Week 6 - Judgement

Before I ever took a course in communications, I felt that it was possible but hard for people to not pre judge other people. I learned that is not the case after I got to college. Trenholm discusses different types of schemata in Chapter 3 and one of them (Person Prototype) we as humans will prejudge people without even meeting, talking to, or listen to them. When we see people, we judge them before we even hear them speak regardless if we judge them from the start and automatically assume we know everything about them, or if we assume very little about them. In either case we made a pre-judgement and in most cases it can be considered wrong. Pre-judgement can both be negative and positive, if we were to be set up on a blind date and we see our date for the first time, we automatically judge them by the way they look instantly. I feel that this is a natural thing we do as humans and we cannot help ourselves. I believe that we can try to work on not judging people prior to actually meeting them but in all honesty, it cannot go away.

In my Interpersonal Comm course we learned that no matter what we do, when we see people we automatically judge them even if we just pass by them when we are walking. Something interesting that I learned, and completly agree with, is that when we engage in a conversation with someone for the first time, within 5-10 minutes (maybe even less) of the conversation, we start to evaluate if the other person is up to our own standards of whether or not we would want to have sexual activity with them. Sometimes we do not assess if we would want to have secual intercourse but we ask ourselves self-consciously if we would want to and also if we were to try and pursue it, would we succeed. We do not do it on purpose, but even the most loyal people in committed monogomous relationships will at one point have it cross their mind.

I feel that in order for us to better ourselves and to start pre-judging people positivley rather than negatively, we should just keep an open mind and not always judge a book by its cover. Someone who dresses in baggy clothing and smokes cigarettes everyday are not alaways going to be drug dealers, high school drop outs, thugs and gang members. If we can possibly reserve judgement until after actually talking to someone, stereotypes would be reduced and each indivdual would not automatically be classified in a stereotype because the stereotype can be wrong.
Trenholm elaborates a little bit on this schema by stating, "Person prototypes are idealized representations of a certain kind of person....Although prototypes give us a quick take on someone, they ignore individual details and can lead to stereotyped responses."