What Makes a Person Bad?

My friend Alex and I were talking about some of the unsavory individuals in our high school after a couple of controversies popped up over the year. I specifically recall him telling me that “even bad people are good 90% of the time”– a statement that’s stuck with me over my college years as I’ve encountered more and more cases of unscrupulous wrongdoings.

The claim is slightly overexaggerated– clearly, you’ll find a small fraction people that are consistently rude and unpleasant. I’ve noticed that these are pretty few and far between, and I can’t really even think of someone I know who’s like this off the top of my head. Most people I meet are quite friendly and open. When talking to my friends about the people we met at some event, the typical takeaway is that “they were pretty nice.” However, it’s pretty unlikely that most of these people are actually nice people¹. It’s just that anyone can be pleasant at first; most of their personality is usually not revealed until you get to know them better.

If we define a good person to be a person who is “good” most of the time, I think we would be over-counting the amount of truly good people. As Alex said, even bad people are “good” a majority of the time. A better way is to observe how people behave in testy edge-case scenarios, where bad behavior is more likely to occur. Here are some examples:

• How someone behaves while drunk
• How someone behaves around members of their preferred sex
• How someone behaves in a relationship
• How someone behaves in a leadership position
• How someone behaves when they’re in the spotlight
• How someone behaves around their parents or siblings
• How someone behaves in a Xbox lobby (just kidding)

I’m not saying we should analyze people in their worst moments. We’re all guilty of doing pretty horrible things at our worst, and they’re often not indicative of who we really are. But if some behavior manifests as a pattern in the same sorts of testy situations, it’s likely an indicator of a larger personality flaw.

Over the past few years, I’ve heard of more than just a few cases of people I considered “good” doing some questionable things. There have been cases of seemingly chill people cheating on their girlfriends or boyfriends, s*xually assaulting others, acting terribly in group situations, or saying nasty things behind people’s backs. I’ve always thought to myself that these flaws shouldn’t determine someone’s entire character². However, over time, I began to conclude that these flaws might actually determine someone’s character. Almost nobody is a “bad person” all the time (or even most of the time), so it would be unreasonable to say someone is a “bad person” only if they are bad most of the time. If someone behaves consistently badly in certain situations or across multiple situations, it should be enough to conclude they might just be a bad person.

Obviously, not all flaws are created equal. We all act poorly in certain situations based on the way we grew up and our environment. But clearly, there are some clear boundaries most people can draw that isolates truly “bad behavior.” Even with our own flaws, the biggest thing that separates good people and bad people is the ability to recognize and work on them. There are loads of people who claim they will “do better” next time but end up falling back on old habits and desires. The inability to act against their flaws is a pretty telltale sign that a person isn’t truly trying to work on said flaws–mostly when they are reminded time and time again.

Ultimately, what I’ve learned is that I should be more selective in who I should surround myself with. I shouldn’t feel obligated to spend time with someone because they haven’t made an arbitrarily amount of enough mistakes for me to cut them off entirely. A few wrong steps within a cascade of right steps can still lead someone astray. Sometimes, one big step is enough.