Wednesday, October 15, 2008
How we judge...
yesterday i was walking down the la hall on campus and i ran into my friend. She was talking to this military guy all dressed up, with the hat and everything. THe military guy was telling her that he can tell what people are like by looking at their hand writting. i was interested so i jumped into the conversation and asked what he thought about my handwriting. he said i was a mess and that i probably am indicisive and have a lot of posters up on my wall. i thought this was really random but he was right!! i have tons of posters up and pictures that clutter the walls. he said you he could tell by my writting because i was inconsistent and switched back and forth from cursive and regular. THis experience made me start thinking about how we judge other. DO we look at eachothers hand writing, car, clothes, shoes or hair style and judge them. Are we right in this judgment? in my case the military guy was right on.. but is this always the case? Will our first impressions and judgment help or hinder us? do any of you have experiences with misjudgments?
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6 comments:
Personally, I think you can tell a lot about a person by the way they dress, and the way they look. In most cases you can tell if a person is goofy, or serious just by the clothes they wear. It's not perfect, and probably not always fair, but often times I find it really is quite accurate to who they really are.
I agree with you, Cameron, but the key words are "often times." We should be observant and try to understand people, but we run into problems, I think, when we categorize people based strictly on appearances. The handwriting example is pretty interesting, though, isn't it? Have you seen that segment on the Tonight Show when the guy looks at someone and makes assumptions about him/her, then asks him/her questions to see if he is right? It's pretty funny. Certainly we try to project an image of ourselves by the way we dress, do our hair, speak...it isn't so very different from the discussion we had about tattoos, actually.
I'd like to know what my handwriting tells people, because it's usually in all caps. I got that habit from drawing cartoons since age 3.
Before DNA became a valuable tool in forensic science, handwriting matches acted as substantial evidence against someone. Watch David Fincher's film, "Zodiac" and notice that a pretty high priority suspect was deemed "not the Zodiac" based on handwriting and polygraph testing.
Nowadays, we have brain scanners that sense activity in parts of the brain where "lying" comes from, and somebody was actually sentenced for murder due to this technology.
i just watched Zodiac last week, crazy. anyways i think that we cant help but judge people. its automatic and involuntary. treating people badly because of those judgments is the real problem and it is wrong. sometimes people dress a certain way so that they can fit into that group, so they kind of want to be judged by how they dress. other times people [like me] dont like to be labled and get annoyed when someone assumes they act like other people who look like them. thats how racism is. i think more often than not our judgments of people are inaccurate.
I agree that you can judge people SOMEWHAT from clothes, hair, etc., but not always. I also have watched the movie "Zodiac" (it is one of my favorites)where they let the suspect go based on his handwriting. They used to have to judge people by such things, but now we don't have to. We have other tests which we can use. In every day life though, often times it is neccessary to judge someone by how they look.
I think that it is natural for us to judge one another. We automatically look at each other and think, "could i be friends with that person? would we have anything in common." Often times i will judge people this way and sometimes like the military guy i will be correct, and others i am completely wrong. To me though if i am gonna take time to judge someone i need to take time to get to know them. I mean we judge at first but after getting to know them sometimes our first judgment is completely altered.
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