Smart or Judgmental?

I guess most people are proud of their aptitudes in identifying the personality types of people around them by observing their behaviors and habits. After all, who does not want to be skilled in the magic of instantly knowing everything about a newly-met person, or predicting an acquaintance’s behavior under certain circumstances?! This aptitude is usually found in a group of smart people known as socially smart, street smart, or a trendier name such as emotional intelligence adept.

Here, I’d like to talk about the side-effect of being smart in dealing with people and their personalities. I use Judgmental as a term to describe the negative side of this aptitude. Precisely, a smart person is judgmental when he rushes to conclusion using limited number of observations or “signs”. In the first sight, such definition of judgmental sounds positive, and to benefit from the “less is more” rule, in which I believe; however, this rule has some prerequisites that are not usually satisfied in the process of perceiving personalities. That’s why a judgmental mind leads to false conclusions.

Smart people are capable of recognizing very tiny details in the behavior of people around them. They capture these “signs” and use their smart minds to analyze the signs and transform them to a higher level piece of information: Facts. The smart mind works based on a set of pre-defined facts and trained rules. I’d like to use terms “analysis” and “perception” when the smart mind is running consciously or unconsciously, respectively. The judgmental mind kicks in when the smart mind “overweighs” the sign, rules, and facts while analyzing or perceiving.

The judgmental mind is blind to the latterly arrived signs that oppose the former signs. Already built up facts based on the former signs, the judgmental mind misses the opportunity of reexamining all signs side-by-side. It sees the reality in one way, but not the other, only because it happened to receive particular signs sooner.

The judgmental mind sees no difference in the validity of an articulated fact and a genuine one. Therefore, it rejects any requests to scrutinize an articulated fact or review the reasoning process. It believes so hard in its pool of facts, and at the same time, feels so proud of its capability in finding the “truth” using minimum amount of input, that it is blind to the reality.

To summarize it, I think smart people are prone to making mistakes by the trap of judgmental mind for the following reasons:

1. Trapped by rules: As explained, smart people are skilled in collecting signs and clues, and packaging them as facts and models. The articulated facts are saved to be used and referred to in the future analysis. After a while, the person is trapped in the web of facts and beliefs he weaved around himself. The web of facts, categories, and models disconnects the person from the reality and fuels the vicious cycle of creating erroneous facts and models.

2. Rush to conclusion: The egoistic mind in smart people expects them to make a conclusion in a short period; otherwise, it reminds that their intellect might be in question. Therefore, they do not have the patience to wait for further evidence, and they tend to rush to a conclusion without a second thought.

3. Lack of empathy: Smart people witnessed their outperformance in compare to people around them for years, so they are not usually well-trained as empathetic beings, capable of being in other people shoes. They only see one version (their own version); therefore, they miss to recognize the hidden causes behind the signs they observed in people. In most cases, an observed behavior is meaningful only if it is considered jointly with some background information.

4. Missing the big picture: Smart people are capable of capturing every tiny sign around them. Therefore, they are surrounded by myriad of detailed signs, which mostly could be just a “noise”. Smart people are so busy with processing huge amount of, possibly low-quality, data they collected that they are prone to miss the big picture.

Furthermore, I believe the same argument is valid in most cases that any sort of “analysis” is involved. Smart people are prone to be trapped by their judgmental minds; thus, make mistakes when analyzing a situation at work, their relationships, social and political issues, etc.