A great pitfall of people is to characterize people.
Every human being is a complex soul of experiences, preferences, moral convictions, dreams, and pain. Each humans lives in a complex network of society surrounded by other people who are just as complex. Each person can only understand a handful of people deeply. It is impossible to know everyone. Given that, there is a powerful tendency to assume that people we don’t understand well are in fact a thin slice. That they can be summarized simply, and thereby discounted.
This oversimplify happens constantly in politics. Contrary ideas get oversimplified into straw-man arguments, and people get oversimplified into heartless straw-men. It is human nature, spawning from our ancestry as tribal groups to think of others outside our own groups as less.
This fallacy to assume people you don’t know well are less complex than people you do know well causes countless problems. To truly try to understand another from the perspective of a close friend takes a tremendous amount of thought and it is often easy to assume they are understood and discount them. This causes dehumanization and outrage at great scale.
To disagree with someone is simple. To step down into their core values is difficult. To live a year in their shoes is nearly impossible. But once you do, you’ll have finally learned something.