I have a bad habit of judging other people that I see too much. I do not judge people by their appearance, but I judge them by the way they act and think. But, I am wrong to do this. No one should should judge anyone. Only God, if you believe in religion, can judge a person. I cannot see in the heart of a person and tell if this person is bad and this person is good. I have not taken a consideration into the life of the people I have judged. Although I am open-minded, atleast I try to be, I often forget that I cannot understand someone else totally because I am not that person. I do not know what it is like 100% to walk into that person shoes and be in his/her position. A lot of times, I read something in the newspaper and say this person is stupid. But, I have not even given a thought to why this person felt the way he/she did before he/she did a negative action. Life is funny in that way: I think I know it all, but in reality, I know very little. I need to learn to but more thought into my thoughts before I judge someone else, regardless of whether it is mentally or verbally. I know that I never will be perfect on this subject, but I hope that as I grow and go to college I will not judge someone before taking a hard look at myself and what it must be like to be in this person's situation.
Hopefully I can stop judging others
By Isaac Terry - Posted on June 5th, 2007
Judgement is a part of life, it is not only your right to judge, but it is essential to your survival. Designating judgement as the exclusive preserve of a higher power that may or may not exist is not only idealistic, but even at that it is a hopelessly flawed and naive ideal. What you are really condemning is poor judgement.
What catagorizes good judgement varies in regard to available information, and it is still not fool proof to any degree, but it is the best deduction you can establish with a particular given frame of reference. As you correctly identified, empathy is a huge part of good judgement. The ability to place yourself in somebody else's shoes is intergral to good judgement, but only when you have enough information to do this properly; you can't really put yourself in another person's shoes if you don't know which shoes are theirs. In that scenerio you have to exercise a certain amount of experience based knowledge that will be piqued by various cues.
People are always claiming that judging people by the way they dress is shallow. It is not, and people who say this are only demonstrating a shallow understanding of semiotics and how we communicate as visual creatures. If you see somebody who is wearing a ski-mask running out of a building and jumping into a car and driving down the street at speed, you don't stop and think maybe they are cold and running to their car to get warm and driving fast down the street because they're in a hurry home from work to catch their favourite TV show. The visual cues cause you to connect the dots in order to assess the person you've just seen and how you should behave.
If I stroll through Harlem in a white robe with a sheet over my head carrying a cross, I can hardly lament the fact that I get hassle because most of the people there don't understand that what I'm really doing is celebrating a love of Christianity in a manner traditional to parts of Spain. I have to be accountable for the possiblity that my visual communication will be misinterpretted due to context and the visual vocabulary of the people I'm likely to deal with.
This logic extends across the board, despite the extreme analogies. If you see a guy dressed like a Goth, they are actively communicating a message, they didn't accidentally end up dressed like that. When you make judgements of them based on what you know about Goth culture, you are merely assessing the visual information you have been presented and reacting to it based on what you know. What you know is dictated by knowledge and experience, and the varying degrees of both will make the difference between bad and good judgement based upon visual cues.
A goth is generally aware of the negative messages their appearance will communicate to specific audiences and they choose to take on that burden. The same goes for a guy who wears head-to-toe Gap outfits. The Goth will most likely be judged negatively at first glance by the Gap brigade, but it cuts both ways, the Goth's will sneer just as quickly at Gap-boy. The fact is that people are free to wear what they like and communicate visually in any manner they choose, but, and that's a big BUT, they must also be willing to accept the consequences that go with their choice of attire, be they good or bad.
If you think about it rationally, what other means do you have of putting yourself in a stranger's shoes if you don't know anything about them and have never spoken to them? The answer lies in visual cues and you're ability to interpret them; things like the way they dress, their body language, their walk, their stance, their gestures etc. Humans are highly visual creatures, our decision to wear clothes is not purely functional, it represents an entire visual system for communication. We style our hair, we wear jewellery, we get tatoos, and so on. Even our eyes differ from most other animals in the pronounced nature of our iris and pupil, this is because we communicate heavily with eye movement and gesture, something other animals don't do.
So in a nutshell, judgement is a good thing, everybody does it, some are just better than others. It allows us to interact more effectively with those around us when done properly, which is why you have poor judges of character and good judges of character. You never hear somebody lamenting the fact that somebody they know is a good judge of character now do you? Regardless of whether they are religious or not.
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I am the people my mother warned me about.
Everyone judges everyone else. We know it wrong, but it's just something that happens. I catch myself thinking bad or good things about people as soon as I see them. It's a big part of life and the challenge is trying not to let it control the way you act or feel about people.
-Matt