Your mate or a friend says something you think is completely goofy. You brush it off. A stranger tells you the exact same thing. Now what?

That’s something that drives me nuts!  I say something and my family brushes it off (yeah, sure).  However, if someone else says the exact same thing, they’ll believe it as if it were gospel (did you know this?).   Or I can tell a family member how to do something and they won’t believe me.  However, if someone else comes along and says the exact same thing, it’s as if they never heard it before.

Why are we more inclined to listen to a stranger than a family member?  It could be because we don’t expect it.  After being around someone for a while, we become used to them; we “know” them.  As such, we can anticipate what they’ll do next (consciously or subconsciously).  Therefore, if there were something we didn’t know, we assume our mate/friend doesn’t know it either, otherwise we’d have known it by now.  In fact, we don’t even listen to them.   We hear them speak, but since what they’re saying isn’t what we expect, it “doesn’t register”.