You can largely thank Victorians for the narrative that âyou only know who a person really is under pressureâ that makes knowing this difficult. Because to much of the population, the âacting weirdâ isnât an abnormal behavior to a specific stressful situation, but an indicator that that person is flawed and impure and can not be trusted etc etc etc
So it doesnât register that high stress leads to weird behavior, because itâs not highlighted as weird, itâs highlighted as âthe truthâ in the most bullshit manipulative way Iâve ever seen.
And this type of narrative is very, very useful for Calvinist branches of Christianity, Puritanism, evangelism, baptism, etc. because they believe in predestination, (whether they know that or not) and therefore have metrics of âthis person does X and is a Good Person, that person does Y, and are a Bad Person, and these things are fundamentally unchangable because that is Gods Willâ which means that even if you were acting âgoodâ, if you ever so much as do one thing âbadâ, itâs an indication that you were lying about being good the whole time, because thatâs what Bad People do, and since you did a Bad Thing (or even had a Bad Thought) itâs proof you are Bad, because God would not have made you to act that way if you were not.
Predestination is a weird, paradoxical concept that simultaneously posits that humans do and do not have free will, as you can probably tell. But that is why that âthe worst of you is always the real youâ narrative is SO prevalent in the US especially.
And I know this because while the concept does appear in other countries and cultures, itâs more of a âhuh, guess you never know a guyâ and less of a pearl clutching hysterical reaction of âoh no! They were bad people all along! Everyone lynch them!â You see in the US.
And it has consequences, the least of which is the inability to understand that stress does weird things to people and that they are genuinely not themselves when under the influence of stress, alcohol, drugs, or mental health disasters.
Itâs not as bad as it used to be in regard to the latter, but for some reason we donât tend to think of stress as causing those disasters in the first place.
I could continue this forever but Iâve said my piece. Iâd love it if more people understood what OP is talking about, but in the US at least itâs SO culturally baked in that any progress on that is going to be achingly slow, particularly in the current fascist climate.