Are you looking for a better answer than talking to them to explore what they believe and why they believe it?
Certainly there are better answers, but I don’t know of a better way to reach those answers than through the exercise of doing precisely that, and the hope that over time my generic model of people broadens to include the communities that at first seem alien, confusing and discomfiting, so that they start to seem… well, human, I guess.
To some extent, that does involve modeling a faceless group… or, rather, a lot of different and more-or-less overlapping faceless groups. It also involves constructing those models out of my experiences with individuals, and grounding out my thinking about those models in terms of those individuals. There’s nothing wrong with that as far as I can see.
Are you looking for a better answer than talking to them to explore what they believe and why they believe it?
Certainly there are better answers, but I don’t know of a better way to reach those answers than through the exercise of doing precisely that, and the hope that over time my generic model of people broadens to include the communities that at first seem alien, confusing and discomfiting, so that they start to seem… well, human, I guess.
To some extent, that does involve modeling a faceless group… or, rather, a lot of different and more-or-less overlapping faceless groups. It also involves constructing those models out of my experiences with individuals, and grounding out my thinking about those models in terms of those individuals. There’s nothing wrong with that as far as I can see.