Other forms of the judgments’ distortion

Other forms of wrong judgments characterized by a specific type of false expectation are:

1. The personalization

It consists in expecting that a certain effect (state, situation, phenomenon) to have one single cause.
Due to the more or less obvious links of the each element of the system with all the other elements and systems, any action which takes place in a system happens because of the participation of a lot of elements (finally, even of the entire elements).

For an effect to take place, an infinity of causes participates but only a few are more important. But an effect never has one single cause.
For a given circumstance, a lot of important factors are “guilty” and also an infinity of other ones which sustain the first factors (they make them possible).


2. The inflexibility

It consists in expecting that a phenomenon to manifest itself, at a given moment, either through one of its extremes or through the opposite one, ignoring the fact that, most of the time, the phenomena’s manifest between extremes.

So, the things can’t be absolutely good or absolutely bad; they are good in certain circumstances (of time and space) and bad in another ones.
The radicalism in thinking is a wrong judgment often met, which appears because we hurry up to “jump” at the extremes without a careful analysis or observation of the other hues.

3. The restriction of the perceptive field

It consists in reducing the whole at one single element of it and in analyzing it as a whole. It also consists in taking into consideration only that aspect and disregarding the other ones, however pretending to have a correct and well-founded judgment.

For instance, the judgment like:
“Vasile is stupid! He can’t understand anything…etc”
is characterized by a mistake of judgment which restrains the perceptive field.

“Vasile (like any other person) understands a lot of things, except one (a specific one from the infinity of things; and that’s why it requires our understanding, not being representative for his entire being); there’s no problem here because, obviously, nobody can understand everything (the infinite in which we manifest ourselves, is really an infinite).

The forms of restraining of the perceptive field are:

- To exaggerate a minor difficulty, to supra -generalize it, making it bigger than it really is. This exaggeration can be accompanied by some formulas such as: “always” and “never”. Judgments like: “you never listens to me…”, "you always yell”, are obviously wrong.

- To expect that some things to have only positive aspects or only negative ones. When we keep in ourselves such false expectations, it’s obvious that an optimistic or a pessimistic deformation of the reality took place, deterring us to adapt efficiently to a given situation.

As I’ve said, each situation has positive aspects and negative ones; but if we analyze them carefully, we can identify and use them for a better harmonization of ourselves. If we don’t do this, we’ll suffer.

4. The dogmatization

It consists in expecting that only what we know is the real truth, even if we haven’t checked this personally .
It’s obvious that there’s a difference between to think something and to know something, between to have an opinion about something and to have knowledge about that something, between to perceive a thing directly and to hear about it from other people.
Clearly, we have here two different aspects which mustn’t be confused. But upon this aspect we’ll come back later.

5. The labeling

It consists in expecting to know a situation better and to take decisions knowing everything about it although we didn’t check that situation or phenomenon carefully, deeply and from many points of view.

A situation can’t be known “from a glance”; it is necessary a serious study and a careful analysis of the details.

In order to give a verdict about a situation or a phenomenon, we must study it carefully and for a long period of time; and even after we do this it’s necessary to stay open for new information which may appear in the future (and which obviously could change the “verdict”)