You Suck at Skateboarding!
You’re taking a leisurely stroll across a particularly scenic route in the city park, reveling in the harmonious mix of man-made and natural beauty. It’s a great day, and there aren’t many places like this in the city. There is one annoying thing though…your neck is starting to hurt from keeping your head turned strictly to the left at all times. Eventually you give in, and, despite your best efforts, look slightly to the right. Yep, it’s still there. Any aesthetic appreciation vanishes as you’re greeted by an abomination of a concrete jungle, parked, mockingly, right in the middle of the damn park. It’s the type of thing that can only be borne out of a peculiar impulse to agitate against any and all broadly held aesthetic preferences. Ugliness as virtue? Regardless, the worst part is, you can’t even tell what it’s supposed to be! It’s not clear the designers knew either. It’s just…confusing. Is it a building? A statue? Is it even finished?
Well, at least something of value was salvaged from that mess: it doubles as a skate park. Joyous laughter emanates from within as kids skate around, using its grotesque concrete limbs to do tricks off of. Maybe it was worth it, just for that, you think. Anyway, you’re about to head home when Geriminkus comes hustling towards you. He’s a bit of a funny sight. It’s like if you took the abstract template of a middle schooler and instantiated him directly from it. He’s 12, sports a broccoli haircut, a face full of pimples, and a level of self-assuredness that can only derive from being popular amongst one’s middle school peers.
G..ge..geriminkus? No…he can’t compare
“Yo, do you skateboard?”
“Nope, bu-”
“So you don’t know how to skateboard?”
“…I know a little bit, when I did it for a few months, years ag-”
“Like what? Could you do an Ollie?”
“nah”
“That’s pretty weak. A few months and you couldn’t do an Ollie?”
“yeah, pretty much”
“That’s kinda lame. Idk it seems like you sucked at skateboarding”
“okay”
“yea”
“alright”
With those withering remarks, he leaves, a self-satisfied expression painted across his pimpled face. You hear a few snickers rebound off the walls of the concrete jungle as you continue back home. Undoubtedly, Geriminkus has craftily used his interaction with you to jockey for even more status. You know what? Maybe being a skateboarding park didn’t salvage that stupid concrete jungle after all. But, with all that, Geriminkus is slightly endearing. At least he’s passionate about something. But moreover, his insults don’t hurt you; his negative judgement doesn’t affect you. Why is that?
Why Doesn’t His Judgement Affect You?
My first instinct is to say his judgements don’t affect you because they’re about something you just don’t care about. You don’t feel bad at the prospect of being a bad skateboarder, because you don’t value being a good skateboarder in the first place. That is to say, the contents of the judgement or its intrinsic qualities render it emotionally inert, in this case. That seems true, but I think that’s only a part of it. Imagine if Geriminkus was someone you really respected and admired and he passed judgement on you with the same exact contents. In that case, I think it’s reasonable to think you might feel at least a little bad. I think I would, even though I don’t care about skateboarding. Why is that? Because sometimes it seems it’s the extrinsic qualities of the judgement that matter, namely, who the judge is. In the case where I respect Geriminkus, I’d feel somewhat bad because I probably want him to like me, and thus his negative judgement surfaces the gap in the attitude he has of me vs the attitude I want him to have. Something similar is at play when someone makes a negative judgment about you that you think is untrue, though it still bothers you. You clearly don’t value the judgement’s contents: after all, you think it’s wrong! Yet, the fact that it still affects you is well explained by you caring instead about what it signals about the judge’s attitudes towards you.
So it seems that for negative judgements to have an affect on you, at least one of the two conditions need to be met:
- You independently value the content of the judgment. Say, you really care and are self-conscious about your skateboarding skill such that if anyone made that judgement you’d be affected.
- You value the judge’s attitudes towards you, which the contents of the judgement are a proxy for.
Furthermore, If your entire identity was based on your skateboarding skill, it’s reasonable to think condition #1 would affect you more than if it was just a hobby you dabbled in from time to time. Thus, the nature of these conditions isn’t simply binary in how they affect you: how much these conditions affect you depend on their strength (i.e., to what degree you value the content of the judgement or the attitudes of the judge toward you). The most emotionally potent judgement, then, will have both conditions and to a maximal degree. Practically, I think it’s unlikely that a judgement that rationally affects you is missing either of these, though the relative strength/contribution to the effect may be very asymmetrical and hence worth differentiating.
Going back to the insults hurled at you by Geriminkus, superficially, their content seems to be simply about skateboarding. And indeed, that’s probably all Geriminkus intended, given he values little else other than skating. But, that’s only the explicit content of the judgement. There is also the content that is implied: that you are a slow learner, which may be far more potent than the explicit content. That is to say, the “content” of a judgement should be understood to contain not only what is explicitly stated but also what’s implied.
On further thought, one issue with the Geriminkus example is that it’s very direct. Most often, especially for negative judgements, we aren’t a direct recipient of a judgement. Instead, the judgment is applied to someone or something else, and likely even being intended entirely to be only so, but we recognize a relation between the recipient and ourselves. For example, the contents of a judgement may be about someone else’s poor skateboarding skill, or slow learning ability, which reminds us of ours. Or perhaps someone that you want to have a positive attitude of you expresses approval for skateboarding which now influences whether you want to do it (instrumentally, for affecting their attitudes towards you).
Lastly, we’ve been looking at judgement mostly in the context of negative ones, but everything said equally applies to positive ones as well. So, to generalize, this is really about why others’ judgements of any kind affect us.
