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I was discussing a particular unknown term with someone in trying to figure out said term.
The description that I will give to aid in finding this term(official or slang) is as follows:
Observing people in everyday life and giving them a fictional background or story that might hold some basis given the context clues of how they hold themselves, their facial expressions when they talk, their facial expressions when they do not talk, how they act around other people, the way they dress or "do themselves up". In other words, having a one-sided connection with a stranger and creating a character through that connection.
I hope that does not sound as creepy as it looks.
Thank you
Greetings MacCycling. and welcome to the forum.
Psychologists have an official term for that practice: projection. Although in that sense, it's usually negative attributes we "project" into strangers.
Not "creepy" at all ... I'm pretty sure we all do that. Beyond projection I might suggest empathy, attribution (also from psychology), reading (the psychic type), or maybe even character creation or fantasy. Not sure if this answers your question, but it's a start. Hopefully more forum members will jump into this thread.
Thank you for the response and the welcome.
I found this helpful. So, I sent it to my friend and they were not quite satisfied; though, they said it helped.
So, I asked them for their description and they gave me this:
The wonder you have for complete strangers. You watch them and observe them as they go about their lives and understand that even though you are not really playing a part in their life, yet you are there. You are a part of their "story" because you are simply present and you wonder what their story is. . .
Not sure if that flipped my first post upside down or if it just made it more confusing.
Here is a great New York Times article on related topics. They call it "window watching." While this term isn't fully explanatory, it is sufficiently evocative of what you are describing. The article focuses on actual windows, but doesn't limit the term to transfenestral observations.
I like "consequential stranger" to describe the object of the musings. I also suspect the book mentioned, Together Alone: Personal Relationships in Public Places (Morrill) will have some more clinical terms and distinctions for you. It sounds just interesting enough for me to pick up a copy, too.
To me, that's simply 'curiosity' that may or may not be caused by 'identification'. I've experienced this before. There were times that I was away from TV or didn't watch because of some reason. And even sometimes I would see some scenes of a movie or something and I would say, "Who on earth watches that?" But after a while I happened to see a longer scene of it and felt how curious I was to see what would happen next.
MacCycling said
I hope that does not sound as creepy as it looks.
Don't mean to quibble about English in the middle of an interesting discussion, but that sounds off somehow, no? Somehow indeterminate, as though somewhere in there something is still creepy though the intention seems to be for all to be well and good though in the end who knows because the intention could be to sound just like how it sounds, no?
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