The Risks of Judging

Twenty years ago I was facilitating a management seminar for a small group of junior and midlevel leaders in a large, brand- name company. The session was partly dedicated to helping the group develop their hiring skills. I lost that client abruptly after my session on how to choose which candidates to interview for a job opening.

How did that happen? I remember saying to the group that when you run an ad for employees you will build a pile of resumes that will need to be sifted through in order to short-list candidates worth an interview.

˜˜There is a role for a certain amount of rational discrimination here, I said. ˜˜Its useful to go through the resumes and weed out people who simply dont understand the importance of putting forth a good image. So, go through the stack and when you see a document that was poorly photocopied (in those days, only hard copies were submitted by candidates) or that has spelling mistakes, move it to the ˜no way pile.

The HR person who had procured my services got in touch with me after the session and said, ˜˜Im sorry, but I dont think our values are aligned. We are totally against discrimination in this organization.

˜˜But discrimination is how people learn, I replied. ˜˜We see patterns and we become prejudiced!

Her response was that she couldnt afford to engage the services of someone who espoused any kind of discrimination.

Ironically, this person was employing a prejudice against me. She moved from what I said about screening resumes and extended it to a bunch of other areas. In her head was the belief that people who say certain things are more likely to say certain other things. Im against all stove tops and shes against people who overtly encourage certain types of discrimination.

Certain triggers, when pressed, dictate conclusions that, though not guaranteed , save time and trouble. For example, when someone in authority says something, we are more likely to conclude that it may well be true. When we perceive that something that is not widely available is becoming in short supply, we extend the pattern to judge that we have a problem if we dont act quickly. When people do us favors, we extend the pattern to think that they can be trusted. When people have a few things in common with us, we extend the pattern to the possibility of friendship. These triggers speed up our judgments and, though they do present a risk of being wrong, simplify our lives.

Whether we compare the present with an ideal or with what unfortunate thing might happen, we have laid the basis for value judgments. The main point is that our value judgments may not be rational. They employ inductive logic in that they move from pieces of individual evidence to generalizations about all such cases. But we dont have all the possibilities accounted for. The risk of this kind of reasoning is the possibility of misapplying the generalization to a new case.

My son can eat a hot dog with ketchup and mustard smeared all the way up his arm without giving a hoot. There is no ideal in his mind about good smeared on skin, so for him, good is not a problem. Further, there is no belief that good is a bad thing, so seeing new good is not a bad thing. My son is free of value judgment when it comes to the intricacies of hot dog consumption. If you called my son a ˜˜slob over the matter, it would be extending the smear onto his humanity, and it could hurt (though in his case, I doubt it). People generally dont like being labeled.

A woman on my team asked me for some feedback on her performance. I said I thought she was intellectually lazy. She was deeply hurt. Her morale dropped. She felt she had been pigeonholed. Its true that her own vulnerability led to her problem; after all, she didnt have to run with the label and assume it was hers forever. But I learned a lesson. My statement was a little stupid. Even if I believed it was true of her, I should have known that there was a big risk in saying it. In fact, I could have communicated the issue with much more finesse. For example, I could have said, ˜˜Marissa, Id like you to spend more time doing personal research so that we can hear some of your own thoughts on some of these subjects. Youll get such a pleasure if you read juicy material that sheds a light on some of these topics! And if you share it with us, well all be better off.

So our meta-level thoughts are very busy passing judgments in order to save us time and trouble and to help us survive and thrive. We ought to be grateful. But they also engage us in our problems. The six types discussed in this book are plagued by the effects of their judgments. So they need to make their judgments in context. The realization that judgments can be premature will make them a little less susceptible to their allure.