Emotion and Good Judgement
Tianenmen Square is most famous for the guy on foot standing down a tank. He later said in an interview he kept eye contact with the driver the entire time. He didn't need to worry about the tank running him over. He needed to worry about the driver running him over with the tank.
Similarly, if you are a judge, you are potentially the weak link in the justice system if career criminals can successfully manipulate you emotionally and convince you to cut them some slack, they really truly are SORRY this time, for realzy realz, and they don't want to spend life in prison or whatever.
The same applies to other gatekeeping or decision-making jobs, but to keep the language simple, I'm going to pretend I'm talking to judges.
Emotion is an important part of the human process of making judgement calls and most people seem woefully ignorant of how that works, where it goes wrong and how to effectively compensate for problems in the signal to noise ratio.
I ran an email list called Wired for Science to talk about neurological stuff and how it impacts people and their psychology. I custom designed it and set it up to serve the needs of my oldest son who is not neurotypical.
The goal was to help him better understand how his wiring worked and why it was tripping him up socially. I shut it down after he got his needs met, lost interest and stopped participating because he was the heart of the list. Without him, I couldn't breathe life into the project, try though I might.
Individuals with low affect (little in the way of emotion) can't make snap decisions. They need to do all kinds of research and their decisions are very intellectual.
People with strong feelings can make snap judgements because one purpose of emotion is it serves as a TLDR for all your experiences on file related to X. It's a summary in brief.
In many situations, this can save your life so it persists because it promotes survival. Survival of the fittest doesn't mean you went to the gym and look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. It means you didn't die and you successfully passed on your genes.
The ability to make effective snap decisions in survival situations is a huge survival advantage.
An extreme example of this is the Amygdala Hijack. In certain extreme situations, people do stuff like jump in a river without really knowing why only to find themselves next to a drowning baby because the amygdala can compel you to act faster than the speed of conscious thought.
If you are a judge or simply a person trying to make an important decision, you may feel a sense of urgency or emotional pressure that helps suck the oxygen out of the process but in most cases, you aren't actually dealing with needing to do something in the next few seconds.
Emotional manipulators consistently try to foster that sense of urgency. It's a well known sales tactic to try to pressure people to Act now! Time is running out! And it's frequently a blatant lie.
While snap judgements based on strong feelings can be useful in life threatening situations where time is of the essence, they are error prone and they can help keep alive prejudices like racism and sexism. If your job involves making important decisions, you need to actively educate yourself about how this works and guard against personal prejudice and similar.
Prejudice is also frequently kept alive by "betting the odds." It may be generally true that X people are more likely to do Y thing, but as a judge your job is to determine the facts in this specific case. So try to account for that and shoot for actual confirmation that this applies in this case.
You also need to guard against personal stuff leading you astray. Educate yourself about somatopsychic disorders where physical ailments have emotional and mental health side effects.
If you are quitting coffee, cigarettes or otherwise going through withdrawal and experiencing high anxiety because of it, rosemary, dill or sage can help. You may also need thyroid support. (See my health site if you want more information.)
It's lonely at the top. If you are a judge or in law enforcement etc. it's challenging to find ways to get your social, emotional and sexual needs met while also erring on the side of not giving anyone an opening to get their hooks in you.
Emotionally manipulative criminals likely know all that and know that it makes you vulnerable to certain tactics so you can feel good about yourself and your job and like you are a good person etc.
Books, music and movies can be cathartic and safely provide some of the emotional stuff you need. The most important thing is simply be aware this stuff can interfere with your judgment and make you vulnerable to emotionally manipulative tactics.
If you know you're not really getting your needs met in that regard, work on that. You'll be happier and you'll be better at your job.
But most importantly, guard against criminals who are right here, right now playing with your feelings to get a favorable judgement because they are a flesh and blood person in front of you and bundle of emotions trying to sway you and that can make you lose sight of the many wronged parties, some of whom may be dead, who aren't there to cry on your shoulder and beg you to see it their way.
The flesh and blood thing is important because there are chemicals involved in emotions, so pheromones physically manipulate you and people talented at manipulating people may have studied obscure subjects like how smell impacts you and may be talented actors intent on evoking strong emotion to override your conscious logical judgement faculties.
Generally speaking, emotionally manipulative narcissists have been turning on the water works since early childhood and whining and crying about their sob story. It worked when they were four or five and they've spent decades since then polishing that act.
