a certain person no matter how hard you try to empathize with them. You also tried to find their strengths, but failed to find any redeeming qualities. In such a case, sometimes you should just be the “better man” for no good reason.

More times than not, it’s worth it to just be respectful and tolerant for no other reason than to keep the peace and stay civilized as human beings. Instigating conflict rarely ends well, even when we truly believe we are smarter and more capable than the other person. Sometimes a simple smile and nod of the head is all you need to do to diffuse your ill feelings.

If you absolutely have to – just walk away.

It’s possible that you will cross paths with people in your life who are absolutely unbearable. It happens. We are a very diverse species – with different knowledge, values, interests, and goals – so it makes sense that there will be some people who you just won’t mesh with no matter how hard you try.

The important thing to remember is that it’s perfectly alright not to get along with everyone. The smartest thing you can do sometimes is just ignore the other person, break any contact with them, and avoid conflict as much as possible. When it comes down to it, sometimes “walking away” is the best solution for both people.

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Recommended: Conversation Confidence – 4.5 hours of high quality audio advice (plus a workbook) on how to bring your conversation skills to the next level.

But peer pressure is really just anytime our peers encourage us to change our values, attitudes, and behaviors. And it doesn’t always need to be a negative thing.

When surrounded by the right people, peer pressure can be positive.

If a peer encourages you to work hard, do well in school, exercise, eat a healthy diet, and be kind to others… it’s still peer pressure. It just happens to be encouraging a set of values that most people find acceptable.

People are always going to influence each other. And we should accept that. Unless you live in a bubble, there will always be family, friends, and peers that reshape who you are.

The goal isn’t to avoid peer pressure, but try to surround yourself with peer pressure that is healthy and productive.

If you hang around people who are always encouraging you to do things that go against your core values, then you may not want to keep hanging around those people.

On the other hand, if you hang around people who encourage you to act in ways that you want to change, then they can be an excellent source of motivation.

Want to start working out at the gym more often? Then find a friend or coworker who already does it on a regular basis. They can help you find a gym, teach you how to use the equipment, and encourage you to go 3-4 times every week.

Want to boost your grades at college? Then find a student in your class who knows the material really well. Try to set up a date to study for the next exam. Or exchange research papers and give each other constructive criticism.

These can both be considered a form of positive peer pressure. The key is you want to change something about your life, so you find people who can guide you to make that change.

A lot of the habits we do are influenced by our environment and the types of people we associate with. So when we take an active role in changing these things, we can often change our habits as well.

One of the number one ways recovering alcoholics fall back into their old habits is by continuing to hang around people who they associate with drinking.

Sometimes it’s direct peer pressure: “Come on man. Just one drink. It’s your birthday!” And other times it’s indirect peer pressure. Just the mere presence of being around your old friends make you want to crack open a beer.

These social influences play a huge role in how we think and behave.

The guide Regaining Consciousness talks about “vampires” that can ruin our life. These are people who suck up positivity from us, and motivate us to think and act in destructive ways. They are negative peer pressure.

“Vampire slayers” are the opposite. They crush the negativity in our lives and instead serve as a valuable source of inspiration and encouragement. They are positive peer pressure.

As painful as it may be, sometimes in life we need to separate ourselves from the vampires, and instead find ourselves some vampire slayers.

It can be difficult to end relationships with people who we’ve been friends with for a long time. But if they only feed our negative habits, it’s probably best for us to walk away.

Then we can build a more supportive social circle by finding people who encourage us to embody the values that we really want to have.

The takeaway message here is to pay close attention to the people you are engaged with on a frequent basis. Because they can have a very real effect on your thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors.

Instead, surround yourself with people who help bring out the better you.

Those who we typically perceive as high value (like CEOs, celebrities, athletes, politicians, good-looking people, etc.) we place at the top of our social hierarchy, while those we typically perceive as low value fall to the bottom of our social hierarchy.

While sometimes it may be useful to distinguish between valuable relationships vs. not-so-valuable relationships, this kind of thinking can also hurt our ability to connect with some people in productive and meaningful ways.

This is because often when we pass judgment on others, we are simultaneously comparing ourselves (and our own perceived value, or self-worth) to that other person.

For example, if we perceive someone as having extraordinarily high value, then we must automatically see ourselves as somehow inferior when compared to this other person. And this perceived difference in value can then cause us to act and think in desperate and anti-social ways.

For instance, in order to build a relationship with this “high value” person, we may feel the need to pretend to be more valuable than we actually think we are, or even somehow lessen that person’s value by picking on them or bringing them down.

One example of this flawed paradigm in action: The Pick-up Community

In fact, there are many concepts within the Pick-Up/seduction community, popularized by guys like Neil Strauss (“Style”) and Mystery, which rely on this flawed paradigm.

First, you have to understand the Pick-up Artist’s social hierarchy. This is known as the “Hot Babe” scale. Pick-up Artists feel the need to rate women on a scale of 1-10 based on their perceived value (usually it is based on good looks). They then treat women differently based on this perceived value.

For example, there are certain social tactics a Pick-up Artist needs to do in order to get an “HB10″ (Hot Babe 10 – a really good-looking, high value woman). These two main tactics include:

Negging: A “back-handed compliment” often intended to lower a woman’s perceived value. Pick-up Artists believe that HB10s need to be negged more so that they don’t think too highly of themselves (because that would presumably mean they wouldn’t want to be with you, duh!).

Demonstrating Higher Value (DHV) DHVs often include canned stories and “games” so that a woman perceives you as higher value (than you actually are). In other words, you have to essentially “prove your value” to the woman in order to win her over.

The irony is that the whole reason a Pick-Up Artist needs to use these tactics is because deep down they feel inadequate. They don’t believe they deserve “high value” women, so they have to tease and play games so that the women essentially gets “tricked” to believe they are worthy.

