Judgement day

Recently, I had this discussion with Padma about how we judge people. During the course of the conversation, some interesting points came up.

The point of separating action from motivation was discussed at great length. Should we judge the act alone or consider the motivation for the action? The first case is very clear. If we can come up with a 2-partition of the set of all actions, it is a simple problem to decide if an act is right or wrong.

Alas, life is not as simple. We often consider the perceived motivation/reason for the act in our judgement. Waking up a friend at 3 a.m. in an emergency is acceptable, but to discuss a football game is probably not. Therefore the judgement function's signature looks more like:

JF: {set of all actions} X {set of all motivations} --> {right,wrong}

However, this opens up a pandora's box. The true motivation of the person committing the act cannot be ascertained. All we have is a guess (albeit intelligent) as to what the motivation might be. We are limited by our communication faculties. An incorrect guess could therefore lead to an incorrect judgement.

Why do we do something that is clearly so error-prone? Is it that part of the brain that encourages us to drink and drive also encourage us to judge on flimsy evidence? Is there a part of the brain that decides to go against all that is logical? I strongly suspect that we all WANT to be wrong sometimes.

Now that we have lifted the discussion to a higher level of abstraction, let me elaborate on my pet theory. I strongly believe that all humans have a tendency to be masochistic. This is so fundamental to our nature that it cannot be explained by other characteristics. It is precisely this tendency that forces us to do the illogical occassionally - indulge in acts that can only hurt (physically or mentally) ourselves. Don't believe me? Just watch xtreme sports.

But I digress. Another interesting point, which I'm sure is reasonably obvious, is that as we grow older, the turnaround time to make a judgement is reduced considerably. We devise mechanisms to make the task easier. In our minds, we form categories or types of people and associate judgements with types and then place new people into those categories. We believe that the 'categories' will cover some kinds of motivations. "Oh, she's the jealous, bitchy type." or "He's a bossy, sarcastic type,". This way the number of possible motivations for each type reduces. This reduces the search space for our judgement, enabling us to 'execute' faster. However, this can reduce the accuracy even further. What is very interesting is that we choose to increase speed rather than accuracy!

Also, Padma Varadarajan has kindly consented to pen her thoughts on this blog henceforth.

--k2