Is That An Opinion Of A Person Or A Judgement?

Opinions of people are often emotionally driven and not factually driven.  This can be true with people who see with a positive perspective as well as those who tend to see people with a negative perspective.  If I like you, I may naturally overlook the full depth of your weaknesses.  If I don’t like you, I might minimize the full potential of your strengths and over exaggerate your weaknesses.  That is when a misguided opinion can cross the line into a judgement.  Look at the potential harm caused from forming opinions and beliefs about people in the absence of understanding. Energy is misguided and you never really address the root cause of a particular behavior. That is why ipsative assessments that are based solely on one’s opinion can be equally as unfair and dangerous.

Take for example, somebody who has a high sociability behavior. They get their energy from being around large groups of people and the only reason they would not engage with people or a person is because they have an opinion of them that they don’t care for. Since this avoidance is predominately driven by a dislike, they overlay that dislike reason on low sociable people who don’t get their energy from being around large groups of people when the truth is it isn’t like/dislike related. So when a low sociable person misses the company picnic, high sociable people can mistakenly believe the reason is because the low sociable person doesn’t like the company and this opinion is just not true. To high sociable people, there is no reason to miss the picnic. To low sociable people picnics are draining and it has nothing to do with liking the company or the people. An ipsative assessment is limited to defining sociability to high/low, kind of high/low, seems like really high/low and it’s all based on an opinion of what high or low is. A normative assessment can place an individual being in the top or bottom 2.5% of working America, and do it with 82% accuracy. To a 10 on sociability, a score of 6 is low. A score of 2 is often unrelatable so there had better be more than an opinion driving awareness.

An opinion in the absence of understanding is called a judgement. That is why opinion based assessments ( 4 quadrant ipsative assessments) can also be dangerous because they are not normed and the opinions can convey a false sense of understanding or completely miss on understanding and the result can be an unfair judgement.