Throw out the social hierarchy mentality: People are just people.

I think it would do many people good (not just Pick-up Artists) if we put less emphasis on these social hierarchies that we’ve constructed in our minds.

All it does is put artificial boundaries around our relationships, which in the end only inhibits us from connecting with others in a healthy way – a way based on mutual respect and understanding.

As Sean Cooper eloquently explains in the Shyness and Social Anxiety System (a great guide for overcoming social anxiety and living a richer social life), all social value is a product of our subjective minds:

“The first thing to understand is that value is all in your mind. In reality, there are no ‘superior’ or ‘inferior’ people. The only reason why you see some people as more valuable than you is because you have some rules in your mind that determine whether someone is valuable to you or not. If someone passes all these rules and criteria you have, then you see them as valuable.

If you have low self-esteem, it means that you do not think you meet other people’s rules for being a valuable person.“

By being less judgmental of others (and ourselves), we begin to see and treat everyone as equals.

In other words, it doesn’t matter whether you are talking to someone who is really rich vs. someone who is really poor, or someone who is really good-looking vs. someone who is really ugly, or someone who is really popular vs. someone who isn’t well known at all. Every individual deserves your attention and respect, and there’s no real reason to be more nervous or anxious around one person over someone else.

(In fact, I truly believe we can find something good in everyone.)

And the great thing is: when you begin to see and treat everyone as equals (insofar as everyone has something valuable to offer), it’s much easier to start building relationships left and right. Your social circle grows and grows, because you no longer discriminate or worry about these fictional boundaries anymore. And once these silly social hierarchies are ignored, everyone becomes a potential friend.

Questions.

• Do you notice your perceived social hierarchies hurting how you communicate and relate to others?
• What types of people do you tend to perceive as “higher value” than yourself?
• How do you treat people of “higher value” differently than you treat those of “lower value?” How can you change this so that you treat people more as equals?

Leave answers in the comment section below!

According to Maslow, without these relationships, many people become susceptible to loneliness, social anxiety, and clinical depression.

Ironically, some people never find fulfilling relationships in their life due to this extreme fear of disapproval. They are too afraid to approach new people, spark conversations, or go out to social get-togethers, because they are afraid that other people will judge them negatively, and ultimately reject them. In the end, their beliefs become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As Sean Cooper explains in his online guide The Shyness and Social Anxiety System:

“Social Anxiety (SA) is often based on the assumption that you are in some way weak, inferior, inadequate or less good that others, combined with the fear people will notice this (supposedly inherent) defect and disapprove of you. And the disapproval will have dire consequences for your ability to get on with people and to feel you belong.

Because of their fear of disapproval, people with SA react to situations where they think they will experience disapproval or rejection in the same way that most people would react to real danger. They may experience physical or mental symptoms.

In order to avoid getting disapproval, people who have SA will usually be quiet and withdrawn, they donʼt want attention going their way because attention could mean potential disapproval.

Itʼs actually a pretty bad situation for people with SA. By adopting this set of behaviours, other people wonʼt disapprove of them… but they also wonʼt even notice them! Thatʼs the whole irony of the situation: Why do fears of disapproval make people act in ways that increase the chances of disapproval occurring?“

According to Cooper, we sometimes act in these irrational ways due to an evolutionary instinct developed millions of years ago. Back when we were hunters and gatherers, it was crucially important that we had strong social ties to our tribe. If we weren’t accepted by our tribe, that often meant death. Relationships and cooperation were vital in order to find food, security, warmth, and reproduction.

Today, in our modern technologically-driven civilization, it is a lot easier to survive independently, without a strong social network. However, our drive to belong (and not be rejected) is still alive and well. That that is why it is still so important to have positive and meaningful relationships that provide our lives with a deeper sense of fulfillment and belonging – the exact kind Maslow described in his “hierarchy of needs.”

Even though we don’t need tribes to survive anymore, many of us still crave a social network that provides us with a sense of belonging.

So it’s natural to have a fear of disapproval every now and again, and clearly relationships still play a huge role in our society and well-being. However, when this fear of disapproval goes to an extreme – and it makes it more difficult to function in your everyday world or unable to achieve your goals – then it may be time to find ways of alleviating your social anxiety and building a richer social life.

A lot of people’s extreme fear of disapproval may also be contributed by social learning and conditioning. From an early age you may have had negative experiences of rejection, and therefore you learned that acting in a shy or reserved way was the best way to get acceptance from the people around you. You were conditioned to fear showing your personality, because that could mean more rejection.

Cooper claims in his shyness and social anxiety guide that the best way to recondition this social learning is by exposing ourselves to new and better experiences. This is often referred to as exposure therapy (although it also makes up a big component of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) as well).

Avoiding social interaction (and sitting at home replaying bad events in your head) only reinforces your social anxiety and your fear of disapproval.

The best way to overcome social anxiety is to get the right type of exposure and thereby give your brain new experiences to learn from and then rewire itself.

This doesn’t mean you jump right into politics or public speeches, but taking small and active steps to get yourself back in the social world can do you a lot of good in the long-run.

The key is to start small. Maybe start by just reconnecting with old friends or family. Then work your way from more comfortable environments to less comfortable environments (making friends with a coworker vs. making friends with a stranger at a bar, or making friends with someone at your book club vs. approaching a pretty girl you see on the streets).

With gradual exposure, your social anxiety and fear of disapproval will often get weaker and weaker.

For more on how to get rid of your social anxiety and fear of disapproval, I highly recommend Sean Cooper’s The Shyness and Social Anxiety System. It applies many principles from Evolutionary Psychology, Social Psychology, and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy to help overcome different forms of social anxiety.