April 2007  
  
There are two different ways people judge you. Sometimes judging you correctly
is the end goal. But there's a second much more common type of judgement where
it isn't. We tend to regard all judgements of us as the first type. We'd
probably be happier if we realized which are and which aren't.  
  
The first type of judgement, the type where judging you is the end goal,
include court cases, grades in classes, and most competitions. Such judgements
can of course be mistaken, but because the goal is to judge you correctly,
there's usually some kind of appeals process. If you feel you've been
misjudged, you can protest that you've been treated unfairly.  
  
Nearly all the judgements made on children are of this type, so we get into
the habit early in life of thinking that all judgements are.  
  
But in fact there is a second much larger class of judgements where judging
you is only a means to something else. These include college admissions,
hiring and investment decisions, and of course the judgements made in dating.
This kind of judgement is not really about you.  
  
Put yourself in the position of someone selecting players for a national team.
Suppose for the sake of simplicity that this is a game with no positions, and
that you have to select 20 players. There will be a few stars who clearly
should make the team, and many players who clearly shouldn't. The only place
your judgement makes a difference is in the borderline cases. Suppose you
screw up and underestimate the 20th best player, causing him not to make the
team, and his place to be taken by the 21st best. You've still picked a good
team. If the players have the usual distribution of ability, the 21st best
player will be only slightly worse than the 20th best. Probably the difference
between them will be less than the measurement error.  
  
The 20th best player may feel he has been misjudged. But your goal here wasn't
to provide a service estimating people's ability. It was to pick a team, and
if the difference between the 20th and 21st best players is less than the
measurement error, you've still done that optimally.  
  
It's a false analogy even to use the word unfair to describe this kind of
misjudgement. It's not aimed at producing a correct estimate of any given
individual, but at selecting a reasonably optimal set.  
  
One thing that leads us astray here is that the selector seems to be in a
position of power. That makes him seem like a judge. If you regard someone
judging you as a customer instead of a judge, the expectation of fairness goes
away. The author of a good novel wouldn't complain that readers were _unfair_
for preferring a potboiler with a racy cover. Stupid, perhaps, but not unfair.  
  
Our early training and our self-centeredness combine to make us believe that
every judgement of us is about us. In fact most aren't. This is a rare case
where being less self-centered will make people more confident. Once you
realize how little most people judging you care about judging you
accurately—once you realize that because of the normal distribution of most
applicant pools, it matters least to judge accurately in precisely the cases
where judgement has the most effect—you won't take rejection so personally.  
  
And curiously enough, taking rejection less personally may help you to get
rejected less often. If you think someone judging you will work hard to judge
you correctly, you can afford to be passive. But the more you realize that
most judgements are greatly influenced by random, extraneous factors—that most
people judging you are more like a fickle novel buyer than a wise and
perceptive magistrate—the more you realize you can do things to influence the
outcome.  
  
One good place to apply this principle is in college applications. Most high
school students applying to college do it with the usual child's mix of
inferiority and self-centeredness: inferiority in that they assume that
admissions committees must be all-seeing; self-centeredness in that they
assume admissions committees care enough about them to dig down into their
application and figure out whether they're good or not. These combine to make
applicants passive in applying and hurt when they're rejected. If college
applicants realized how quick and impersonal most selection processes are,
they'd make more effort to sell themselves, and take the outcome less
personally.  
  

