Why does judging other people feel so good?
[This piece was written last year pre-covid-19]
I found myself in a familiar frame of mind, a sense of superiority flooded over me, I had figured something out, I was separate and I was better. I was in a local cafe in Haringey, North London which according to Time Out is one of those areas that is always meant to be ‘coming up’ but never actually does. I see where this might come from, I think of it as a mishmash place, and I mean this in the most endearing way, it’s one of those places in London difficult to label all in one go, difficult to judge on first appearances.
There are of course lots of Turkish and Kurdish restaurants, there are pound shops and bucket shops (shops that sell lots of different sized buckets outside of them), flailing charity shops, bookies and copious jewellery shops, who buys all this jewellery? Who buys the 18 carat gold dummies? And of course there are the corner shops selling everything that the large Sainsbury’s sells in the retail park, just packed into a tenth of the size, they are little microcosms of London perhaps.
But over the last number of years there has been a new addition to the mishmash — the trendy cafes have opened up, cafes that have the usual smashed avocado on sourdough, the tumeric lattes, the local illustrations for sale on the walls, the Korean supper clubs and the ubiquitous clipboard menus. At first I was excited by them and enjoyed relaxing there, but I recently went to one of my favourites, and I felt as though I had walked into a satire featuring faux hipster posers, the worst kind of hipster. The creatives on their creative laptops having the kind of phone conversations it felt as though they wanted you to hear, the women whose outfits came straight off a COS hanger bitching with their friends about their other friends and coming out with all the clichés of a Lena Dunham portrait of a cafe about faux hipster posers in uptown New York. But my primary and I’m sure you’ll agree legitimate gripe was not any of this but the fact they had “run out” of English breakfast tea.
As I sat in my uncomfortable wooden chair fit only for a primary school child and begrudgingly drank my overpriced chai latte I relished in judging nearly everyone in that cafe and it felt good.
Now I have to confess this isn’t the extent of my judgemental behaviour, I find myself judging others a lot of the time, public figures get the worst of it, from actors to politicians but I don’t discriminate and spread my judgements out evenly among work colleagues, family members, friends and never leave out the best subject of all — myself.
Judging is a human instinct
So what is going on here? Why do we continually engage in behaviour which we know is not good for us and not good for others? Why are we addicted to the highs of judging? The first thing to acknowledge is that judging living things, our environments and objects positively, negatively and neutrally is an human instinct, like judging an animal to see if it’s predator or prey. It’s a habit we have evolved to become really good at to ensure our own safety and refine our understanding of the world.
However, the type of judging I am referring to here is the undeniably negative kind — the indulgent, the judging for judging’s sake, the rants, the blatantly unfounded, the snap assumptions about others we barely know and in the course of this the imposition of our motivations, values and worldviews on to others. I’m sure I’m not alone in experiencing that the more I judge the easier it gets and the more I fall into it without a second thought. Like so much behaviour which becomes almost addictive, I think it’s worth a deeper look and the admittance at the very least that we may have a problem.
There is of course a lot that goes into a judgement, never underestimate the weight your words have and what they can reveal to you about your own inner state of mind. Hell this is why therapists and hostage negotiators alike charge what they do. In saying this I want to unpack some of the main factors I have experienced when making a judgement, to try to get to the heart of this all too common behaviour. I am not an academic, psychologist or therapist, so this is very much about analysing my own behaviour and seeing with the naked eye what lies beneath (although I will discuss psychologist Alfred Adler briefly), perhaps some of this will resonate with you.
I am better than you
The primary observation of mine is that judging other people feels good, because there appears to be a direct correlation between the belittling, labelling and boxing up of others with the aggrandising of myself. If I get to judge others before they judge me then somehow I have won the secret game of ‘I’m better than you’. If I can write someone off as being superficial, unintelligent, insecure or foolish (the list goes on I assure you), then what I am trying to convince myself of, is that my awareness of this in others means that these qualities I have an aversion to are outside of myself. Not convinced?
My particular go to flavour of judgement, is labelling others for not having a wider sense of perspective, for their views being too material, too limited, too hackneyed. Proving thus that I have a broad understanding of the world, a multidimensional and distinct worldview. I cling to this marker of self, ‘the individual against the mainstream’ forming a strong sense of my ‘I’ in the world. I knew it wouldn’t take long for good old fashioned ego to rear its head. It’s in making judgements on others that I am trying to strengthen my own sense of ‘I’, trying to make myself more solid. Which brings me onto my next observation — safety.
I make you up
In labelling others, I am finding a way to make my processing of the world superficially easier. There is a degree of false safety when I project onto others a persona I can manage, when their past experiences are straightforward, their trajectories linear and their behaviours predictable.
It’s a strange sort of shortcut to actually knowing or understanding a person and one which leaves me feeling less threatened but also kind of alone, this is where the separateness comes in. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I am an introvert, it’s my way of connecting with others without actually having to connect, knowing a version I have made up instead of knowing the real, complex and multi-dimensional other. I’ve made myself believe it’s safer that way. This way of relating to others alienates me from the range of diverse motivations that a person has for acting in the way they do. It’s easier not to acknowledge, it’s easier not to care.
In this way I believe the topic of judgement connects closely to the topic of forgiveness. When we make snap judgements we don’t feel the need to consider why someone might behave in a certain way. However, the victims of those in for example restorative justice situations upon meeting the perpetrators of crimes committed towards them or others close to them, need to care about the reasons why people do what they do, it may be the only slit of light in tunnel of anger and other very uncomfortable emotions. In situations such as these the stakes for making judgements are a lot higher — mental freedom is at stake.
