Two kinds of judgment
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Two kind of judgment
There are two different ways people judge you.
Something judging you correctly is the end goal. But there’s a second much more
common type of judgment where it isn’t. We tend to regard all judgments of us
as the first type. We’d probably be happier if we realized which are and which
aren’t.
The first type of judgment, the type where judging you
is the end goal, includes court cases, grades in classes, and most
competitions. Such judgments can of course be mistaken, but because the goal is
to judge you correctly, there’s usually some kind of appeals process. If you
feel you’ve been misjudged, you can protest that you’ve been treated unfairly.
Nearly all the judgments made on children are of this
type, so we get into the habit early in life of thinking that all judgments
are.
But in fact there is a second much larger class of
judgments where judging you is only a means to something else. These include
college admissions, hiring and investment decisions, and of course the
judgments made in dating. This kind of judgment is not really about you.
Put yourself in the position of someone selecting
players for a national team. Suppose for the sake of simplicity that this is a
game with no positions, and that you have to select 20 players. There will be a
few stars who clearly should make the team, and many players who clearly
shouldn’t. The only place your judgment makes a difference is in the borderline
cases. Suppose you screw up and underestimate the 20th best player, causing him
not to make the team, and his place to be taken by the 21st best. You’ve still
picked a good team. If the players have the usual distribution of ability, the
21st best player will be only slightly worse than the 20th best. Probably the
difference between them will be less than the measurement error.
The 20th best player may feel he has been misjudged.
But your goal here wasn’t to provide a service estimating people’s ability. It
was to pick a team, and if the difference between the 20th and 21st best
players is less than the measurement error, you’ve still done that optimally.
It’s a false analogy even to use the word unfair to
describe this kind of misjudgment. It’s not aimed at producing a correct
estimate of any given individual, but at selecting a reasonably optimal set.
One thing that leads us astray here is that the
selector seems to be in a position of power. That makes him seem like a judge.
If you regard someone judging you as a customer instead of a judge, the
expectation of fairness goes away. The author of a good novel wouldn’t complain
that readers were unfair for preferring a potboiler with a racy cover. Stupid,
perhaps, but not unfair.
Our early training and our self-centeredness combine to
make us believe that every judgment of us is about us. In fact most aren’t.
This is a rare case where being less self-centered will make people more
confident. Once you realize how little most people judging you care about
judging you accurately – once you realize that because of the normal
distribution of most applicant pools, it matters least to judge accurately in
precisely the cases where judgment has the most effect – you won’t take
rejection so personally.
And curiously enough, taking rejection less personally
may help you to get rejected less often. If you think someone judging you will
work hard to judge you correctly, you can afford to be passive. But the more
you realize that most judgments are greatly influenced by random, extraneous
factors – that most judging you are more like a fickle novel buyer than a wise
and perceptive magistrate – the more you realize you can do things to influence
the outcome.
One good place to apply this principle is in college
applications. Most high school students applying to college do it with the
usual child’s mix of interiority and self-centeredness: inferiority in that
they assume that admissions committees must be all-seeing; self-centeredness in
that they assume admissions committees care enough about them to dig down into
their application and figure out whether they’re good or not. These combine to
make applicants passive in applying and hurt when they’re rejected. If college
applicants realized how quick and impersonal most selection processes are,
they’d make more effort to sell themselves, and take the outcome less personally.
Exercises
1. Look at the title of the passage and check the
two kinds of judgment you expect to read about.
1) guilty or not guilty
2) fair or not fair
3) objective or subjective
4) an end goal or a means to something else
Now read the text and check your ideas.
2. Choose the best summary of the text.
1) There are two types of judgment which are made about
people. Most of them are not concerned about the type of person we are, but are
made for some other reason, such as to provide members for an organization,
like a team, a company or a college. So if we are not chosen these
circumstances, we shouldn’t feel hurt about it.
2) It is more useful to think of someone who has to
select people (for a job, for example, or for admission to a college) as a
customer rather than as a judge. This is because there is never anything «personal»
about selecting someone for a prize, or a team. Rather, the process of
selecting people is more like a business transaction, and it is vital not to
make a mistake.
3) We are constantly involved in judging other people.
Most of the time this is not in any formal situation, such as a law court, but
informally, at work or school, or even when we are looking for a partner to
date. But there are two types of judgment – good or bad – and if we make a
wrong judgment we will probably regret it.
3. Answer the questions.
1) What have court cases got in common with
competitions?
2) Why is it natural to think that all judgments are
about us as persons?
3) Why is hiring someone like dating someone?
4) What does the writer hope to show by using the
example of choosing a team?
5) Why isn’t it important if the wrong decision is made
in a borderline case?
6) Why is it important to think of a selector as a
customer rather than as a judge?
7) Why should people take rejection less personally?
8) Why is it important not to feel hurt if you are not
selected by a college?
4. Work in pairs and discuss the questions.
1) Do you agree with the main idea of the text that
most judgments are not about individuals? Why / Why not?
2) Do you agree that choosing a partner, or even
dating, is like hiring someone to work for you? Why / Why not?
3) Do you agree that most young adults still have a
child’s mix of interiority and self-centeredness?
4) What influences you when making judgments about
people?
5. Translate the sentences into Russian.
1) The first type of judgment, the type where judging
you is the end goal, includes court cases, grades in classes, and most
competitions.
2) It’s not aimed at producing a correct estimate of
any given individual, but at selecting a reasonably optimal set.
3) Our early training and our self-centeredness combine
to make us believe that every judgment of us is about us.
4) And curiously enough, taking rejection less
personally may help you to get rejected less often.
5) If college applicants realized how quick and
impersonal most selection processes are, they’d make more effort to sell
themselves, and take the outcome less personally.
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