None of us really knew how to feel about it. In fact, we moved on completely after about one hour as if nothing had happened. I was more upset about my cut-up clothes and lost pair of glasses, and more glad about an e-mail that a mistake on my transcript had been corrected, than I was grateful for having survived the crash without any serious injuries. Clearly, my vision was impaired in more ways than one.
As silly as it is, the most significant effect of the crash was the little inconvenience of having to survive for three weeks with my blurry vision unaided by glasses. I had hopes that my diminished vision would result in a heightened sense of hearing — that would’ve been great for my piano playing. But contrary to my initial expectations, I found that my hearing seemed muffled. With my senses dulled, I felt like I was in some translucent glass ball, and I became less aware of my surroundings: The extra effort to see through the glass just didn’t seem worth it. With the actual glass lenses replaced by an imaginary glass ball, I found that I was generally less superficial in passing judgments on people, myself included.
Without my glasses, everyone looked pretty good: My eyes smudged out the imperfections and oddities. One day, I was walking with a friend from the Street to our 50-square-foot lab in Jadwin Hall. We happened to be walking past Cottage when I could make out what seemed like three beautiful girls just in their underwear (who knows how they actually looked?). I eagerly asked my friend to describe the details so I could visualize them better. Unfortunately, my friend is Finnish — he’s a man of few words. Just as when I was watching the recent production of “Othello,” I was left to imagine and fill in the details of what I couldn’t see.
The fact is that we are all innately judgmental. A recent psychological study demonstrated this in two ways, both by arguing that men are judgmental and by revealing the judgmental preconceptions of the researchers themselves. Psychology professor Susan Fiske, Mina Cikara GS and Stanford psychology professor Jennifer Eberhardt recently made public the results of an experiment apparently showing that men view half-naked women as objects. I’m not sure how astonishingly illuminating that is, but apparently it is enlightening enough to be featured in National Geographic. I am no psychologist so I dare not criticize the research, but a sample size of 21 male students from the University seems just a tad too small to draw such a sweeping conclusion about the entire human male population and what evil, superficial, judgmental and image-driven bastards we are.
Ironically, the sample chosen reveals that the researchers were prejudiced in the first place. Why wasn’t an equivalent study done on women? Based on the National Geographic article, Professor Fiske doesn’t think such an experiment would work the same way, because women usually react to men they desire by “interpreting their minds, thinking about what they’re interested in, and then trying to please them.” Is it such a blindingly self-evident fact that men never ever try to read women’s minds, figure out what they like and do whatever makes them happy? Evidently, her intuitive preconceptions blind her intellect and blunt the findings of her research.
Last Friday, I finally got my new pair of glasses. With the glass ball shattered, my prejudices, superficialities and judgments have zoomed back to their original spot between my eyes and the glass lenses, distorting how I perceive the world. That’s what premature judgments are: a subjective distortion of what is. I don’t know if my worldview improves or worsens with my glasses. Maybe I was happier without them.
Eric Kang is a physics major from Christchurch, New Zealand. He can be reached at eakang@princeton.edu.
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