Over Judgemental?

It scares me when I observe the extent to which people's reactions to others are governed by their expectations of how another person should be in any given situation.

The only way to explain this so you stand a chance of understanding me is to give an example:

Tragically, a man's wife dies in suspicious circumstances. The police strongly suspect murder and so the man is hauled in for questioning. He is knumb, his whole system completely steamrollered by a situation utterly beyond his capacity to understand. He says little or nothing during his first police interview.

Later, the policeman is heard to say that the man's attitude is highly suspicious, he is not reacting as he would expect a bereaved husband to react. He's too quiet, he's not weeping and he seems too contained.

In the policeman's eyes, the man's apparent lack of reaction is a strong indication that he has something to hide and well deserves the label of 'chief suspect'.

So policeman, who has not himself been bereaved, is making a decision about the reactions of someone who has been bereaved.

I wonder, what is he basing his judgement on?

Example 2:

A girl loses her father in an awful car collision. It emerges that her father was drunk at the time, and that this had a significant impact on the event.

Three years afterwards there are some issues at her school. She has been rude to some other kids and shown some uncharacteristic anger.

The school counsellor tells her that she can't keep using her father's death as an excuse to 'act out'.

How does he know how those circumstances should affect her? What is he basing his judgement upon? Is he influenced by the fact that her father was partly to blame for what happened?

This is all hypothetical, of course, but it is typical of situations I have observed. On one level, I am fascinated as to how we think we have the right to judge others on how they should react to extreme situations. After all, this would seem to imply a high level of narcissism.

Can anyone witnessed a sufficiently high sample of these events to be able to filled a truly representative opinion? I doubt it.

Worryingly, if, as in the first case, these opinions play into a criminal investigation, they could well lead to an injustice being done, or maybe another suspect being overlooked.

Seriously, why do we all seem to think we're such experts on this?

No answers. I'm truly baffled.