Notice when your “gut feeling” is just a stereotype wearing a hoodie.

A fast feeling about somebody can come from real experience or from a thousand repetitions of an image you never chose, and both arrive wearing the same certainty. That is how a reaction to a stranger’s clothes or accent can feel like instinct when it is mostly inherited. The useful tell is that the borrowed kind has no specifics attached to it.

When a judgment turns up quickly, ask what this particular person has actually done. If you cannot name anything, file the reaction as a reflex rather than a read. Treat people according to their behaviour, which is the only part that is really theirs.