Jane was a big believer in the seven-point status check. Upon meeting a man, she would scan him up and down, estimating his worth and divining his soul from such indicators as the shoes and watch he wore. Jane was religious about her status check. "I don't have to eat the whole pie to know what it tastes like," she declared. I doubtlessly failed her test. This pie hasn't worn a watch since he gave up working hard.
I have a status check of my own, but it's a tad less material. Old friends might recognize my criteria, for they probably came in the form of questions back when we were new friends. These are the only four things I need to know in order to know a person. Everything else, I think I can extrapolate from this.
Who are your friends and enemies? What is the worth of the people whose approval you value? Are they evil? Are they pointless, preening, narcissistic airheads? That is, do the wrong people like you? Do the wrong people dislike you? This suggests that you lack moral courage. And that suggests a crippling need for approval that people will exploit. A corollary: who are your heroes? Seeing who you admire tells me your values—who you'd like to be. If it's just Jesus or your parents, that indicates your world is pretty small. If you have no heroes, that tells me your world doesn't exist much past your own skin. And if your heroes are Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and Rumi, that tells me you're from Seattle.
Who was your big heartbreak? This criterion admittedly comes from observer bias. If you've never had your heart ripped out by its roots and stuffed into a Cuisinart on Puree, then you missed out on a part of life that is, in my estimation, crucial to fully developing humility and empathy. Life's buzzsaw has a way of taking off our rough edges. Or back to my original metaphor: having been pureed myself, I would die before I'd toss someone else into the blender. How about you?
How do you lie? We all lie every day. "I'm fine," we tell the cashier. "You look great," we tell the relative. But when I lay out my Burmese Liar Trap, do you tell me lies of omission? Do you insult my intelligence with misdirection? Or with bushels of superfluous detail designed to make the lie sound more real? Or with subject changes, such as criticisms of me? Do you try to win arguments with eleventh-hour, deus ex machina introductions of new "facts?" Do you so try to control people's perception of you that everything that comes out of your mouth is at least 37% bullshit? Beyond technique—which is largely a function of your intelligence and your respect for others' intelligence—there's genre. If you lie about what you do for a living, we know you're insecure about your professional worth. If you lie about your whereabouts last night or the gender of who you were with, we know you were, at best, sneaking around. And if you lie about doing something, we know it's more important to you to be thought a certain way than to actually be that way.
How do you react when others are harmed? When someone is cruel to the defenseless—say, a child or an animal—do you stop them? When you see a friend royally screw someone over, are you closer to renouncing the friendship or to saying "Well, they've always been nice to me" and retaining it? These are tests of your moral center. People with moral centers protect the defenseless and don't require that evil be perpetrated on themselves before they're moved to act.
I've shown you my measures of a person; now show me yours.