Humans need to evaluate the world to navigate it effectively and meet their goals. Not all things in the world have equal value. If that were the case, humans would not be judgmental—there’d be no need to. The fundamental reason humans are naturally judgmental is that things in the world have unequal value.
To meet their fundamental goals of survival and reproduction, humans had to assess the value of things in the world with a sufficient degree of accuracy. They had to accurately assess opportunities and threats so they could approach the former and avoid the latter.1Haselton, M. G., & Funder, D. C. (2013). The evolution of accuracy and bias in social judgment. In Evolution and social psychology (pp. 15-37). Psychology Press.
The ‘things in the world’ that people judge not only include things and situations but also other people. Being a social species, how accurately humans assessed others significantly contributed to their survival and reproductive success.
All humans are judgmental. Some do it in kind ways, some in obnoxious ways. Others are socially smart enough not to verbalize their automatic, especially negative, judgment of others.
Reasons for being judgmental
Judgment is a feature of human nature, but other reasons drive humans to be judgmental. These reasons explain what magnifies the innate human tendency to judge and why some people are more judgmental than others.
1. Mental shortcutting
Since human survival and reproductive success largely depended on other humans in ancestral times and even today, our minds are wired to make snap judgments about other people. When you encounter a new person, your mind wants to quickly classify them as a ‘friend,’ ‘enemy,’ or a ‘potential partner’ based on minimal information.
Since such social decisions are high-stakes, the mind doesn’t want to wait too long to gain enough information to logically assess this new person’s friendliness, unfriendliness, or mate potential. It wants to categorize, stereotype, and jump to conclusions. It follows a ‘better safe than sorry’ approach.
Better think of them as a friend than not if they did one positive thing, because the benefits of gaining a friend outweigh the costs of not seeing them as a friend. Better think of them as an enemy than not if they did one negative thing, because the benefits of seeing them as an enemy outweigh the costs of not seeing them as one.
Same with potential partners. The more readily you can assess people as friends, enemies, and potential partners, the more you stand to gain. You save time and ensure you don’t lose the friend or the potential partner. You also ensure the enemy doesn’t harm you because you were too late to figure them out.2Sng, O., Williams, K. E., & Neuberg, S. L. (2018). Evolutionary approaches to stereotyping and prejudice. The Cambridge handbook of the psychology of prejudice, 42-68.
2. Group behavior
Humans have long faced threats from outgroups. So, as a defense strategy, we had to develop a psychology to quickly judge someone as an outgroup based on minimal information. The ‘us vs. them’ mentality makes us favor members of our group and disfavor members who don’t belong to it. This mentality manifests on many levels—from high school friendships to international geopolitics.
To the mind, it’s too risky not to judge someone as an outgroup as soon as possible. So, as a rule, it classifies anyone who appears different as an outgroup. Anyone different from you in any shape or form- appearance, age, gender, beliefs, etc.- gets thrown into the outgroup or ‘them’ category. Once you do that, you may start fearing or hating that person. Historically, this has led to wars and discrimination.
You may be an educated and intelligent person who has overcome their ‘us vs. them’ mentality through rationality. However, the people belonging to your group, your in-groups, probably won’t do the same. They want to feel a sense of belonging to the group. They want to be accepted by their group. This herd mentality makes them believe what the group believes and do what the group does.
Having a ‘them’ to hate strengthens their feeling of ‘us’.
3. Knowledge level
People judge others based on their own level of knowledge, which they acquired either from others or through their own experiences. I call this the ‘bucket of knowledge’ effect, and it’s a critical concept to grasp.
Imagine people with this bucket of water on their heads. The level of water in their bucket represents their level of knowledge. The quality of the water, muddy or clear, reflects the objective quality of their knowledge. There are all kinds of water level and quality combinations in these buckets. Some people have full buckets with clear water. Some have shallow ones but with clear water. Some have full ones with muddy water. Others have shallow ones with muddy water.
As a rule, people fill these buckets on their own based on what they go through and whom they interact with. It’s their responsibility to clear out their muddy waters by filling their buckets with clean water. They have to go to the well of knowledge and draw from it. They have to do the heavy lifting themselves. No one can do it for them. You can only nudge or motivate them to improve their buckets. But you can’t really fill it for them.
