Judgment

[hay82]

When you meet someone new and start to get to know them, you make assumptions about them, I don't think its possible to avoid judging people even if you want to.
No matter how open-minded you are, you will still have some sort of prejudice toward the unknown and I think this will influence the way you might judge a person, at first at least.

What do you think you judge the people around you by?
Do you think its possible to avoid judging people?

Judging people doesn't have to be a bad thing, but often can be.

 

[Martin]

I think you're right, you can't avoid it. As you said, not at first.

I think the first thing everyone will judge a person on is physical apearance (barring, of course, the occasions in which you first meet someone, say, over the phone - I'm talking about physically meeting). You can claim you don't do it, but then you'd be lying. Period.

After that your opinion of said person can depend on many many variables - what he says, where he lives, what he does for a living, the car he drives, etc .. but judments are made continuously. That is, until those judgements are corrected (refuted) by the actual truth, which is found out simply by interacting with said person. That way, gradually, all you assumptions (judgements), however many, will be overtaken by the actual truth; reality kicks in.

The up-side of all this - people will always be able to surprise you.

Cheers

 

[bobbyburns]

if we can't be free to judge each other based on our preferences then the terrorists have won.

 

[sanyuja]

True... we cannot avoid judging people. We will have some prejudice or the other. My very first impression of a person is made by his physical apperance. I know physical appearance doesnt count, but still!
Then, the image is given shape by the way he talks, some remark that he makes, the place he is from, his profession (sometimes) and many parameters.
This image is sometimes corrected and revisited until the image is solid. Once that image is built completely, I use this to predict how he would feel/react under some situation.
I have been right about my judgment of many people. But, there have been instances where I was proven completely wrong. So, my judgement skill is also being improved parallely

 

[RitalinKid]

You get an impression of someone almost immediately. Their posture, their accent, the words they use, the clothes they wear, hell, whether or not they remind you of someone, all these things (and more) come together with your life experiences to help you start forming an opinion. That's installed thanks to evolution to help you stay alive. It's "intuition" like in the book that novella posted about in a thread. There's an automatic formula that gets applied somewhere in the back of your head with you hardly even knowing. It changes with time and experience. That's my opinion anyway.

I think that using the word "judging" to describe the reaction gives people the feeling of having their hand caught in the cookie jar. Forming a strong opinion immediately upon meeting someone on the totality of their being is a bad thing, but it isn't a bad thing to make assumptions into someone's basic character in one or a few brief meetings. I have to do it when I interview people for jobs, and you know what? The older, more experienced guys are better at it than I am.

 

[Motokid]

It's interesting to read this thread, and the thread that wabbit started about the question of what you do for a living and why people ask it, and then read the thread started by novella about how first impressions are usually pretty close to being correct most of the time.

I was hoping I could include links to those threads here but I'm obviously not that good with those kinds of things. Maybe somebody could help me?

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (this is novellas thread in non-fiction)

Defined by our job (this is wabbits thread in general chat)

The important thing is that the judgment of people is a continuous process. Don't let one particular thing, or act, or circumstance be the sole basis for your judgment. Allow your judgment to grow and form over time.

 

[novella]

Being a word person, I would hesitate to use the word "judge" in this context, but rather choose "assess" or "form an opinion."

"Judgment" had the connotation of good v. bad, innocence v. guilt, worthy v. unworthy, of pronouncement, and of finality. I see some of this point in RitKid's post.

Most often these assessments are in flux, changing as we get to know someone better. To that extent, they are ultimately based on "truth" (I would choose the word "experience"; see Martin's post), not on prejudice.

As to the main question, what is this assessment based on?, in a forum like this it's based on how and what the person communicates, how (overly) sensitive they are, how flexible, how acute, how astute about humor, how incisive on the topic, how kind, how generous to other posters, how insecure, how opaque or transparent (this is how I would characterize online "honesty" because I don't believe anyone should give up too much personal online), how free they seem, how creative, how unique, how much fun they are to talk to.

In person, there are all those other factors people mention, but in RL, kindness counts. If I detect kindness in a person, it overrides many faults on the spot.

 

[Motokid]

"Do you think its possible to avoid judging people?"

Totally impossible. Call it judge, assess, forming an opinion...

Every bit of information you recieve is processed and evaluated consciously and subconsciously. Even making a decision to not form an opinion is based on a judgment that you don't have enough information to form an opinion.

It's mainly a self-defense mechanism I believe. There's so much need to protect yourself you have to be cautious at first, and gradually let your opinions of people and events refine itself over time and through observation.

 

[sanyuja]

It's mainly a self-defense mechanism I believe. There's so much need to protect yourself you have to be cautious at first, and gradually let your opinions of people and events refine itself over time and through observation.

This is one of the reasons why we (atleast, most of us) like infants, right?. They dont know what kind of world they are in. They dont know how bad/evil the world is.
So, they dont need to have any self-defense mechanism and _hence_ they dont "assess" people. They might, in their own way, but atleast not like us.
Thats why we dont think twice before approaching an infant.

 

[RitalinKid]

Motokid (and anyone else interested), Jared Diamond covers this topic in The Third Chimpanzee. He also talks more about it in Guns, Germs, and Steel. You'll notice me referencing those books quite a bit becuase they delve into the tendencies of humans over the last 100,000 years. According to Diamond, humans were not so friendly to each other at one time, so it paid off to be able to look at someone and assess whether or not this person you just happened across is going to kill you. He backs these views up with acccounts from people who observed the cultures of people that had been cut off from the rest of the world for 10,000 years.

 

[Themistocles]

I really hate how accurate my prejudice can be. It's sad, really, that people are so willing to be pigeonholed and modify their character so that any extraneous elements that do not fit into the niche are conveniently amputated. I'll always prefer the awkward, shapeless, ill-defined blob of the eclectic.

 

[hay82]

I had a teacher who wanted to prove to us that we can't avoid interpreting things. He said this, "don't under any circumstances think about a pink elefant". Of course everybody pictured a pink elefant.
Every information we get we interpret based on our background and knowledge. This will often lead to a wrong picture.

After the pink elefant thing I found it a bit fun to make people uncomfortable by saying stuff like "Don't under any circumstances think about me naked"

We can't stop our mind interpreting what it picks up, we can only hope to rectify our wrong impressions.