The pervasive problem of “You think you know, but you really don’t know” and the harm it causes …

There are moments when another person’s suffering asks something of us. It may ask for time, patience, money, inconvenience, presence, advocacy, forgiveness, practical help, or simply the willingness to sit long enough to understand what life looks like from somewhere other than where we are standing. Yet there is a remarkably effective way to escape much of that demand. Decide that we already understand the person and why the suffering is happening.

A woman remains in an abusive relationship, and someone decides she must not really want to leave. A man cannot seem to climb out of poverty, and someone decides he is irresponsible. A person suffering from addiction relapses, and someone decides nothing will ever change because the person simply does not want it badly enough. Someone living with chronic pain cancels another commitment, and eventually friends decide the person is unreliable. A family needs help again, and people who helped before begin telling one another that the family must be doing something wrong. In every case there may be facts visible from the outside. The danger begins when those facts are used to construct the rest of a story that the observer does not actually know.

After decades of serving people as both a pastor and counselor, I have come to describe this pattern with an intentionally simple sentence: You think you know, but you really don’t know. Beneath that sentence is an observed progression that can turn incomplete knowledge into something morally consequential:

Research does not need to establish that sequence as a formal psychological model for the pattern to be recognizable. Research does, however, provide disturbing evidence for several of the movements within it. A multistudy investigation of responses to suffering found that when observers attributed less responsibility for adversity to the suffering person, they experienced greater compassion, and greater compassion was associated with a stronger desire to help. Research on mental-health stigma has similarly found that judgments about controllability and responsibility can lead to emotional responses that culminate in avoidance, rejection, coercion, segregation, and withholding help.

The implication is difficult to avoid. What we believe about why another person is suffering can influence how much compassion we feel for that person and whether we are willing to help. If the explanation is wrong, incomplete, or based on information we do not possess, the consequences do not remain inside our own heads. Someone else may suffer because of what we merely thought we knew.

When observation quietly becomes explanation
The Bible contains a remarkably compact picture of this problem in the account of Hannah. She had endured years of infertility and the cruelty of Peninnah, her husband’s other wife, who taunted her because she had no children. Hannah eventually went to the Tabernacle and prayed in profound distress. Eli the priest watched her.

The New Living Translation records what happened in 1 Samuel 1:12–16: “As she was praying to the LORD, Eli watched her. Seeing her lips moving but hearing no sound, he thought she had been drinking. ‘Must you come here drunk?’ he demanded. ‘Throw away your wine!’ ‘Oh no, sir!’ she replied. ‘I haven’t been drinking wine or anything stronger. But I am very discouraged, and I was pouring out my heart to the LORD. Don’t think I am a wicked woman! For I have been praying out of great anguish and sorrow.’”

Eli saw something. He was not imagining that Hannah’s lips were moving without audible speech. His observation was accurate. His explanation of his observation was completely wrong.

That distinction is at the center of this problem. People often confuse what they have actually observed with what they have concluded from the observation. The two become fused so thoroughly that the conclusion begins to feel like another fact.

Eli did not say that Hannah might have been drinking. He moved directly from observation to certainty and from certainty to accusation. The woman he thought needed rebuke was actually a woman experiencing “great anguish and sorrow.” He correctly saw her behavior while profoundly misunderstanding her condition.

That misunderstanding changed his response to her. Had Eli understood what was actually happening, drunkenness would not have been the issue before him. He would have been looking at a grieving woman pouring out her heart to God. Because he believed his own interpretation, however, suffering looked like misconduct.

That is how quickly “I see” can become “I know.”

Proverbs 18:13 speaks directly to the danger of reaching a conclusion without first possessing the facts: “Spouting off before listening to the facts is both shameful and foolish.”

There is a bluntness to the proverb that belongs in this discussion. Scripture does not dignify premature judgment by calling it insight or discernment. When a person speaks before listening to the facts, the behavior is described as both shameful and foolish. That does not mean every fact about another human being can ever be known. It means that ignorance of relevant facts should produce greater care in judgment, not greater confidence in assumptions.

