What is it about?
Have you ever noticed that two people can witness the same event and leave with completely different interpretations? We often assume that one person must simply be more objective than the other. Yet our judgments are rarely based on facts alone. This article explores how our understanding of people and situations is shaped by the experiences we have lived—and limited by those we have not lived or cannot fully access. Sometimes, what appears obvious, unreasonable, or even wrong from one point of view may carry a very different meaning from within another person’s life. Rather than treating judgment simply as a failure of reasoning or openness, the article asks what happens when we encounter something that does not fit easily within our own experience. In those moments, a quick judgment may give the unfamiliar a familiar meaning. It can reduce uncertainty and help us preserve the sense of order through which we understand ourselves and the world. The article does not suggest that every judgment works in this way. It focuses on those rapid judgments that can arise when another person’s choices, behavior, or way of living are difficult to understand from within our own experience. In such situations, judgment may tell us something not only about what we are observing, but also about the limits of the perspective from which we are observing it.
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Why is it important?
Every day we make judgments about other people’s choices, intentions, and behaviors. These judgments influence relationships, education, inclusion, public debate, and many ordinary interactions. Yet we rarely stop to consider how much our own experience shapes what we are able to recognize and understand. The article offers a different way of approaching this problem. Instead of viewing judgment only as a matter of bias, intolerance, or lack of openness, it considers the possibility that some judgments emerge when we encounter meanings that our own lives have not prepared us to understand. This does not excuse harmful or unfair judgments. Nor does it mean that every judgment is justified, or that we should stop evaluating what happens around us. It means becoming more aware of where our interpretations begin and creating a pause before uncertainty hardens into certainty. In this sense, greater awareness of our limits may not weaken judgment. It may make it more reflective, more balanced, and ultimately more humane.
Perspectives
What inspired this work? This article began with a question that stayed with me for a long time. Why do people sometimes reach completely different conclusions even when they seem to be looking at the same situation? At first glance, it is tempting to explain these differences through personality, intelligence, values, or bias. Yet I kept returning to another possibility: perhaps what we are able to understand also depends on the experiences through which we have learned to interpret the world. We often judge situations from the outside without having access to the experiences, relationships, or meanings that make them understandable from within. What appears obvious to one person may therefore remain difficult for another to recognize. That observation became the starting point for this work. Rather than asking how people should judge, I wanted to explore what happens before judgment becomes settled: how our personal history shapes what becomes visible, meaningful, or difficult to understand in the first place. My hope is that this perspective encourages a little more intellectual humility when we encounter ways of living, choosing, or behaving that initially seem difficult to understand. Sometimes understanding may begin not by having an immediate explanation, but by recognizing that our own experience does not give us access to every possible meaning.
Jaoudat Moussalli
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Judgment under Conditions of Experiential Asymmetry: An Interpretive Theoretical Approach, Human Arenas, May 2026, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/s42087-026-00629-8.
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