Quotes About Judgment

your looks—that

And please punish Jenny. You could strike her dead. Amen." Jenny blinked. "I'm no expert on this, but… are you supposed to pray for someone to be struck dead?

What is embarrassment but a relative of fear? You've been seen—caught—at being imperfect.

They could talk about shallow things without judgment and deep things without self-consciousness.

It takes experience to know what is a catastrophe (Richard Hughes, 'A High Wind in Jamaica')

Anyone who has ever scanned the bookshelves of a new girlfriend or boyfriend- or peeked inside his or her medicine cabinet- understands this implicitly; you can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face.

Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions . . . by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.

The answer is that we are not helpless in the face of our first impressions. They may bubble up from the unconscious - from behind a locked door inside of our brain - but just because something is outside of awareness doesn't mean it's outside of control.

understanding the true nature of instinctive decision making requires us to be forgiving of those people trapped in circumstances where good judgment is imperiled.

We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail.

Some people look like they sound better than they actually sound, because they look confident and have good posture, once musician, a veteran of many auditions, says. Other people look awful when they play but sound great. Other people have that belabored look when they play, but you can't hear it in the sound. There is always this dissonance between what you see and hear (p.251).

We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy. If I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy.

I've been in auditions without screens, and I can assure you that I was prejudiced. I began to listen with my eyes, and there is no way that your eyes don't affect your judgement. The only true way to listen is with your ears and your heart. (p.251)

our power of thin-slicing and snap judgment are extraordinary.but even the giant computer in our unconscious need a moment to do its work.

Don't look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger's world.

when you remove time, de becker says, you are subject to the lowest-quality intuitive reaction

Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.

knowledge of a boy's IQ is of little help if you are faced with a formful of clever boys.

The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding.

he waits for the kid to decide whether to pull the gun up or simply to drop it - and all the while, even as he tracks the progress of the gun, he is also watching the kid's face, to see whether he is dangerous or simply frightened. is there a more beautiful example of a snap judgment? this is the gift of training and expertise - the ability to extract an enormous amount of meaningful information from the very thinnest slice of experience.

Pronin calls this phenomenon the "illusion of asymmetric insight." She writes: The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.

We are bad lie detectors in those situations when the person we're judging is mismatched.

Puzzle Number One: Why can't we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face?

The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew the least about him personally. The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours.