What’s Wrong with Judging Others?
Judging others is not a bad idea but judging too quickly is.
Can you look at others without your mind commenting, judging, or creating conclusions? Well, I am guessing none of you got a ‘yes’ to this question… That’s because Our brains are structured to form automatic judgments about other people’s actions and appearances so that we can go around without wasting time understanding everything that falls under our view. As long as we lay eyes on other people, we make judgments based on the mental scan we do of the others’ personalities depending on the way they move their bodies, the way they talk, the way they respond to different things happening around them, and then these mental snaps are stored into the back of our minds which serve as data with which we deal, for a long period. The next time we meet the same person, this data is loaded into our memory and our brains highlight the signals we previously received from that person and we treat the person accordingly. There’s nothing so wrong with these judgments and instant images that people make, instead, it is due to these judgments in the back of our minds that help us to sense the personality traits of the other person and the impact of this sense lays the groundwork for the entire relationship with that person. Just take a scenario. When it’s your first day at an academy or work, you judge people around you based on how they talk to you, how warmly do they smile at you, do they tend to pay you deference? how friendly do they respond to you, and based on these judgments you choose your friends. So, this is all normal.
Judgment comes into play with everything. Now that we know that it’s in our nature to judge others and this one habit cannot be removed from our daily life because that’s a default habit for our good, for deciding who is good for us and who is not, and to have a better understanding for dealing with people, we should draw our attention towards the downside of this human ability and it’s that we judge the negative in others so quickly that we don’t even take any time to know their full story and we don’t leave any room for further amendments in those judgments. It might have been that during those first times when your brain came up with the mental snapshots of someone they might have been on their bad days and couldn’t treat you the way they usually do and they are not those wrong mental snapshots you have created.
Furthermore, judging the negative in others develops a habit of observing negative aspects, and as a result, we begin to notice the negative details about ourselves more and begin having negative self-talk, which limits our ability to believe in ourselves and eventually leads to anxiety, and this is how a series of our downfall begins, we not only look down on others but also on ourselves, which makes us get harsh with ourselves. Negative self-talks have ruinous effects on our mental health. Making judgment is good if the purpose behind it is to decide whether the person is of your type or not or what type of bond should be made with the other person but as the purpose of making judgments slightly shifts towards humiliating others, catering your ego, judging their characters and moralities, treating them wrong for your negative judgments and gossiping about them in your friends circle just to scale up in your friends’ eyes, that is the point where your judgmental behavior starts showing its negative impacts. Sometimes we take it too quick to jump to conclusions about others that we miss out on knowing their tragedies and helping them. Remember one thing, when we encounter others, we are interacting with them at that particular time, not necessarily their overall or permanent state. We may see someone’s conduct at a particular point in their journey, but that point may not represent their entire journey. Extend grace to others. I remember from my school, my English teacher once told us a story of a man who once entered a park for jogging, as he entered there his attention was caught by a little boy who was there with his father. The little boy seemed to be a bit mischievous, plucking flowers in the park and running from here to there but his father seemed to be quite blank and was just gazing at his son. The man thought that the father of this boy is such an irresponsible father seeing his child creating a mess but not doing anything to stop his son. After a few days that jogging man came to know that the person he judged to be careless and irresponsible a few days back was actually suffering from mental trauma because he lost his wife, the mother of his little son died from cancer that’s why he was not in his senses. Knowing this made the man feel so guilty about his own quick negative judgment and made him think that had he been not judged the man negatively and looked down upon him, he would have asked him why are you looking down and helped him.
“How easy it is to judge rightly after one sees what evil comes from judging wrongly.”― Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters
In the end, all I would like to say is do evaluate people around you to know which ones are right for you and which ones are wrong but don’t come up with these judgments way too quickly. Give others some time to prove themselves worthy of getting places into the compartment of positively judged people in your mind, do not jump to negative conclusions about others so quickly even if you see them doing something wrong too, try to know their story first, try to know that what made them do be in that wrong behavior or take that wrong action. Fine-tune your brain to focus on the good in others. But yeah, one important thing to note here is that if they constantly give you reasons not to have a positive image of them, do not waste their efforts and take the message and distance yourself from such people without humiliating them or showing bad behavior to them or spreading their bad traits like wildfire.
