Imagine that you’re driving and come across a car in front crawling along and moving erratically. You immediately start making judgements about the driver’s ability and begin to feel annoyed that they’re in your way and holding you up when they shouldn’t be on the road. You hoot loudly with annoyance and drive past, turning to frown at the driver as you pass. It’s then you notice that the driver is an elderly woman, and the car has a flat tyre.
When people get behind the wheel of a car, they become even more judgemental than when they’re walking. Research in the psychology of driving found that drivers dehumanize other drivers in ways they would never do when interacting with someone face-to-face. Similar behaviour also occurs online in social media.
We make judgements all the time, although there’s a big difference between carefully considered, intentional judgment, like evaluating a business case, and the habitual and less intentional judgements that we make. This includes all of the things we like or don’t like, label as good or bad, or judge as pleasant or unpleasant.
We can be judgemental of others, ourselves, and things in the world, like a film, or type of food. When judgement is turned inward, we’re on the receiving end of our inner critic. One way of exploring this is to imagine a smart speaker assistant, like Alexa, Siri, or Google talking back to you with a critical running commentary, “Why are you so useless? You’re always late. No wonder people don’t value what you say, you’re unworthy and not likeable enough…” Although this may sound spooky or laughable from a smart speaker, we sometimes entertain and habitually identify with a similar harsh and self-judging dialogue inside our heads.
Thoughts are concepts, labels, and ideas that represent things in the world; they are not the actual reality, which is always much more complex than we think it is. This includes other people and ourselves. When we judge other people, we separate ourselves from and project limitations onto the other person, so they become little more than the judgement in our minds. The result is that automatic judgemental thoughts rarely serve us, or other people, well.
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