Only four verses later, Proverbs 18:17 adds another dimension: “The first to speak in court sounds right — until the cross-examination begins.”

The setting is a dispute in which a case initially appears convincing until it is examined. Its relevance here is the warning embedded in that experience: incomplete information can sound completely convincing. A conclusion can feel settled because the information currently available points in one direction, while facts not yet heard could substantially change what appears to be obvious.

Jesus makes the importance of looking beyond what is immediately apparent unmistakable in John 7:24: “Look beneath the surface so you can judge correctly.”

The immediate context concerns the judgment being made about Jesus for healing on the Sabbath. The verse does not teach that every judgment about another person’s suffering is wrong. It confronts the inadequacy of judgment that stops at appearance. What seems obvious from one vantage point may cease to be obvious when what lies beneath the surface is understood.

The part of another person’s life we cannot see
In 2017, Serena Williams gave birth to her daughter by emergency cesarean section. Williams had a history of life-threatening blood clots. The following day she became short of breath and believed she was experiencing another pulmonary embolism. She told medical personnel what she suspected and requested appropriate testing. According to Williams’s account, a nurse suggested that pain medication might have left her confused. Williams continued pressing for evaluation. A CT scan eventually revealed blood clots in her lungs.

The story should not be stretched beyond what is documented. It does not establish that the medical personnel lacked compassion, nor does it demonstrate the entire sequence described in this blog post. It illustrates something more fundamental. A plausible explanation can be dangerously wrong. The nurse had an explanation for what Williams was saying. Williams had pain medication in her system, and confusion was possible. Yet the existence of a plausible explanation did not make that explanation true.

The consequences of mistaken interpretation become even more troubling when the suffering itself is difficult for outsiders to see. A qualitative synthesis of research involving women living with chronic pain found repeated reports of being dismissed, disbelieved, rejected, or ignored, including by health professionals. A systematic review involving children and adolescents with chronic pain found that young people described being perceived as lazy or dishonest because their pain fluctuated and others could not understand why something possible one day might be impossible another. Some eventually stopped talking about their pain because they expected to be misunderstood, increasing their loneliness and isolation.

This is where “you think you know” can become cruel without ever announcing itself as cruelty. The observer sees that someone was able to attend an event yesterday but says she can’t get out of bed today. The observer possesses one piece of information and supplies the explanation for the rest. She can do things when she wants to. She is exaggerating. She is unreliable. She wants attention.

The person living inside the body may know something the observer cannot see.

The same problem appears in homelessness. Research involving homeless young adults in New York City found that 81 percent reported experiencing at least one instance of discrimination related to homelessness during the preceding year. More than half reported being treated as mentally inferior, including being characterized as irresponsible or lazy. Broader research on homelessness documents how assumptions about laziness, addiction, irresponsibility, and unwillingness to work can become barriers in employment, health care, and ordinary human interaction.

Calling a person lazy can accomplish something psychologically convenient. It transforms a complicated human life into an uncomplicated moral explanation. Once homelessness has been explained as laziness, the observer no longer has to seriously consider trauma, unaffordable housing, lost employment, disability, family breakdown, mental illness, domestic violence, lack of transportation, criminal history, addiction, or the interaction of several circumstances at once. None of those possibilities proves that every person experiencing homelessness bears no responsibility for any decisions. They demonstrate why seeing the outcome does not confer knowledge of everything that produced it.

The difference is enormous. Knowing that someone made a bad decision is not the same as knowing why that person’s life is what it is. Knowing one cause is not knowing every cause. Knowing that someone bears some responsibility is not knowing how much responsibility belongs to that person, what forces were operating around the decision, what capacities the person possessed at the time, what has happened since, or what help is needed now.

Partial knowledge becomes dangerous when it masquerades as complete knowledge.

