This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

People make mistakes. Small ones, big ones.

Sometimes irreversible ones.

It used to be that passing judgment on mistakes

was mostly the domain of judges and prosecutors,

the courts and the confessional.

But in our raucous, busy, social media dominated world,

all of us today are called upon to pass judgment on strangers.

Should the writer who plagiarized a story get a second chance?

Does the manager who embezzles money deserve another job?

Should the contrite cheater receive forgiveness?

The Court of Public Opinion, as it's called,

is not a court in the ordinary sense of the term.

Each of us has our own rulebook, our own constitution.

We are not required to weigh all the facts

and we are allowed to reach conclusions based on our own histories

of wrongdoing, pain and resentment.

Given that we are filtering the mistakes and misdemeanors of others

through the prism of our own baggage,

it's small wonder that we often disagree with the conclusions of others.

Back in 2019, when we first released the episode you're about to hear,

I was fascinated by the range of responses that we received from listeners.

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