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Universal Ethics > Ideas > Judging Motives C

Judging Motives - Reading People

Continued from part A...

There are methods you can learn to infer what motives are driving behavior of an individual. Most of us discover over our lifetime how to read facial expressions and body language, and how to infer what motives may be underlying behaviors. But these methods are ineffective if not done with clear thinking.

Some time ago I read a book "Reading People" written by a lawyer, Jo-Ellan Dimitrius with co-writer Mark Mazzarella, about judging underlying motivies of witnesses. She noted at the outset that people within relationships more often make mistakes judging others than they do in other settings. Here's a quote from the start of the book:

"When I told my colleagues about the great difference between my people-reading success on and off the job, I found I wasn't alone. Many of the best attourneys I knew confessed that, while they enjoyed greate success reading people in court, the rest of the time they didn't do much better than anyone else. Why?"

"...The first thing I discovered was that attitude is critical. In a courtroom, I was ready to focus fully on the people I encountered, to listen to them closely, to observe the way they looked and acted, and to carefully think about what I was hearing and seeing. I had a very different attitude in my private life. I rarely did any of those things. The fact is, you have to be ready to read people, or all the clues in the world won't do you any good."

"...Master the following skills, and you'll be ready to read people."

  1. Spend more time with people. That's the best way to learn to understand them.
  2. Stop, look, and listen. There's no substitute for patience and attentiveness.
  3. Learn to reveal something of yourself. To get others to open up, you must first open up to them.
  4. Know what you're looking for. Unless you know what you want in another person, there's a good chance you'll be disappointed.
  5. Train yourself to be objective. Objectivity is essential to reading people, but it's the hardest of these seven skills for most of us to master.
  6. Start from scratch, without biases and prejudices.
  7. Make a decision, then act on it."

Return to Judging Motives part A.

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