Judgment
As human beings, judgment is a huge part of our everyday life. When the average person thinks of the work judgment, they often think of negative things. I would argue that judging is not always a negative action. The ability for an individual to judge between right and wrong is an example of how judgment can be positive.
As a class we were assigned to split into groups of three and record facts about another individual within our group. After we had gathered a large enough sum of facts, we were assigned to write a paper describing if our initial judgment of the person turned out to be true based on the notes we took.
I was in a group of three with two females, Corinne Mitrzyk and Katelyn Elizabeth. As much as we men try to fight it our brains are visual. The first thing we tend to judge on someone we meet, male or female, is that person’s physical appearance. I was assigned to write about Katelyn. I happen to be one of those guys who cares about what’s on the inside of and individual rather than their physical look. But, I am a stereotypical guy and tend to make initial judgment based on physical appearance.
Based on Katelyn’s appearance I “judged” her to be a simple girl with a laidback personality. Katelyn was wearing sweets and a tie-die shirt which made me think she might be the kind of girl people jokingly stereotype as a hippie.
When Katelyn began to tell me about herself and some of her goals my judgment seemed to be pretty accurate. She told me that her favorite color was tie-die. She said she is the kind of girl who dresses for comfort rather than style. She also said she would like to someday join the peace core and dreams of living in Africa doing social work. All these things fit the stereotype I had given her of a hippie.
Then Katelyn began to tell me some of her hobbies. They did not involve transplanting trees, rescuing animals, or any other activities that might be associated with being a hippie. Katelyn told me she loves to ski, swim, and works at a gym teaching gymnastics. Katelyn was now describing activities that one would classify as jock behavior. This judging thing was becoming a little more complicated than I had expected.
After Katelyn had finished telling me about herself I realized I had only judged a small part of her correctly. This assignment has opened my eyes to how inaccurate judging individuals can be until you spend some time getting to know them. I had only spent ten minutes getting to know Katelyn and my initial judgment had already been proven false. Thanks to Katelyn and this assignment I am going to make a legitimate attempt at waiting to judge an individual until I have enough knowledge to do so.