Suspicion

The story goes that Cao Cao, on the road, fleeing in misery to take refuge, met an acquaintance who received him warmly and let him come home to sleep for the night. Late at night Cao Cao heard the host sharpening a knife, and reasoned that the host had spent the whole day only pretending to entertain him warmly in order to lull him into sleeping peacefully, and that late at night he was sharpening a knife to kill him and hand him in for the reward. So Cao Cao took his sword and killed the entire household, until he saw the pig that the host had tied up, about to be slaughtered to feast him, and understood what had happened. Cao Cao felt a little remorse, but justified his excessively suspicious action with the famous saying (which also did harm for generations afterwards): better that I betray others than that others betray me.

A father was playing, chasing his child in a park, when a distant descendant of Cao Cao shouted that he was kidnapping a child. So a muddle-headed hero ran over to stop him, was scolded, and the hero went home, took a knife and stabbed the father to death.

All of us tend to infer, must infer, know how to infer and guess everything from a few sketchy initial data. The nature of a human being with intelligence is to infer like this. If we did not infer, we would not be human. But inferring is not yet concluding. To conclude we need more complete data.

For example, if we hear that there is a quadrilateral with one pair of equal opposite sides, we have 5 inferences in all. Either it is an isosceles trapezium, since it surely has a pair of equal opposite sides; or it is a parallelogram, which has two pairs of equal opposite sides; or it is a rhombus, which has four equal sides and two pairs of equal opposite angles; or it is a rectangle, which has two pairs of equal opposite sides and four right angles; or it is a square, which has four equal sides and all 4 angles right. But we don't yet know which conclusion to choose, because the initial data are not enough to conclude; knowing only that there is at least one pair of equal opposite sides is not enough to reach the next conclusion, and we have to find more data before we can conclude exactly what shape the quadrilateral is.

Likewise, when we sit daydreaming at the window late at night and suddenly see a woman hurrying into the deserted alley across the street, we will have at least 3 inferences. Either that woman is doing something improper, going out in the dead of night like this; this is inference in the direction of attributing bad things to others, a new version of Cao Cao. Or we infer that the woman has an emergency, such as a relative suddenly falling ill so that she has to go out in the night to buy medicine or ask for help; this is inference in the direction of attributing good things to others, with a tendency to kindness. Or we infer neutrally, with no harm in it: there must be something that she has to go out late for, that's all.
Nearly all of us come up with one of three inferences: Bad, Good, Neutral. Then we conclude on the spot, without waiting for more data. A woman going out this late must be a depraved, loose woman.

Nearly ninety-five per cent of the time we conclude in the direction of attributing bad things to others, and karma is made from here.
There are 3 kinds of inference, and we tend to prefer choosing the bad kind.
A less intelligent person infers only one kind and concludes at once. An intelligent person infers in all three ways, then, according to their morality, chooses which one to draw the conclusion from. A very intelligent person waits to find more data before concluding.
A wrong conclusion creates karmic obstacles for later lives. We should be careful when guessing, inferring and concluding as we look at everything in this world.