Suspend Judgments
Suspend Judgments is a series of exercises designed to help participants notice and temporarily set aside their automatic evaluations of other people. Through structured interactions and reflection, participants develop awareness of how snap judgments affect their listening and collaboration.
Structure
Opening Awareness Exercise
Participants pair with someone they do not know well. Before speaking, each person silently observes their partner and notices any immediate impressions or assumptions forming. These observations are written down privately.
Structured Conversation
The pairs engage in a structured conversation using open questions. The listener's only task is to receive what the speaker says without evaluating, correcting, or comparing it to their own experience.
Checking the Judgments
After the conversation, participants compare their initial silent judgments to what they learned through conversation. Most participants discover a gap between their first impressions and the person they actually encountered.
Group Reflection
The full group discusses where their initial judgments came from, what information those judgments were based on, and what they missed as a result of judging before listening. The debrief helps participants develop vocabulary for recognizing their own evaluative patterns.
Practice Commitment
Participants identify one specific judgment they regularly make in their work environment and commit to noticing that pattern in the coming week.
How to Teach It
Objectives
Suspend Judgments develops metacognitive awareness of evaluative patterns and builds the practice of deferring judgment long enough to actually listen. The exercise demonstrates that most judgments operate below conscious awareness.
How to Explain It
"Before we talk, just look at your partner and notice what your brain starts doing immediately. What assumptions does it make? Write them down. Then we will have a conversation and see how those assumptions hold up."
Scaffolding
Begin with low-stakes partners before moving to pairs with known tensions or strong hierarchical differences. The exercise is most revealing when participants have some basis for judgment but not deep familiarity.
Common Pitfalls
The most common issue is participants who claim they do not have initial judgments. This is itself a judgment about what kind of person they are. Normalize the automatic nature of all judgment without framing it as a character flaw.
In Applied Settings
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Suspend Judgments addresses a root cause of poor interdepartmental relationships: teams that interact primarily through the filter of departmental stereotypes. The exercise creates direct experience that disrupts those stereotypes more effectively than diversity training alone.
Hiring and Performance Processes
The exercise develops awareness of how evaluative biases affect hiring decisions and performance assessments. Participants who practice noticing their automatic judgments become more conscious evaluators in high-stakes professional contexts.
Facilitation Notes
In professional settings, emphasize that suspending judgment does not mean abandoning discernment. The goal is to listen fully before evaluating, not to eliminate evaluation entirely. This framing addresses the concern that the exercise is asking participants to be uncritical.
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How to Reference This Page
The Improv Archive. (2026). Suspend Judgments. Retrieved March 18, 2026, from https://improvarchive.org/exercises/suspend-judgments
The Improv Archive. "Suspend Judgments." The Improv Archive, 2026. https://improvarchive.org/exercises/suspend-judgments.
The Improv Archive. "Suspend Judgments." The Improv Archive, 2026, https://improvarchive.org/exercises/suspend-judgments. Accessed March 18, 2026.
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