How good are you at judging others?

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I don't necessarily mean in a bad way. In order to stay away from people who might harm you or be drawn to people who might share similar interests we have to judge people on either a first impression or after getting to know them a bit better. As for me I can never tell who are those I need to avoid, in order for them not to take advantage of my naivety. But I am a decent judge on people who are a lot more like me and might share certain interests.

How about you? Do you think this ability is more affected or less affected by AS/Autism?

I don't think it's affected by AS. I stay away from people with a lot of "drama" in their lives. That seems to keep me away from the type of people that would harm me or my family.

Oddly enough I find myself to be a fairly accurate judge of character... most of the time anyhow.

Me, I'm clueless unless I know the person's past history. Then trajectory analysis tells me all I need to know.

I'm pretty good at making snap judgments, which is a good talent in life, I think. But what really throws me off is when people are two-faced, and I only have one of their "faces" sussed out.

Same for me. I've been able to suss people out for a long time. When a person is 'all show' I can usually see though the disguise while others fall for it (they always find the truth about the persons character the hard way). I can separate the actors from the genuinely kind people in an instant.

I find this rather amazing now that I know I'm AS. Maybe it's because I've been tricked by wolves in sheep's clothing so much in the past, that I might have become more alert due to earlier experience.

i am able to analyse people very effectively.
However, that is an entirely different process to sussing people emotionally and socially.

i have always categorised people andhave tried to make sense of them in terms of "type." that goes so far, but does little to safeguard me against getting hurt or learning how to protect myself better.

i think this distinction is an important one as it came up in an AS therapy session recently.

Some of us learn to overcompensate for the emotional/social reading and comprehension deficits by an intellectual analysis of other human beings.

for me, the deficit remains, and it is just plain tiring to work so hard at what others grasp inuitively and easily.

I try not to judge anyone based on anything other than their own actions. If a friend of mine thinks so-and-so is not such a nice guy.. I will certainly keep that in mind. But it will not make me dislike so-and-so or avoid getting to know him unless I know for a fact that he has done some terrible things to me or someone close.

^ Just an example.

Really I just try to keep an open mind (although it's hard) and give people the benefit of the doubt. I suppose I should rely on my instincts and then perhaps I wouldn't get tangled up with so many jerks. But then again my first instinct is that everyone is a jerk. So it's really not fair to judge them based on my own insecurity.

*shrug*

Yeah, I'm the same. I only judge people by how they act to me and my friends, not on rumours or what other people have to say about them.

I wish other people would extend the same courtesy to me, because the rumour mill makes me sound like a right freak (a pregnant freak, allegedly ).

I tend to be gullible and WAY too trusting!

I could only wish that I were good at judging others. It doesn't seem to take much cunning to get me decoyed into the land of gullibility.

I am terrible at judging others and I definitely do think it has to do with my AS. I just don't pick up on clues like others do and I also can't interpret nonverbal signals---and many times verbal ones. I usually am drawn to "bad" people and turned off by "good" ones, until I find to my surprise that I have totally misjudged them and they are the opposite of what I initially thought.

I know that I always think the best of people and think people are mostly like me. I don't lie, but find that many many people do. I hate liars. If someone lies to me, I send them packing.

Last edited by ngonz on 04 Mar 2009, 1:13 am, edited 2 times in total.

I honestly don't have any idea how good I am at judging people. I don't have that much life experience. I don't take many risks.

I tend to be mistrustful and paranoid about people so I'm hypersensitive to people I would rather avoid and I'm usually right on 90-100% of the time. I had plenty of practice in the public school system.

It depends.

On first impressions, I can get a feeling but some people are very good at fooling me. I've known people to put on a front that would make it seem they were tolerant or "nice" people and yet I usually come to find they're the very opposite. It's the same with seemingly shallow or thugish people. After having known some people who fit that profile, it all seems like a front or visade they carry around in public.

When it comes to their intentions and/or emotions after knowing them for a while, I judge by everyday patterns. Not that reliable but when someone is reacting differently to me as opposed to other people, it's hard not to notice. However, I am sometimes unable to comprehend on how I upset people just as people uspet me. I have been known to do it in the forms of jokes or out of humor yet some people take it as an attack. Ironically, I have done the same thing.

This is pretty close to my sentiment on the matter. I'm generally a very good judge of character; but I judge people based on their actions, the way they treat others and their ideas as opposed to how they view themselves. I can usually get a good picture of their motives and emotions, but I would say the process is far removed from any sort of intuitive emotional realization, which I would imagine to be quite unreliable anyway.

I also believe that you can better ascertain someone's 'true' nature from their online demeanour more readily than you can their in-the-flesh demeanour. People say that you're missing out on something key; namely everything nonverbal and situational... I say that it's relieving you of a lot of obscuring factors that can mask what someone is truly like.

Of course, some of that could be due to the fact that even if I thought nonverbal cues meant anything, I likely wouldn't be able to pick up on them anyway. There are still some otherwise subtle things that I can still pick up on, though. I can tell the difference between different tones and facial expressions, etc, but it usually requires some contemplation some time after the fact for me to figure out what it all means. My general rule of thumb is that if it's a change in tone or some subtle behavior that is *consciously* produced, then I can pick up on it. If not, then not. At any rate, I don't think such things matter as much as what someone *thinks* anyway, so it all works out.