People judge others based on what’s in their own bucket. If you like to read, for example, someone may judge you based on their own experiences about reading. Maybe they were bullied and called a ‘nerd’ in school for being a bookworm. You, on the other hand, have positive associations with reading. You’ve seen how it has grown your mind and improved your life. No matter how hard you try, the one judging you simply can’t see how reading can be a good thing. They only look at what’s in their own bucket and judge others from that level and perspective.
This applies to literally everything, but especially to knowledge itself. If you’ve gained tremendous knowledge over decades, you can’t expect people to understand that in a couple of minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months. You can only inspire them to go and fill their own bucket with some clear water.
We also tend to assume that others have the same bucket as ours.3Nickerson, R. S. (1999). How we know—and sometimes misjudge—what others know: Imputing one’s own knowledge to others. Psychological bulletin, 125(6), 737. So if you tell someone something based on your own bucket and they can’t relate, you’re like:
“How can they not understand this?”
Well, now you have a clear idea why they can’t. Your bucket is not their bucket. When you fully grasp that, you’ll save a lot of time and gain a lot of mental peace. You will quit trying to explain or defend yourself to people whose bucket is different than yours.
4. Projection
Projection is when people project their own negative qualities onto others. Thanks to their ego, humans tend to avoid thinking of themselves negatively. So we tend to project any trait or quality we don’t like about ourselves (our ‘shadow’) onto the other person so we can judge them, not ourselves. Often, these traits are repressed. We’re not aware that we have repressed these traits in ourselves.
John was into gaming a lot as a kid and a teenager. At some point in young adulthood, his parents, teachers, and peers criticized him for his hobby. As a result, he repressed the ‘gamer’ part of his identity. Now, when he comes across a gamer, he judges them harshly even though he himself spends hours on social media and binge-watching Netflix.
What we criticize in others reveals what we haven’t healed within ourselves.
5. Insecurity
As I mentioned before, not all things in the world have equal value. That’s also the case with humans, harsh as it may sound. Humans live in a value-based social hierarchy. Some people are high-value, and some are low-value, based on several factors, the primary ones being looks, financial status, and social status.
Humans are wired to value high-value humans and seek them out for friendships and relationships because they have the most to gain from these relationships. Low-value individuals tend to get ignored and excluded.4Gong, X., & Sanfey, A. G. (2017). Social rank and social cooperation: Impact of social comparison processes on cooperative decision-making. PLoS One, 12(4), e0175472.
As humans deeply care about being valued and included, we have developed a psychology where we pay strong attention to how others perceive us. We want to compare ourselves with others to know in what areas we’re winning and where we are losing. We wouldn’t know what to improve if we weren’t prone to such social comparison.5Haugan, T. (2023). Social anxiety in modern societies from an evolutionary perspective. Discover Psychology, 3(1), 12.
People often make upward social comparisons, looking at those above them. This can inspire someone with high self-esteem to improve, but it often creates overwhelming feelings of insecurity and jealousy.
People, especially those with low self-esteem, are prone to judging and criticizing others when feeling insecure or jealous. Looking at the high-value person intimidates them and automatically lowers their own value, at least in their own eyes. Putting the high-value person down restores their value, at least in their own eyes. This is why people who’re better than you, generally or in specific areas, don’t put you down, generally or in those specific areas.
6. Childhood trauma
If your parents judged you harshly, didn’t accept your choices, and didn’t let you be your own person, you’re likely to become judgmental when you grow up. Not only does your judgmental behavior stem from it being normalized in your family, but also from hypervigilance. You developed trust issues because you were hurt or neglected by the people who weren’t supposed to do that. You’re now hypervigilant or on guard to protect yourself from hurt. So you are blazing fast at judging others.
I always say hypervigilance is a double-edged sword. While it certainly can make you judge others unfairly, affecting your relationships, it can also be a superpower in trying to avoid harmful people. Hypervigilant people can sense harm from 1000 miles away, while normal people do it from 100 miles away, which may be too late. I’ve seen hypervigilant individuals judge people’s character with mind-boggling accuracy based on just one or two interactions! Most people, however, would do well to restrain their judgments a little.