Why we do it
Some of this behavior begins with an ordinary feature of human cognition. People interpret. We observe behavior and attempt to explain it. Because another person’s internal experience and complete history are unavailable to us, explanations inevitably require inference. The problem arises when inference loses its humility and becomes certainty.

There is also an empathy problem. Eleven studies involving more than 1,200 participants found that people often avoided empathy when given a choice and tended to experience empathizing as effortful and aversive. Other research has found an “empathy gap” in which people who were not experiencing social suffering underestimated the severity of experiences such as exclusion and shame compared with people who were experiencing them.

That helps explain why looking from the outside can be so deceptive. The person standing safely outside a painful situation can underestimate what it costs to live inside it.

Consider the question often directed toward victims of domestic violence: Why doesn’t she just leave? Embedded in those five words can be an entire imagined world. Leaving is presumed to be available, straightforward, and safer than staying. Therefore, continued presence in the relationship begins to look like consent, weakness, foolishness, or unwillingness to change.

Yet the realities can include financial dependence, threats of retaliation, fear for children, isolation, emotional attachment, lack of somewhere safe to go, and other barriers. Georgetown legal scholarship surveying the social-science literature has documented several of these constraints. In one publicly reported survivor account, a woman responding to the question of why she had not left answered with two questions of her own: Where was she going to go, and who was going to help her?

That response exposes the arrogance hidden inside some of our easiest judgments. The observer asks, Why doesn’t she leave? The woman living the reality may be asking, Where can I go? Who will protect my children? How will I live? What will he do when he finds me? Who will believe me?

The observer and the sufferer may be reasoning from entirely different sets of facts.

There can also be a more uncomfortable reason for remaining satisfied with our explanations. Understanding another person more fully may increase what we believe we owe that person.

Experimental research on what psychologists call willful ignorance is revealing here. A meta-analysis examined more than 33,000 decisions made by 6,531 participants across 56 experimental treatment effects. Researchers found that 40 percent of participants avoided readily available information about how their choices would affect someone else. When people could remain ignorant, altruistic behavior declined by 15.6 percentage points compared with conditions in which the relevant information was provided. The researchers found evidence consistent with people using ignorance as an excuse for self-interested behavior while preserving a favorable view of themselves.

That research does not prove that everyone who misjudges a suffering person is deliberately refusing to learn the truth. It establishes something sobering about human motivation: sometimes not knowing serves us. If further understanding might require sacrifice, inconvenience, generosity, patience, or involvement, a comfortable explanation can protect us from the demands that fuller knowledge might create.

For Christians, the spiritual questions become unavoidable. Pride can make confidence easier than humility. Self-interest can make distance easier than involvement. Hardness of heart can allow another person’s suffering to become familiar enough that it no longer disturbs us. A lack of compassion can then search for reasons to make itself appear reasonable.

Scripture gives very little room for a Christianity that sees suffering and remains content with explanations. Galatians 6:2 says, “Share each other’s burdens, and in this way obey the law of Christ.”

And 1 John 3:17 is considerably more searching: “If someone has enough money to live well and sees a brother or sister in need but shows no compassion—how can God’s love be in that person?”

Neither passage requires indiscriminate giving, the abandonment of wisdom, or pretending that destructive behavior is harmless. Neither permits compassion to be reduced to a reward given only after the suffering person has satisfied our judgment about how the suffering began.

Responsibility and compassion are not enemies. A counselor can confront destructive behavior compassionately. A pastor can refuse to enable someone while continuing to serve that person. A family can establish necessary boundaries without contempt. Help can take forms other than giving someone exactly what is requested. Wisdom asks what genuinely helps. The ugliness begins when an assumption about responsibility becomes permission to stop caring.

When an explanation becomes an excuse
This is the point at which the sequence becomes most revealing.

I see what is happening. There may be nothing wrong with the observation itself. The bills are unpaid. The person relapsed. The marriage is chaotic. The woman returned to the abusive partner. The employee has missed work. The family needs assistance again.

I think I know why it is happening. Now interpretation enters. The person does not care enough. She likes the drama. He refuses to grow up. They waste their money. She could leave if she really wanted to. He could work if he were willing.

