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Lumifer comments on Open Thread for January 8 - 16 2014 - Less Wrong
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I think I'm coming from the position that once you have information about a specific person and a specific relationship, general priors are pretty much useless.
To give a simple example, women are, on the average, shorter than men and that would be my prior about the height of someone before seeing her. But once I see her, the prior is completely superseded by the concrete information that I now have.
In the same way when evaluating whether someone specific is likely to change his/her opinion of me, I will rely almost completely on my knowledge of that particular person and not on generic priors.
Well... I wouldn't worry too much about what's "normal", though I'll point out that e.g. the mainstream picture of women paints them as very emotionally labile in sexually-charged situation.
You might also consider that you are being played games with. Might be for control (to keep you off-balance) or might be just for fun -- some people like drama.
Well, maybe the only wisdom to be had here is really that if you don't have much more than priors to go on, tough luck, nothing you can do, live with the uncertainty and hope for the best (because actively asking for evidence is too costly). It's likely that this this doesn't bother you as much as me because you're just better at reading social cues; however the hell one is supposed to learn that, especially if one is an introvert and experiences a consequent poverty of stimulus.
Although sometimes it's not even about observing clues. For example, one might know that it's likely that one will at some point behave in some way that the other person would view unfavorably; and you want to estimate how much you should invest in this relationship. Then the only relevant evidence you can get is how this person behaves in dealing with other people.