Judging Vs Modelling

"Judging a person does not define who they are... It defines who you are"

I loved this quote and I am pretty sure we all can easily agree to it. However, does it mean we should never try to know other people? Or if we try to know, would we be branded as being judgmental? I want to shed some light to these questions.

I want to differentiate between three terms to make my point here. Prejudice, Judging and Modelling.

• Prejudice - Subscribing to a belief due to established stereotypes without any respect to evidence. For example: Long back (even now actually) many people were prejudiced about the whole white supremacy stuff.

• Judging - Inferring something about a person (often negatively) with one or very little data points. For example, once, when an acquaintance of mine failed to materialize a plan, I inferred her to be unreliable. When my other friend pointed it out, I did realize I was being judgmental.

• Modelling - Inferring something about a person (negative or positive) based on many data points keeping biases to a minimum.

I am of the opinion that being prejudiced or judgmental is bad while modelling is not only good but very necessary. In fact, biologically we have a predisposition to model, without which we could not have survived till now. Just imagine, if cavemen failed to model how a tiger attacks based on many pieces of evidences, I would not have been in a position to write this post nor you would be in a position to read it. I was recently trying to understand why we like art. Actually, it is bewildering because liking art does not make any evolutionary sense. What's really happening is, art is about pattern recognition and therefore it is tapping into those networks which are primed to identify patterns or make models. Just see the below picture. If I tell there is a dog here, you mind starts groping into the details.

And you will have a Ahaa moment when you identify the dog.

So modelling was very important back in the days of hunters and gatherers and is important now. Scientists' job is to model the world around us. Mathematicians and statisticians model about many phenomena. Weather modelling (however unreliable) is still very essential to prepare people for calamities. Extending this line of thought, I would argue, people who are social animals, need to model about others for healthy relationships. However, one needs to have the rigor in order to minimize biases while modelling.

So modelling judging is bad and modelling is good. Where is the catch? In my experience, at times, my nature of modelling has got (mis)construed as being judgmental. I am NOT saying I am never judgmental. I am prone to judge here and there because of the inherent biases I have. But at times, I have noticed, my modeling has been mistaken for being judgmental. Guess those people were judgmental about me being judgmental :D

P S. How do I know that those people who I referred above, were being judgmental about me being judgmental and they were not modelling? It is also possible that I could be judgmental about they being judgmental about me being judgmental. Okay enough, I will stop the recursion here :-)