I assign responsibility or blame. The explanation hardens. Possibilities become conclusions. Context begins disappearing. Whatever the suffering person may have contributed to the situation expands until it becomes the explanation for the situation.

My explanation reduces my compassion. This movement is not merely theoretical. Research on responses to suffering has found an association between greater attribution of responsibility and lower compassion, while research on mental-health stigma has connected responsibility judgments to anger, rejection, avoidance, and withholding help.

I justify not responding to the suffering. By this point, doing nothing can begin to feel morally responsible. Compassion is recast as enabling. Distance is recast as wisdom. Irritation is recast as discernment. The observer can walk away while continuing to regard himself as caring because he has developed an explanation that makes withholding care seem appropriate.

There are situations in which refusing a requested form of help is genuinely wise. Enabling destructive behavior can harm rather than help. Boundaries can be necessary and loving. None of that changes the question being raised here. Has the decision been made from what is actually known, or from a story constructed about another person and then mistaken for knowledge?

That question becomes especially important because the suffering person may already know what everyone thinks.

People with substance-use histories describe entering health-care settings knowing they may be regarded as drug-seeking rather than hurting. In one qualitative study of chronic pain among socially marginalized people, participants described having their reports of pain discounted because clinicians knew about previous substance use. One participant said that the experience of being treated as someone merely seeking drugs had made asking doctors for help extremely difficult.

Another qualitative study involving people with mental-health or substance-use conditions found accounts of physical symptoms being attributed to psychiatric diagnoses, of patients believing clinicians regarded their pain as imaginary or exaggerated, and of people becoming increasingly reluctant to seek medical help after repeated experiences of dismissal. One woman reported that serious injuries involving her tailbone and sacrum went unbelieved for an extended period while she was regarded as lying or faking.

This is where the harm reaches beyond hurt feelings.

When suffering is repeatedly misread, people can stop asking for help. They can withdraw. They can become ashamed of needs they did not choose. They can begin concealing pain because disclosure has repeatedly brought judgment rather than care. Relationships can fracture. Medical treatment can be delayed. People already carrying one burden can acquire another — the burden of continually defending the legitimacy of the first one.

A person can eventually become more afraid of being misunderstood than hopeful of being helped.

That is the hollowness of this behavior. We can believe ourselves perceptive while knowing remarkably little. We can call our assumptions discernment, our impatience wisdom, our distance boundaries, and our unwillingness to become involved personal responsibility. Sometimes those words describe genuine virtues. Sometimes they provide respectable language for a heart that has found a reason not to be troubled by someone else’s pain.

And that is also its ugliness. The suffering person can be required to prove enough innocence before receiving compassion from people who do not possess enough knowledge to render the verdict they have already reached.

Perhaps the most revealing question, then, is not whether the suffering person bears any responsibility. Sometimes the answer will unquestionably be yes. The more searching questions are whether the observer actually knows what he thinks he knows, whether he has confused a fragment of the story with the whole of it, and what his certainty is allowing him to avoid.

Hannah was not drunk.

Serena Williams was not confused about the blood clot in her lungs.

The person whose pain cannot be seen may not be lazy.

The woman who has not left may not have the safe exit that looks so obvious from outside her life.

The person who contributed to his own suffering may still be suffering.

There is a reason Jesus’ command in Luke 6:36 is so uncomplicated: “You must be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate.”

Compassion does not require ignorance about human responsibility. It requires something far more demanding: enough humility to recognize the limits of our own knowledge, enough interest to discover what we do not know, enough wisdom to distinguish helping from enabling, and enough love to refuse to turn another person’s failures into an excuse for indifference.

The next time someone else’s suffering begins to look obvious, perhaps the most important interruption is also the simplest one: What do I actually know, what have I merely concluded, and what might I discover if I cared enough to ask?

Because sometimes the person standing at a safe distance has an explanation for everything.

And the person who is suffering has the rest of the story.

Scotty