Our instruction about the way negative association works seems to have been primarily undertaken by our parents. Remember how they are always warning us against playing with the bad kids down the street? Remember how they said it didn’t matter if we did nothing bad ourselves because, in the eyes of the neighborhood, we would be “known by the company we kept.” Our parents were teaching us about guilt by association—and they were giving us a lesson in the negative side of the principle of association. And they were right. People do assume that we have the same personality traits as our friends
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