Meta-Level Judgments

We make judgments to try to help ourselves , but sometimes they cause us trouble. Our meta-level judging faculty can be trigger-happy. This is the source of the problem for many people who regret their emotional responses. In certain circumstances they know intellectually that their feelings are not appropriatethat they represent an overreaction of some sort but they find it difficult not to pull the trigger.

But how do we judge? Lets answer this question with a real-life example: you. As you read these pages, your brain is taking in information. At the same time that you are absorbing the meaning at the object-level , you are busy at the meta-level assessing whether you like it, or agree with it. You are making judgments. I am doing the same thing as I am writing it. ˜˜This sounds too simple, either you or I might think. I personally just reread something and thought, ˜˜That was a poorly written paragraph. My wife recently read a part of the manuscript and while reading spoke her judgment out loud: ˜˜This is unclear.

All three statements above are judgments. They were made at the meta-level of consciousness. They may look like factual, object-level judgments, but they are meta-level judgments. For example, when someone says, ˜˜This sounds too simple, the word too reveals that, in this case, simplicity is undesirable. Or, when my wife says something is unclear, there is an implicit statement: ˜˜And thats not okay.

Judgments can actually be broken into two categories: factual judgments and value judgments:

Factual judgments are about the object-level world. They can be disputed, of course. But they can also be proved or disproved. Factual judgments are usually reliable. And if people can resist the temptation to depart from the world of facts into the world of generalizations and value judgments, there would be far fewer sources of tension in the world. ˜˜Nothing but the facts, maam, is the police officers plea for holding back judgment while all relevant information is collected.
Value judgments, however, contain an extra component. They are meta-level creations that import things like goodness and badness, and desirability and undesirability. When we make value judgments, we are no longer pointing to facts; we have created a new entity to join the facts: our opinion about them.

Sometimes people hide value judgments inside factual statements. For example, ˜˜Bob has been late for four morning meetings in a row sounds like a statement of fact. But the people hearing the comment made by Bobs boss know that inside the observation is a judgment that equates to ˜˜and that, my friends , as we all know, is simply not okay. And of course were all aware of statements made about people (their ethnicity , body type, marital status, etc.) that seem factual on the surface but actually hide prejudicial value judgments.

The value judgments we make about people and situations are often the cause of our problems. If we could stop ourselves before making them, we would have a better chance of avoiding the behaviors that define the six types described in this book. We would also avoid hurting the feelings of others.