You can forget a film’s plot, its characters, and its ending, and still know exactly whether you liked it. That isn’t a flaw in your memory. In 1986 psychologists Reid Hastie and Bernadette Park showed that when we judge something as it happens, the judgment gets filed separately from the evidence behind it — and only one of those two drawers reliably stays full.
Useful, until it isn’t. At work the same compression decides who gets promoted, whose idea gets heard, and who carries a label nobody can source. “She’s not strategic.” “He’s difficult.” Each one started with something real, and two years later the case file is gone while the verdict is still being enforced.
In this episode: why the verdict survives the evidence, how inherited conclusions harden into “everyone knows,” and one thing to do on Monday about a label you are carrying.
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