Finally I notice it is always that much easier to make judgements from afar, i.e. before a person has become fully human. I think that’s why it’s so easy to judge people online or in the media because we know we will never need to engage with them on a human basis.
Causes
Now there are of course myriad reasons why we get into the business of judging others, and like so much of our dysfunctional behaviour a lot of this can be traced back to childhood. In looking at my three main observations — that of self-aggrandising, minimisation of threat and dehumanisation, the addiction to judgemental behaviour is unsurprisingly an expression of insecurity and fear, or to put it another way a move away from love.
I recently read the Japanese bestseller The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, in the book they distill the teachings of psychologist Alfred Adler into an accessible dialogue format. One of his principal theories is around the inferiority/ superiority complex.
According to Adler we begin with an inferiority complex arising from a helpless state at birth and as a result our pursuit does not become one of happiness, but one of superiority or being in a condition of wanting to improve in one way or another to put it more neutrally. As adults our feelings of inferiority can turn into feelings of superiority when we do not believe we can surmount the obstacles that are in front of us to improve. It is no coincidence then that the judgements seem to flow much easier when we encounter people doing just what we have always wanted to do.
Another of Adler’s theories is around the concept of ‘community feeling’ — i.e. making others our ‘comrades’ instead of our competition or enemies, it is through this shift of how we see others that he believed we can improve our relationships and also our world. This is summarised in the book by the line “all problems are interpersonal relationship problems”, in saying this Adler states that our issues of inferiority/ superiority, and therefore of worth are only ever in direct relationship to others supposed value. Inferiority springs from the comparisons we make between our competition and until a shift is made in how we see other people this will not change.
This was a new and powerful idea I had not come across before. Judgement arising from our sense of being in an inhospitable environment of competitors starts to make more sense. In order to ease the world of judgements we inhabit we need to shift our view from one of living in a hostile environment, to one of trusting that we are in a friendly environment.
I’m not going to pretend to know how to generate a community feeling overnight, but I do believe digging deeper into the judgement is useful as is being brutally honest with at least ourselves and if it feels right compassion based meditation practices — more on this below.
What about if my negative judgements are true?
It may be the case that your judgements are objectively true I hear you say, that several people concur with your assessment of someone else. In answer to that I would say — ‘but then what?’ I think the question we need to be asking ourselves is not ‘what if what I am thinking is objectively accurate?’ rather ‘even if my judgements are true who is this serving and where can my energy be better placed?’ A negative judgement does not have the power to change the world.
At the time of writing this piece which was actually a year ago I watched the Channel 4 documentary, Sleeping with the Far Right. In it Alice Levine spent a week with ex UKIP prospective MP Jack Sen. As you might expect his views were inflammatory, offensive and upsetting (unless of course you are on the far right), but Levine didn’t react in the way you might expect. The Telegraph deemed her approach an ‘unentertaining backfire’, and while it may not have given the viewers what they were looking for, i.e. an echo chamber for their own views, it did create just a little bit of space between Sen’s views and what lay beneath. Perhaps Levine’s aim was not to try and undoubtedly fail to change his views, but to allow Sen to reveal himself in his own judgements, to allow us to try to understand him and others like him through his judgements, perhaps she felt their was value in that as a piece of documentary making, since there are enough existing examples of people direcly challenging others views to no avail.
Can we shift judgemental behaviour?
In short, I believe that judging others is, like so much unhelpful behaviour, a safety mechanism, it is an expression of past hurt, it is the fear of not being loved for who you are, and therefore a mirroring of the hurt you have suffered. I used to think that what lay underneath all judgements was the belief ‘I’m better than you’, when in fact it could be just the opposite. Ultimately, it is a move away from connection.
The opposite of judgement for me is openness, trying to understand others and bringing awareness to your own behaviour, the opposite is love. If you are a serial judger like me, than it will take time for these habits to loosen their grip.
There are empathy practices that can support this such as the buddhist metta bhavana meditation, although I think it’s valuable to look into the judgement first over forcing positive feelings towards others if this is not in alignment with your natural state. If you are in the right state of mind, than the loving kindness involves focusing first on saying ‘may I be happy, may I be well, may I be safe’, and then you focus on a good friend repeating this with ‘may you be happy’ and so on, than a neutral person, then a difficult person and then everyone together and then the whole world or universe, including all living things. The repetition of the phrases for each person in turn is where the element of unity comes in, it shines a light onto the fact that there are nearly always more similarities between the people we judge than there are differences. The happiness, wellness and safety is what we are striving for in the end. The exercise is designed to train your compassion muscle, which for many of us has been avoiding any form of exercise.
In a previous life coordinating workshops for charity leaders, we always used to start residentials with a group contract, an agreement made by the group about what behaviour was encouraged and not encouraged. Sure enough the commandment ‘don’t judge’ would be routinely added to the flip chart paper, one time a participant interjected saying ‘I can try but I can’t stop my judgements’. He was right, we can’t all together stop the flow of judgements that appear so naturally, but we can question them little by little and start to dilute their power over us, perhaps our judgements will become less second nature, maybe third or fourth.
I’d like to end this piece by confessing that writing this is also an act against judgement, I have spent many years hiding away for fear of judgement as so many of us do. I realise both judging and fear of judgement is a poor substitute for actual connection.
Sources
- Kishimi I. and Koga F. (2018), The Courage to be Disliked, Allen & Unwin
