In the past I found it was very easy to judge people just based on they way they look. Perceiving others came automatically with judging people. This was based solely on their looks and came through chronically accessible constructs. I would group people by the way they dressed or talked. This would allow me to make quick judgements about pretty much everybody. As you go through life and meet a larger variety of people, you learn that everyone comes form a different backgorund and it gets harder and harder to group similar looking people. This leads me to a quote from the text.
"Cognitive complexity is a mark of maturity and is necessary for good communication. (Trenholm, 2008)" I feel like having more life experience has led me to beleive that you can't judge someone without knowing them a little bit and hearing about their own life experiences. This allows us to make these judgements more fair to everyone that we interact with. The thing about cognitive complexity is it takes into account that everyone is different. Differentiated observation takes this into account and notices that everyone has had a different combination of life experiences that makes them who they are. This has to be taken into account with everyone you meet.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Like you, and probably most people, I too judge/categorize people that I meet based on their looks or how the talk. While I think this is somewhat essential so that we can have a starting point when we get to know them, it kinda overlooks their uniqueness. In the multicultural class I am taking right now, the book that we are using emphasizes the creation of new categories so instead of compartmentalizing people into say, five broad categories, we have ten or twenty categories which makes us have to look deeper at them to figure out where they fit best. By doing this, we are still technically judging them, but hopefully not quite so superficially.
ReplyDelete