A Few Applications
While not capturing the totality of the relationship between others’ judgement and its effects on us, the discussion above nonetheless captures salient aspects of it that have applicability in helping determine what our reactions should be. The applications are mostly ad hoc as I was originally just curious about what exactly makes us care about certain judgements, rather than any application, but I can think of at least two ways this could be pragmatically relevant.
The first way it helps is in evaluating whether the effects of someone’s judgment should essentially just be ignored. Let’s say someone snidely remarks that you’re fat. You don’t think you are (while being confident in your own assessment) andnot caring if that person has a positive attitude towards you. What reason do you have to be affected_?_ I don’t think there is one! Now, it may be a simple fact that you just are affected nonetheless, even though none of the conditions apply. Doesn’t that mean I should amend my crappy theory to be able to explain why you are affected, rather than just implying you shouldn’t be? No, because the real intention behind my theory is to explain when we are, in some sense, intelligibly, rationally, or actionably affected by others’ judgments. In this case, though you are affected, it doesn’t seem like there’s anything that can be done about it! No amount of information or reasoning can change that. Some part of your subconscious, biological hardware, or something that isn’t at the level of your conscious, reasoning self is the cause of that. It’s like when you have a bad dream where a loved one dies and you wake up in a sour mood, which doesn’t dissipate even when you are acquainted with the fact that everything is fine. You can’t “reason” with such a predicament. Paradoxically, the best thing you can do is acknowledge you can’t reason with it and try to ignore it. Being affected by someone’s judgment despite neither condition being fulfilled is much the same. Hence, the theory helps in such cases by allowing you to easily identify when you should try to reason with the affects of a judgement vs when you should just try to ignore it.
The second way it’s relevant is in helping you recognize what exactly is justifiably affecting you, thereby avoiding crucial misattribution. Going back to Geriminkus’s remarks, let’s pretend they were truly withering and you are now thoroughly devastated. The nature of such things is that it may not be immediately clear why. Well, we’ve now got a little checklist or framework by which to analyze why you are affected. Is it because you value the judge’s (Geriminkus) attitudes towards you? Let’s assume that you do a little bit, but that it doesn’t explain the extent of the effect. So, then is it because you strongly care about the contents of the judgement? It would seem so, but what within the contents specifically? The explicit statements about your skateboarding ability? Or the implied ones about being a slow-learner? Let’s assume it’s the latter. You’ve now successfully pinned down exactly what is affecting you and can think about how you want to address it. Maybe the only resolution is improving at the way in which you learn, or perhaps, while you genuinely care about it, working on it is not worth the tradeoff given limited time and you’re just going to have to live with that. Either way, you’ve successfully exited the zone of confusion, where you don’t know why you feel the way you do, which has emotional overhead by itself. And, most importantly, you’ve avoided thinking what actually affects you is the lack of skateboarding skill, which you may have even attempted to wastefully ameliorate, all while the actual issue remains unaddressed. There is more to be said about misattribution, which we’ll continue exploring in the next section.
Avoiding Parasitization of Yourself
In the example above, we considered misattribution at the level of the contents of a judgment. But there’s also misattribution at the level of not realizing that what you actually care about (or care about far more) is the judge’s attitudes and not the contents of the judgement. Here, the misattribution runs the risk of your values, aims, or goals being unduly or unnecessarily parasitized and replaced with the judge’s ones. Going back to the Geriminkus example, let’s stipulate he was someone you admired and respected. Furthermore, let’s say in actuality you don’t care about the contents of his judgement for their own sake (which, hypothetically, would be known after some reflection). If, after being affected by his judgement, you misattribute the cause of your devastation to the contents of the judgement (say, the explicit ones), as that might superficially have the clearest causal chain to your emotions, learning skateboarding might suddenly seem appealing. In such a case you risk doing or valuing something without actually knowing the true reason why: a parasitization of your goals, aims, and values for Geriminkus’s. To dramatize, but not in a wholly incorrect way, you risk becoming a zombified vessel through which Geriminkus’s ideas live.
To be clear, doing or instrumentally valuing something for the purpose of obtaining someone’s positive attitude towards you, or for wider social approval, or anything similar, isn’t the actual issue here. I’m granting the legitimacy of such goals both in this specific context (i.e., trying to get Geriminkus to have a positive attitude of you) and in general. The issue is doing so without knowing that’s what you care about; you don’t have recognition of your actual aims and self. The better response in such a situation would be to recognize what you actually seek is the judge’s positive attitudes, and, working backwards from that as a goal, see how best to achieve that. This can help avoid a myopic focus on contingent judgements and the suboptimal actions that follow, such as learning skateboarding when you have no other reason to do so_,_ thereby investing effort in something that is disconnected from your wider goals, aims, and values. Now, It may be that, unfortunately for you, skateboarding is actually the best way to obtain that goal and you’ll just have to consider that when deliberating on what to do. But, and this is probably more likely in real world scenarios, there’s an intersection between what would obtain the judge’s positive attitudes of you and what you find independently valuable for other reasons, which better serves you as a course of action.
Contrived Examples and Concluding Remarks
Surely we won’t misattribute what about a judgment causes an effect on us as egregiously as these examples! I mostly agree. After all, these are contrived examples to illustrate a general point. Most people probably wouldn’t make such mistakes if put in these exact scenarios. However, the world is awash with judgments and judges, the cumulative effects of which can be far greater in their ability to parasitize, deform, and subvert what’s in our best interests than even these contrived examples.