“Everyone wears some kind of a mask.”
First impressions mean a lot. When you meet someone new, you’re probably trying to get a feel for who they are—and whether they’re trustworthy. It all comes down to noticing behaviors.
Human behavior expert Chase Hughes explains how to read someone instantly. “Everyone wears some kind of a mask…a persona that I put onto the world,” he says in a YouTube video.
Getting underneath that mask is what truly reveals who someone is and what they’re all about. Hughes explains that people build these masks to conceal shame.
The #1 question to instantly read someone
According to Hughes, there is one important question to keep in mind when trying to read someone: “What does this person want me to feel about them, and what do they want me to notice?”
Hughes notes that this is the beginning of understanding why someone builds a mask based on shame.
“Shame is ‘I shouldn’t have done that. I’m a bad person for doing that. I need to hide it,’” he shares, explaining that shame holds power in today’s culture because it has been institutionalized as a “public weapon.”
The power of shame
Shame creates cognitive dissonance, which Hughes notes is mental discomfort. “Mental discomfort says, ‘I don’t want to be this uncomfortable in front of people.’ That creates a mask,” he says.
Understanding that most people wear a mask—a persona they present to the world—is key. From there, the task is determining how “thick” or “thin” that mask is and what it’s made of.
“If I’m seeing somebody who’s acting like he’s posturing all the time—he’s yelling, he’s puffing his chest out—the mask is usually the opposite of what it’s concealing,” says Hughes. “So I’m seeing a fearful little boy.”
Bumper-sticker alliteration
Hughes gives another example of how to read someone’s mask by comparing it to a car covered in bumper stickers. He tells a story about pulling up behind a car with various bumper stickers that signal aspects of the driver’s identity, from “I Did Yosemite” to marathon stickers to ones that say “I Go Fishing.”
He asks his kids what the stickers say about the driver, and his daughter replies that the person is adventurous. Hughes then asks what else it might mean, and she says it means the person can be trusted and would make a good friend. Hughes then gets to the point: if someone is a good friend, it means they need friends. In other words, that person is lonely.
“The better you get at understanding humans, the more that you’re going to see loneliness, shame, and suffering,” says Hughes. “The way that I deal with loneliness, conceal shame, and anesthetize myself from suffering equals human behavior.”
Reading for self-control
Finally, Hughes notes that another thing to look for when reading a person is their level of self-control, which comes down to whether they are disciplined or not.
To spot it, Hughes says that even if someone is a stranger, they will appear “more predictable in a good way. They’re more likely to be trustworthy because they already discipline themselves. They have self-control.”
He notes that this is important in many areas where relationships matter, including business. If someone lacks self-control, Hughes says he tends to be more cautious around them.
