Bluffs riddle the humorous times you experience. People often jokingly attempt to prank us by bluffing. They’ll exaggerate, embellish, and overplay certain truths in an effort to analyze your reaction to those truths. Your reactions to others’ bluffs can be an education on your how you deal with life’s surprises.

Bluffs are thereby a sort of test on the part of the bluffer. These individuals send a mistruth into your understanding of reality and aim to see how you react to that false information. They’ll take notes whether you comically react to their bluff, or whether you angrily exit a conversation due to hearing something you didn’t want to hear.

Bluffs are low risk activities on the part of the bluffer from the social perspective. People are able to witness your potential reaction to a certain piece of information which you believe is true when it isn’t. For this reason, bluffs are frequently used as a tool to test the truth out on others. This article is about your reactions to the bluffs that people voice. It aims to educate you on a certain social use of bluffing which is regularly overlooked.

They May Be Testing Out a Truth in the Form of an Obvious Bluff

Bluffs seem to be a tool used by those unconfident in how the truth will be accepted by the ones around them. In attempting get a taste for the reaction of those who listen, they’ll package what seems to be the truth in a package which is presented as a bluff. Their bluff thereby, isn’t meant to actually trick you, but rather to leave the door of falsehood open.

If you, as the audience, don’t react well to their bluff, they always have the option of calling their own bluff. They’ll tell you that they were bluffing, and will say what actually is the truth was nothing more than their attempt to prank you.

If you react well to this bluff of theirs, they’d have a stake in not calling their own bluff. Though their presentation may have been a casual one, the truth they packaged as a bluff would have been well perceived by their audience. At that point, they’ll forget about this truth needing to be a bluff, and will go on to pretend there was no bluff at all.

This use of jokes / bluffs is an interesting one to think about from the audience’s perspective. If you suspect there to be truth behind some people’s alleged and obvious bluffs, it may be in your best interest to control your reaction to these tests of theirs. As they’ll be testing out a truth packaged as a bluff, you’d have to decide whether you want to be accepting of that truth or stand against it.

Your good friend’s apparent bluff about joining the local drama club for instance, may be his desire to test how you’d react to his interest of doing so. Should you react in ways which voice your opinion about drama clubs being emasculating, this friend of yours may be dissuaded from voicing his real interests around you.

Be tuned into when truth may be packaged as a bluff in others’ dialogue. Bluffs often exaggerate a truth that’s at the core of the bluff. In the example above, the friend may have simply been interested in joining a drama club, but bluffed about actually doing so. Though he in fact didn’t join, his act of being interested in it can be condemned by your reaction to him joining it.

Should you have said, “That’s awesome, I didn’t know you like acting,” he may have still unveiled that he was just bluffing, but your positive reaction to his bluff would tell him that he’s safe to open up around you.

Your reactions to others’ alleged bluffs are thereby important in educating them on how you’d react to some of their uncomfortable truths.

Stay away from voicing just how surprised you were once their bluff is called out. A common trap we fall into is reacting well to the bluff, only to then expose your true opinion when the bluff is called out.

For example, you may have reacted well to your friend telling you he’s joining the drama club. Then, as he called his own bluff and said he was only kidding, you may have breathed a sigh of relief and exclaimed, “You scared me for a second!”

Your reactions during, and after, the bluff in question are important to keep tabs on. Someone unveiling they were only bluffing before may very well be bluffing for real this time. Try to react positively to others’ bluffs which carry with them potential uncomfortable truths. Even after the bluff is called out, remain consistent in your reaction to the bluff when it was presented as the truth.

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