This may work fairly consistently for some people because you as a judge have them in front of you right here, right now and they aren't currently in the process of committing a heinous crime, so emotionally manipulating people gets results for them even though it's a huge miscarriage of justice and amounts to conning you into aiding and abetting them.
There is an episode of an animated version of Batman where he says afterwards he closed his eyes to be immune to the head fuckery of one of the villains. Here is that Batman scene.
Similarly, the solution to the emotional manipulation where bad people cry on your shoulder and whine about their sob story and emanate sad feelings or whatever is to focus on remembering their countless victims and let yourself get angry about all they've done and angry that someone who has committed so many atrocities would dare to pretend they are some hurt little child while making you feel things like "I can't execute them. Only BAD people kill people and I'm NICE. "
Be nice. To other people. Make a decision that stops them from continuing to hurt others. Nice people don't aid and abet because the whining, crying criminal is in front of them punching their sympathy buttons and their victims can't because they're dead or whatever.
People born to wealthy families are sometimes unethical dipshits who learned in childhood to whine and cry and get away with awful behavior. This social observation gets documented in fictional stories which are typically based in part on something real that the author or one of their friends or relatives experienced firsthand.
Rene Auberjonois played Clayton Endicott III in a TV show called Benson. He ended up typecast and nearly unemployable until he took the role of Odo in which he played an alien and they altered his appearance.
Endicott was a spoiled privileged asshole from an upperclass family. In episode 61, Clayton's Condo, Benson learns Endicott owns his apartment building and doesn't want to make any repairs. In possibly a different episode, Endicott is facing some kind of consequences for something and begins sniveling and whining, gets down on his knees and begs and gets out of whatever it is.
Some other character, probably Benson, says something like "I can't believe you would humiliate yourself like that" and Endicott says "Well, it worked."
People knowing all the right things to say and buttons to punch is a red flag. They've probably run this con before, possibly many many times.
If someone is young, poor, not well educated etc. it's reasonable to expect to have to actively look for such affirmative evidence because unlike career criminals they haven't memorized the play book on how to talk a good game.
One possibility: It was actually self defense and they just are being out maneuvered by a smooth talking, articulate, better educated asshole who lacks a conscience and can afford a fancy-pants lawyer.
Take a jaundiced eye to the smooth-talking, articulate upper class people in your court with well-paid lawyers. The movie Erin Brockovich is based on real world events and it begins with her being the victim of a hit and run and losing her court case for basically being dirt poor and potty mouthed on the stand.
Your job is to fill in the gaps for the naive, less formally educated unwashed masses. See also Our Current Penal System is a Joke.
Also, talk is cheap, so believe your eyes over your ears.
In some TV show that I think was set someplace like a local TV station, the main character gets hired and he's from outside the organization and on day one his boss says "Fire so and so." And he doesn't really want to have to be the hatchet man as his first task. He's very uncomfortable with this and kind of dithers.
By the end of the day, so and so has a hissy and quits dramatically and the new guy goes to his boss and says "Good news! I don't have to fire him! He quit."
His boss says "I wanted you to FIRE him. He quits every week."
Actions speak louder than words. Career criminals have probably been doing the same shit for decades and then conning some judge into UNDERSTANDING and giving them a slap on the wrist.
Sometimes people have a change of heart and stop their shit and many people want to believe if you give someone a second chance, that will foster goodness and encourage their grinch-like heart to grow three sizes! Awwwwww!
It almost never works that way. You need affirmative evidence beforehand to make that a reasonable bet.
1. A poor, underprivileged person may genuinely be a victim of circumstance. Giving them a second chance coupled with a solution to some underlying problem may be a reasonable bet.
2. Wealthy privileged people whining and crying about lack of opportunity and needing a second chance are probably running a con job on you. They better have extremely compelling evidence that in spite of all their privilege, they somehow were genuinely barred from solving this. Otherwise, the way to bet is they don't believe you will do more than lecture them and fine them and that's a joke to them.
Emotional manipulators will say anything to get off the hook yet again. It means absolutely nothing to them. They have no plans to keep their word.
Empty promises of some vague future improvement or future benefit to someone else at an unspecified time in exchange for immediate material gain is their stock in trade.
When someone never pays their bills, get cash upfront. Don't take a promissory note.
You need something already in hand to place that bet. Otherwise, you are actively growing the problem because such people have pulled this stunt countless times and have only grown steadily more competent at getting away with their crap based on big feels and empty promises.