is unconscience Judgement possible?

[Doc. Josh]

I was pondering a while on the thought of judgement and how that influences someones decision. for instance is it possible to not form any opinion at all about someone. for example you walk down the street and see a youg person wearing a certin type of clothes and walking a certin way automaticaly i form an opinion of that person and catagorize them somewere in between. I also believe people have the ability to change that opinion but still stays somewhere in that person. You look at a homeless person and form an opinion rather good or bad, but still pass judgment on him or her. Even so small as to a way someone might look in appearence as the opinion you make. i look at someone well dressed clean cut i automaticly assume he/she keeps a clean home, car and lives a very miticulas life. and same goes for an oppisite person i see them driving a out dated car not very groomed and i assume they are in poverty and live a rough life, with none or little education. That may be the furthest from the truth but it is still an automatic opinion. Anyone who can (enlighten) me or prove or disprove me please oblige me.

[TonyMcC]

As the old saying goes - first impressions count!

[lemur]

i look at someone well dressed clean cut i automaticly assume he/she keeps a clean home, car and lives a very miticulas life. and same goes for an oppisite person i see them driving a out dated car not very groomed and i assume they are in poverty and live a rough life, with none or little education. That may be the furthest from the truth but it is still an automatic opinion. Anyone who can (enlighten) me or prove or disprove me please oblige me.

This is something I also wonder about. Do the 'clean' people have meticulous clothes, car, home, etc. because they keep it all clean by their own labor or do they just spend money to get new things and pay others to clean and maintain them? If so, that may explain your association between poverty and messiness. Now, consider if you would take the 'clean' person and the 'rough' person and give them the same disposable income, how long would it be before the clean person appeared like the rough one? Sometimes I have found that wealthier, better educated people can be the worst housekeepers while meticulous people can be very anti-intellectual - so I don't know if that is another stereotype that's worth comparing with yours.

[Zarnaxus]

This doesn't just go for people either. If you see a dog running loose all full of dirt and ungroomed, you will think differently of it than you would for a dog that is sitting well behaved and is groomed nicely. Our immediate response to pass judgement on something happens for every object we see. We assume. We predict. If we see a man with bifocal frames, we assume that there are glasses in them, and that they help him see. We make our own model of the situations we encounter based on our own experiences and knowledge. It's impossible to look at something and immediately jump to a conclusion based on information or ideas we have never crossed before.

[thinker_jeff]

Is unconscious judgment possible?

 

Yes, it is more than possible, in most cases is inevitable. Why? Because our brains have established lots of emotional memories.

You have some memories about some young kids' behavior and the clothes they wore when you saw their behavior. These memories associated with the emotions when you saw them, such as surprising or aversion. Therefore, your cognitive memories have associated certain emotions, which are emotional memories.

Emotion can be triggered unconsciously in the most condition. When you see a new kid who wears the same kind of clothe your remembered, such memory triggered the associated emotion unconsciously. This emotion will make your impression about this kid biased to your impression about the previous one. This is where the unconscious judgment comes from.

When you go to a new country with totally different culture, you won't have much of unconscious judgment because there are very less emotional memory in your brain.

 

 

 

 

[Realitycheck]

You can always make a conscious decision that it is impossible to know anything without irrefutable facts, you know, like a cop. Of course, you can always make an educated guess as well, if you are so inclined, however, acting on guesses statistically becomes unproductive over time.

[Marat]

Perceptual psychology has established that we always approach new data with a strategy for optimally processing it and deriving meaning from it. Informally you can confirm that for yourself by observing the way you look for something missing: You don't just survey the room with an open mind and a soft focus, but instead you superimpose the template of the missing object on the jumble of shapes and colors you see in front of you, always looking with the predetermined strategy of matching images received to the image sought.

 

All thought is in this sense an intelligent use of stereotypes. Would we be able to see trees if we looked at a forest without ever having had our brains pre-equipped by language and culture with a certain disposition to unite objects primarily by shape rather than color, or if we did not already have th word 'tree' as a pre-existing stereotypic template into which we could feed and organize the vertically arrayed impressions of brown, black, tan, and grey uneven solidity?

 

So since all normal thinking is ultimately based on prejudgment, it is only to be expected that this operates on higher levels as well, so when we see a tall, thin man with a short haircut, a stiff bearing, a saber scar on his left cheek, and a monocle over one eye come into the office of an international criminal lawyer in 1946, we don't wonder whether he is a Caribbean limbo dancer.