Do We Think Our Neighbors Are Bad People? A Question for the Day After

This morning the yard signs are still up, the way they always are for a few days after. Some will be pulled out of the ground by the weekend. Others will lean in the grass until the first real wind. And somewhere on your street there is a person whose sign you noticed, whose car you wave at, whose dog you have a name for, and about whom you formed an opinion sometime in the last few months that you have not quite said out loud.

I want to ask a plain question, on a day when the plain question is hardest to hear: do you think the people around you are bad people? And if you do, what exactly is that belief made of?

What the numbers say

In March 2026, the Pew Research Center published a survey of more than 30,000 adults in 25 countries, asking whether the morals and ethics of their fellow citizens were good or bad. In 24 countries, more people said good than bad. The United States was the exception: 53 percent of Americans described their fellow citizens' morality as bad, and 47 percent as good. Canada sat at the other end, with 92 percent saying good.

Then, in a Gallup poll fielded in September, confidence in the judgment of American voters came in around 51 percent, which press coverage described as a record low for a series that began decades ago. I was not able to pull the figure from Gallup's own page, so check news.gallup.com before quoting the exact number. The direction is not in doubt.

Numbers like these invite two reactions. One is to say, "See, I knew it." The other, which I would like to try instead, is to ask what question these people were actually answering.

The perception gap

When you are asked whether your fellow citizens are good or bad, you do not poll the dozen people you know. You picture a crowd. And the crowd in your head is built from what reaches you most easily: the loudest posts, the most alarming clips, the worst version of whoever you disagree with.

The research group More in Common has spent years measuring the distance between what people believe about the other side and what the other side says about itself. They call it the perception gap. On many questions, people's guesses about how extreme the opposing camp is ran about double the reality. The gap tended to be widest among the most politically engaged and among people who consume the most news.

That last detail is the one that stays with me. The people who care most, and follow most closely, are often the most mistaken about everyone else. Attention and accuracy are different things.

There is a caveat. More in Common is a nonprofit that works on reducing polarization, so its framing deserves a critical look, and I have not examined its methods in detail. Independent researchers have described a similar pattern, often called false polarization, but treat the exact percentages with care.

A vote is not a character

Here is a distinction that sounds obvious and is surprisingly hard to hold. Disagreeing with someone's vote is one claim. Judging their character is another.

A vote is a single, compressed act. It compresses a person's fears, their income, their parents' stories, their town, the one issue they refuse to compromise on, and a dozen things they would never say to a pollster. When we read someone's vote as a full portrait of their values, we are asking a very small thing to carry a very large conclusion.

I know this from the inside, because I do it too. A person says one thing at a family gathering and, within seconds, I have written a biography of them. Then I discover, months later, that they drive an elderly neighbor to appointments every Thursday. The biography was fiction. It was fluent, confident fiction, which is the most dangerous kind.

The principle of charity

Philosophers have a name for the alternative: the principle of charity. It comes out of the work of thinkers such as W. V. Quine and Donald Davidson, who were interested in how we understand anyone at all. The idea is that when you interpret what someone says, you should assume, until shown otherwise, that they are making sense. Not that they are right. Only that there is a reason behind what they said, and that you have not yet found it.

Without that assumption, communication would collapse. Every ambiguous sentence would be read as the dumbest possible version of itself.

Daniel Dennett turned the principle into a practical routine, drawing on the social psychologist Anatol Rapoport. The steps go roughly like this. First, restate your opponent's position so clearly and fairly that they say, "Thanks, I wish I'd put it that way." Second, list anything you have learned from them, especially points of agreement. Only then are you allowed to say a word of rebuttal or criticism. It is slow. It is also the only version of an argument I have seen where both people leave understanding more than they came with.

Charity is not the same as agreement, and it is not the same as approval. You can interpret someone generously and still conclude, after careful thought, that you disagree with them completely. The point is that you earned the disagreement.

How neighbors keep living together

Elections end. The people stay. This is the quiet fact beneath all the noise: you will still borrow a ladder from the same person, take the same bus, stand in the same line at the same school pickup.

I suspect, though I cannot prove it, that part of what the surveys capture is a gap between two kinds of judgment. People tend to rate "Americans" in general far more harshly than the specific person on their own street. We know that about politicians too: a common pattern in polling is that people think poorly of the institution and better of the individual they actually know. Abstract strangers are easy to condemn. A named neighbor holding a casserole dish is not.

In the Heartfulness meditation I practice, there is an idea that what we see is colored by the impressions we carry. I find that a useful humility, whatever vocabulary you prefer for it. If my view of someone is tinted, then the first honest move is to wonder how much of the tint is theirs and how much is mine.

Communities that hold together after hard seasons seem to do a few unglamorous things. They keep small shared rituals going, such as potlucks, school events, snow shoveling and the long-running neighborhood group chat. They separate the question "what do you believe" from the question "can I count on you." And they let the second question be answered by behavior over time, not by a sign in the yard.

One generous conversation this week

Here is a small practice, modest enough to do. Choose one person in your life whose views you find hard, someone you will realistically see this week: a neighbor, a coworker, a relative. Then:

Pick the setting, not the topic. A walk, a driveway, a shared task. Side-by-side is easier than face-to-face.
Ask one real question, and mean it. "What was on your mind when you decided?" or "What is the part of this you worry about most?" Not a trap, not a debate opener.
Listen until you can summarize. Say it back: "So what I'm hearing is..." Then ask, "Did I get that right?"
Name one thing you can honestly respect. Their care for their family, their work ethic, their honesty, the effort it took to answer you. It does not have to be about the issue itself.
Do not try to change their mind. You are not there to win. If the conversation drifts toward a fight, say "I'd rather understand you than argue," and change the subject.
Afterward, write down one thing you were wrong about. Even small. The guess you had about how they would react. The assumption about why.

If you get nothing else out of it, you will have replaced one imagined person with one real one. That is a good exchange.

FAQ

Does assuming good intentions mean I have to agree?

No. Charitable interpretation is about understanding what someone means and why, not about accepting their conclusions. You can understand a view fully and still disagree with it.

What if someone really is acting in bad faith?

Some people are, and charity is a starting assumption rather than a permanent one. It can be revised when evidence changes. The mistake is to begin with the worst reading, since you then cannot tell the difference between the few who deserve it and the many who do not.

Is the perception gap only about politics?

It shows up in many places, such as workplaces, families, and religion. The politics version gets measured most, because there are surveys. But the pattern of assuming the other side is more extreme than it is turns up wherever groups form.

How do I handle a relative or coworker who always wants to argue?

You are allowed to decline the debate while keeping the relationship. A sentence like "I would rather hear how your week was" works, and so does a boundary on topics. Warmth and disagreement can sit at the same table, as long as nobody is forced to perform.