Human relationships are based on assumptions about people, what they are like and what their nature is. These assumptions can be either implicit in the way we relate to other people, or they may be explicit. A given person may or may not be able to specify what he or she believes to be the nature of humanity. That person who has a coherent point of view about the nature of humanity is said to have a philosophy. But each of us has in our relations with other people a more or less consistent set of assumptions that we make about other people and about ourselves, and our philosophies may be inferred by observing us relating to other people.
Different assumptions about what other people are like lead to different ways of relating. For example, the person who has the point of view about people that underlies the statement, “People are no good,” is likely to behave toward people in a suspicious, nontrusting way. On the other hand, the person who assumes that to be loved is a human need relates to people in a fundamentally different manner. In their assumptions about
the nature of humanity, some people emphasize the animalistic side of humanness, and this leads to a different set of behaviors toward other people, particularly those of the opposite sex. Persons who hold the assumption that the herd instinct is a part of human nature tend to behave differently than do people who do not have an instinctual basis for
their philosophy.
The term “nature” connotes birth, and philosophies about the nature of humanity have at their roots the assumptions that we make about what people are like without regard for the influence of the environment on them. What is a person like when he or she is born? Is he or she, in fact, a person? It is important that people be able to assess their assumptions about other people for two reasons. First, to diagnose how they are relating to friends, to coworkers, and to other group members. Second, so that they may plan more effectively the interventions they might make in the human systems of which
they are a part. The way they intervene in human relationships implies a set of assumptions about what people are like.
Gordon Allport specifies three psychological models about the nature of humanity. The first of Allport’s models is that people are reactive beings. This model specifies that people essentially react to stimuli in their physical environments. They are not proactive in the sense that they will things to happen. They are essentially reactive, and their behavior is determined by their environment
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