Saturday, October 3, 2009
Is it possible
I do think it is possible to percieve others without judging or catergorizing them. I just believe you have to be one very special person to pull it off. For instance when a person in front of Seven Eleven approaches me and is dressed in ragged clothing I automatically assume three things. The three things that I assume are that this person is homeless, a drunk/drug addict, and is going to ask me for money. I do not think that makes me a bad person just a person using my past experiences to predict what is going to happen. I do think that we can make better judgements about people more fair. I have started to try and do this in my everyday life. I am in a fraternity and every semester we try and recruit new members to join. We have events and then offer bids to join the fraternity to guys who show interest. Every semester the guys in my fraternity will start making judgements about the new guys based on only seeing them once or twice. I have been spending this semester to try and take the negative judgements some of the guys make into positive judgements. One guy was catergorized as being annoying and I flipped it around and started saying I like how much of an effort he is making to meet new people. I noticed that after I said that the judgements about him being annoying stopped. I do think that a few people making positive judgements about someone can change how others percieve them. If I have never met someone and everyone says she is a real mean person I automatically go into the meeting with a negative judgement about her. If I instead heard that she is a cool laid back person I am more likely to have a positive perception of this person. So in order to combat negative judgements we should all just make positive judgements.
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I like how you took the initiative in the situation you described by sticking up for the one person was labeled “annoying” and turning the qualities that may be considered annoying into something positive. It really isn’t fair to judge people we don’t know or have met only a couple times but we continue to do it and I don’t really think it’s possible not to. It’s important to have people like you who can go against these judgments people have labeled on others so that they can have a fair chance. Isn’t it interesting how once you tried to change the label then the others started to see your vision of him as well? It’s good that your friends were open-minded enough to see your opinion of him and were able to give him a fair chance as well.
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