Virtues And Defects: They Really Exist Or We See Them In Others
When we want to refer to the more or less pleasant qualities or characteristics of another person or of ourselves, we call them virtues and defects respectively. These are said to define us and classify our way of behaving in lists of adjectives: it is generous and kind, but somewhat borderline.
Actually, both the virtues and the defects exist but they can be very relative or be personal opinions that we see about others without realizing that they can become a reflection of ourselves, as we will see below.
Projections: the mirror effect
It is probably not the first time that this debate has arisen around you or that you have heard what those around us reflect on us. Think, in a certain sense, it is still something true: we are always conditioned by the interrelationships that we have.
When what is known in psychology as a ‘mirror effect’ occurs, what we mean is to take into account that the person we are looking at can be the mirror of what we do not usually see in ourselves. Sometimes we go ahead to pigeonhole others under certain strengths and weaknesses, under “x” adjectives, without realizing that we may be describing ourselves.
It is difficult for us to recognize in our personality what we do not like and sometimes we omit that we have what it bothers us to see in others. For this reason, the mirror effect also occurs the other way around: your friends or your family members may criticize or praise a part of you that is a reflection of your personality.
The strengths and weaknesses can be relative
One of the reasons we hang out with certain people and not others has to do with sharing positive qualities and avoiding negative ones. However, who says that what I call a defect, you cannot call a virtue?
The strengths and weaknesses are very relative and vary depending on the optics that analyze them. It can happen, in fact, that we see lists of adjectives that someone has considered as virtues or as defects and that we do not agree at all: you will classify as a positive or negative quality using a very personal criterion.
This is not to say that there are no qualities that alone seem universally positive or negative, such as resilience, sincerity, humility, or insecurity. What we want to point out is that, beyond these universals, factors such as our way of seeing the world or the state of mind that we have influence when it comes to classifying adjectives on one side or the other of the scale.
Virtues and defects according to our state of mind?
The emotions we feel configure practically everything, because by virtue of how we find ourselves we will take different perspectives of what we live at the moment and with whom we live. If we are discouraged, the vision of those we observe will be more aversive than if we have a healthy emotional well-being, for example.
Others will see us happy if what we transmit is joy and on the contrary if we are sad. In other words, they will see virtues over defects or the other way around. Therefore, we see others in the same way: we establish judgments about the strengths and weaknesses of others based on what moves us within.
In this sense, if we are having a good day or a good time, we will probably be much more tolerant of what we dislike and vice versa. It is always necessary that we take these factors into account; otherwise, we could hurt with unfortunate value judgments or be disappointed before our time.
