Judging

I absolutely think it is not possible to perceive others without judging or categorizing them. I believe that we've gotten so use to judging people as well as being judged we tend to do it unintentionally, unconsciously and sometimes even on purpose. Like Chapter 3 in the book stated, we are poor listeners in America. When we listen we either pay attention to the person or look like we're listening and pay attention elsewhere. The book also states that we do three things when listening, "stimuli structure", "stability", and "meaning". We tend to focus on past knowledge and categories to define people, when listening to them. Right away we realize that we are either talking to a female, male, or a transgender person those are all three categories. We often notice age, color and clothing style, which again are all categories. I think it is impossible to not categorize someone because we do it whether we know it or not.
Judging might have some hope in the fairness area, maybe put yourself in their shoes first. We can make fair judgments by basing them on fact and not on opinion. There are listening strategies that chapter 3 touched on. They included improving attention, interpretation, evaluation, responding as well as storage and retrieval. I believe that those five listening techniques can help being fair in the area of judging and categorizing people. I believe if you have a positive attitude in the beginning and are open to hearing someone else's point of view your on to a good start.