Streamline Training & Documentation: The Impulse to be Judgmental

Monday, May 21, 2007

The Impulse to be Judgmental

I've discussed healthy and unhealthy ways of judging people in a previous post. It's a subject that comes up from time to time in my conversations with colleagues, most recently last week over lunch with a college classmate who works at a large insurance company. In the wake of that conversation, I was particularly alert to what Shankar Vedantam, a favorite journalist, had to say on the subject in today's Washington Post.

Vedantam embeds his discussion in the context of political battles in Washington, which is not something I want to deal with, so I'll extract the material directly related to research on the double standard that all too often governs how people judge others vs. how they judge themselves.

The issue Vedantam highlights is actor-observer bias:

When we do something wrong ourselves — drive 60 mph in a 40-mph zone, for example — we explain our actions in terms of situational factors. We say we are speeding because we are running late, or that we got held up at work. But when we see someone else do something wrong, we are far more likely to link the behavior to the nature of that individual.

Vedantam references Scott Plous, a Wesleyan University social psychologist, who explains how this bias

[has] to do with how our perceptions inform our judgment — when we act, our perceptions are tuned to our own situation. When others are acting, however, we are not automatically aware of all the things in their situations that could be influencing them.

Experiments have shown that our tendency to see the actions of others as dispositional — reflecting their innate nature — persists even when we are explicitly told otherwise. Psychologists have conducted experiments in which they asked some volunteers to take an unpopular stance while others were asked to judge the volunteers. Even when people knew the unpopular positions had been assigned to the volunteers by an experimenter, they still tended to say that the volunteers genuinely held those positions.

This phenomenon is food for thought for anyone aspiring to be fair in personal and professional dealings.

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Labels: Critical thinking, Decision-making, Motivation, Professionalism, Respect

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