Beh225 Evaluation and Judgment

Evaluation and Judgment

We evaluate people through the observation of their mannerisms. A person’s physical appearance, the way they dress, their body language and their attitude all contribute to our overall evaluation of them. Upon first meeting a person, we assign them to a pre-fabricated category, called a schema. For example, if meeting a person for the first time, they are wearing a business suit; we might automatically assign certain attributes to them, such as professional, efficient, possibly even wealthy. Not all of these are necessarily accurate. This person may very well be wearing a business suit because they are unemployed and interviewing for a new job. There are also factors that influence our perception of a person. Physical attractiveness may cause us to be more forgiving of a person’s flaws. An unattractive person may be treated differently; people might magnify the severity of their flaws or be more critical of their personality.

As we age and gain experience, we tend to associate certain characteristics with one another. This is due to the fact that our brains are lazy. We automatically reuse data that we have already processed in order to reduce the workload on our brain. Rather than thoroughly analyzing and evaluating each individual person, we instead compare them to people we have met in the past. Basically, if a few character traits match, we assume that they are the same and that all of their character traits match. This can lead to some fairly serious errors in judgment. I think that this is one of the root causes of such things as racial hatred. People meet or hear about a person of a certain race or background who dresses a certain way and does terrible things. They then assume that everyone who is of the same race or background and dresses the same way must also do terrible things. This is known as stereotyping and is actually a very unfair practice, though even I am guilty of it.