Pre-Judging and Expectations

How many times have we encountered situations where in people will tell you “Stay away from that guy, he’s no good” or “He’s ok, you’ll surely like him/her”. Then even before we even met him/her in person we started pre-judging him? Then how many times did it end up that the person we expect to dislike wound up as one of our best friends while the guy that we are expected to like turned out to be just a casual friend or at worse became an enemy or foe. Why does this happen?

When someone tells you “Don’t hang out with that guy, he’s this and that”, whether we like it or not, subconsciously we begin “to expect”. We start drawing pictures in our mind of all the devilish and evil things he/she will do to us. A lot of times it came to a point that we haven’t even met them yet we already started to hate them. How unfair indeed for them! Fact is every individual is unique and personality-blending is a case to case situation. How many times did we avoid these persons even before we get to know them? How many times before did I pre-judged? Of course some of them turned out to be true but the chances of them turning out otherwise are just as equally possible.

Ok, let’s get back to analyzing the case. Once we start to build up expectations, we have in mind a person who’s not only unpleasant and disgusting, but someone who doesn’t deserve our attention. And when on certain circumstances we are forced to meet them, we start to fear them. Yet when we did finally met them, we end up going home telling ourselves “Hey, he/she isn’t that bad, he/she seems ok to me.” Why? Because at the back of our mind all worst scenarios are already played out (which of course was brought about by our unrealistic (and unfair) expectations), so that by the time we get in real touch with them nothing could be worse than what we imagined. The same thing the other way around, when someone tells us “he’s ok, he’s super nice (heard that line before?)”, then we begin to picture a saint or somebody just as holy, that by the time we get to meet them all his virtues are already played out in our mind and we end up going home telling ourselves “Well, he’s ok, but not as good as advertised (of course the reason is because we expected too much).” That’s unfair as well because he’s human just like us and it’s our too-much-expectations that’s ruining his image in our eyes.