There is probably a pen within reach of you. Pick it up, or just look at it.
You know what it is immediately. That’s worth pausing on, because that knowledge didn’t come from the pen. It came from you. Every scrap of information that let you land on pen was gathered before this moment — years before, most of it. If you’d never seen one, you’d be holding an object you couldn’t name.
So even when you look at a piece of plastic on a desk, you are seeing it through your past. Before you have had a single thought about it, earlier experience has already told you what kind of thing it is, what it’s called and what it’s for.
What would it take to see the pen as it is?
Suppose you could set all of that down — everything you already know about pens. No memory telling you what it is, no name arriving ahead of the object. Just the thing, right now. What would you feel?
Wonder. You’d be looking at something for the first time in your life.
But nobody feels wonder looking at a pen. You think pen, register the color, and move on. In that half-second the past has already arrived and done the work for you.
And notice you can’t catch it happening. There’s no moment where you hold an unnamed object and then supply the name. The name is there the instant you see the object. Whatever the mind is doing, it has finished before you notice anything happening.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to see a thing as it is. I’m saying it’s very, very hard, and that in ordinary life we almost never do it.
Why do we judge people so quickly?
Now put a person where the pen was — someone you have only just met.
You haven’t even learned their name. A few sentences have gone back and forth, most of them about nothing. And somewhere in there you’ve already made up your mind: this person is fine, or this person is not. If someone asked what this person had done to earn that, you couldn’t say. There’s only the verdict, already in.
And it isn’t just a yes or no, either. Before the conversation has really started, you have a whole small story about them — what they’re probably like, how the rest of this conversation is going to go, whether you’ll want to be near them again. None of that came from those few sentences. There wasn’t enough in them to build it from.
That verdict forms the same way the word pen came to you: instantly, and from the past. Something in this person’s face, tone of voice or posture resembles someone you knew before, and your mind reacts to them as if they were that earlier person — before you know enough about the one actually in front of you.
That is why the judgment arrives quickly and feels certain. You experience it as seeing the new person clearly, not as remembering how an earlier person made you feel.
Who gathered the information you judge people by?
The important question is who first decided what people are like. You did, as a child. A child who knows only a few adults may conclude, “Quiet people are angry” or “Confident people will humiliate me,” and carry that conclusion into later encounters.
Because the conclusion becomes part of how you see people, it never shows up as a belief you could check and correct. It simply looks like the way people are. You notice what fits it and overlook what doesn’t, so the old conclusion keeps feeling accurate.
The conclusions came in small pieces. So that’s what the world is like. So people don’t like me. Thousands of those, collected quietly, until they settled into one steady view of how things are — a whole private philosophy, put together by you as a child, when you had met perhaps four adults and had no idea that was a small sample. Most of it was in place by the time you were six or seven.
Why doesn’t that childhood view ever get corrected?
Because as soon as it was finished, you started looking at the people you met through it — and what you saw seemed to be about them, not something you brought with you.
That’s the part worth sitting with. The conclusions a child reached weren’t kept as guesses, to be checked later against better evidence. They were kept as settled — as how things are. And a settled view doesn’t wait to be tested. It goes out ahead of you and shapes what you find.
That settled view works as an expectation, and the expectation shapes what you notice and how you act. If you expect rejection, you notice a delayed reply, miss signs of warmth, and speak more cautiously. The other person responds to that caution, and their response becomes new evidence that people do not want you. Each time this happens, the childhood conclusion feels less like a conclusion and more like simply seeing what is there.
When someone rubs you the wrong way, you may well be seeing them through that old view.
Can you stop judging people this fast?
No. I don’t think you can, and I wouldn’t put effort into trying.
The judgment isn’t a decision, so you can’t simply decide differently. It arrives finished, the instant you see their face. There’s no moment in between where you could step in.
Why, then, do I keep saying that what you see is the past? Because something starts to change when a person can admit, plainly and without softening it, that what they’re seeing may not be true. Not that it’s false — you have no way of knowing that for sure. Just that it may not be true. That admission is small, and it isn’t comfortable, but it’s the only place I’ve seen anything actually shift. The first impression still comes. What changes is what the person does with it.
So let the first verdict come, but don’t take it as the final word on the other person. Take it as information about you: who this person reminds you of, what you expect next, and when you first learned to expect it.
The next time someone puts you off in the first ten seconds, you don’t have to argue yourself out of the feeling or feel guilty for having it. Just notice that it came too fast to have been about them. Knowing that your picture of them comes from your past won’t change the picture. What it does is make you less likely to decide who they are on the strength of something you concluded as a child. That is most of what you can do.
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Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board