Mar 23, 2021
Who Are We To Judge?
Discussing the Social Barriers to Sound Judgement
As social creatures, we make judgements all the time. A judgment is a cognitive process that we repeat in almost every situation to reach a decision or draw a conclusion. We need to make judgements in order to survive, both physically and psychologically. But not everyone makes sound judgements.
As a counselor, one of my roles is to help my clients sort through information. The experiences that we have endured are a major contributor to the judgements that we end up making. To determine the reasoning for that, we have to judge the judgment process itself.
Dual Processing Systems
For several decades, psychologists have been intensely interested in the dual process of decision-making that leads to both small and large judgements, whether it is “what outfit to wear on the first day of school” to “the court is sentencing someone to life in prison”.
Psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West have spent a great deal of time analyzing two systems in the mind when it comes to making judgements: System 1 and System 2.
- System 1 operates with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. It is an intuitive or gut feeling and any actions that occur are split second and automatic. This is the system that tells you to duck when a ball is flying towards you, or jump out of the way when a car doesn’t stop for pedestrians.
- System 2 operations are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration. The judgements are more analytical, slow, and effortful. The individual factors in relevant data and information before coming to a conclusion.
The way that these two processes work together makes up the foundational basis of our cognitive judgement process. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman discusses this interaction well in his recent book.
“System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions.”
The moral and ethical beliefs that we adopt throughout life are not immune to the dual processing systems. Jonathan Haidt found that moral judgements are made predominantly on the basis of intuition and when prompted, we use our System 2 to provide a rationalization for these beliefs.
Conscious and analytical reasoning is oftentimes an afterthought that can end up being problematic and even dangerous at times. Especially when you factor in the anchoring effect.
The Anchoring Effect
The anchoring effect is the tendency to rely heavily on the first piece of information given. If people do not make the conscious effort to question what they have been told, then they will likely go through life repeating what they have absorbed without ever analyzing the information available.
The anchoring effect is used all the time in marketing campaigns and social media these days. If you watch The Social Dilemma, then you can see the way that misinformation spreads easily in our modern times, and it is profitable for big data companies, and political organizations that stand to gain from our faulty judgement.
As they say, “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product.” The consequences of these powerful social media algorithms keep people coming back for more.
People read a headline and make all sorts of assumptions based on it without ever reading the whole article, and they don’t think about the lasting impact of their words. In this way, we can see the anchoring effect causing a cognitive bias that influences people in both System 1 and System 2 processes.
Maybe you make a system 1 judgement based on the first thing you hear, and then make a system 2 judgement to rationalize your system 1 process. People do this all of the time out of pride or embarrassment to avoid seeming “stupid”, and it’s definitely something to be aware of.
Referencing the first piece of information that is received influences our cognitive processes to make generations about the state of the world — and the social revolutions that occur alongside it.
The anchoring effect can have a lasting impact: Have you ever talked to an older relative or friend about the prices of basic commodities back when they were young? In history as recent as the 1960s, earning one hundred dollars per week was decent money.
Other questions to consider are:
- How does someone from this era make sense of inflation and socialist movements?
- How do they use the digital world where news articles are updating by the second when they grew up reading the paper?
- How do they value their online relationships today when in the past they had to search for old friends in the yellow pages?
In The Modern Era
We are consciously and subconsciously aware of the biases that permeate our culture based on our age, gender, nationalities, abilities, and life experiences. This awareness impacts the way that we express ourselves and the way that we judge others. I find that it’s difficult for people to be vulnerable with each other, and accepting of themselves because of the way that judgements form.
Does it occur to us that what we are reading, watching, observing around us is altering our intuitive and automatic reactions? Do we consider the lifespan of this reaction?
We hide our complexity because it takes longer to explain. We repeat what we hear because it’s easier than doing our own research, and the consequences of the lapses in judgement fall on the greater society.
The fear of judgement is rational because the automatic (system 1) response of most people is based on the social norms that have been anchored in their minds. Analytical concentration to understand a situation with compassion and empathy is a system 2 process, which takes longer.
We need to make a conscious effort to activate our system 2, analytical process, regularly. Don’t just judge a book by its cover. Don’t make judgements based only on your initial thoughts, and factor in all of the relevant information that you can. The more consideration that we give to a situation before drawing a conclusion or casting judgement, the more confident we can feel in the decisions we have made.
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