Judgement is a skill that is very necessary to have in certain situations in life. Our judgements affect a lot of things in our life. There are three levels on which we judge people. As you might have already guessed from the title, they are - action, intent and context. In today’s blog, let’s explore how we use these incorrectly and how we should actually use them to correctly judge people (and ourselves).
The first level is action. We see someone doing something, and we judge them solely based on that. This is the simplest and the most common form of judgement. Almost all of social media is this form of judgement. We look at someone’s life’s highlight reel in which they might be travelling somewhere and we judge everything about them. We also feel jealous of these people because their life is perfect. We see some rich person doing philanthropy and we judge them to be a really good person. We see a random influencer showing off their Lamborghini and we judge that they might be very rich. There is not much depth here. We just look at a person doing something and we form an opinion about them.
The second level is intent. We look at what a person wants to achieve by the action they take. During my engineering college years, we had a course that required us to do social work for credits. Many students in my class chose beach cleaning from the available options. Most of us were doing it simply to fulfill the course requirement, not out of genuine concern for the environment. One day while we were cleaning, a school had a field trip to the same beach for their own cleanup efforts. The young students were very serious and diligently picked up and disposed of waste. On another occasion, a local MLA visited the beach with a large entourage of people carrying cameras and setting up video equipment. He picked up a single plastic bag, posed for photos and videos with it, and then left. Now, I’m not here to debate the motivations of the MLA or my classmates and myself. My point is this: the school children, the MLA, and we students all took pictures. An outsider viewing these photos would likely perceive all three groups as environmentally conscious. But is that judgement accurate just based on the photos? I doubt it. I believe we often judge others, and even ourselves, based on these superficial observations, much like that hypothetical outsider. However, a person’s underlying motivation is far more significant than their outward actions. We need to factor in the intent of the person while judging them. Judging solely based on action is not enough.
I would like to give one more example to prove my point about intent and why it is different from action. Let’s consider two people. Imagine the first one as a soldier who is currently in his camp, surrounded by enemy soldiers, hopelessly outnumbered. He is looking at the photo of his family, one last time. Let’s also assume that he has an option to run away from the battlefield for the sake of our example. He remembers his training, he remembers how he was taught to put his nation first. He knows that he is going to die if he goes out to battle, running away will save his life. But still he marches against the enemy soldiers and starts killing them one by one. In the end, he is hit by a bullet and dies. The second person is a student who fails an exam and decides to end his life. Now I would like to ask you, can both of these be classified as suicide? I don’t think so. The soldier is said to be a patriot. Why? In my opinion, it is the intent that separates the two. Both of them knew that they are going to die. Both of them willingly decided to die. The willingness or the knowledge is not the factor that separates bravery from suicide. It is the intent.
Along with intent or mindset of the person being judged, another crucial component is context. In traditional sense, context means the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood (took this definition from Google search). To understand an action performed by a person, the context is a combination of the intention of the person and the external situation in which the person is. But the context I am discussing here, takes it a step further. It studies the origin of the intention as well. This origin of the intention is often located in the upbringing of the person being judged.
The upbringing the person has had is arguably the biggest contributor to the opinions, the intents, the motivations and the actions of the person. A child who is subject to a lot of harsh criticism and unnecessary comparison with other children may grow up to be an under confident and anxious adult. A child who is subject to a lot of pampering may grow up to be a weak adult. A child who is praised a lot may grow up to become a narcissist. A child from an extremely strict religious family may grow up to become either an atheist who completely rejects religion or an adult who is blinded by religious beliefs. Obviously these generalizations might not be completely true for all cases, but broadly speaking, we could expect these to be true. Not just childhood, context includes cultural and religious influence on the beliefs of the person. Context involves anything and everything that is relevant to shaping the intentions of the person. To understand the motivations or the mindset of a person, the context is very important.
Understanding context converts judgement into empathy. I don’t need to tell you how much we need empathy in our society. But let’s say you don’t need to empathize with the person in question. There are still many benefits of understanding the context of the person. One of them is that you can predict what that person’s next action (and intent) is going to be given the situation. This means that you will almost never be very surprised by the opinions or the actions of the person. We tend to become defensive when a person has opinions against ours. If we have already predicted those opinions, our reactions will be in check. Again, I don’t need to tell you how useful this skill is.
In my opinion, the root cause of most of the incorrect judgement we see in people lie broadly in two categories. First, judging based on just action, which is many of the times not enough information to judge. Second, correctly trying to understand the intention, but incorrectly projecting our own context on their intention i.e. projecting our own subjective beliefs on them. Intentions are very subjective. Something that is wrong for you might be right for the person being judged. This makes very difficult to stay objective and not bring our own context while judging them. While this is very difficult to avoid, we can at least try to minimize it. The solution, as usual, is to consciously think about how we are judging and if we find any flaws, act to improve them. The main thing to keep in mind is that the actions taken and the body language of the person often hide hints of their intent and to some extent their context as well.
Hopefully you keep these things in mind when you are trying to judge someone (consciously or subconsciously, someone else or yourself), and hopefully this article makes you a better judge.