“Thinking is difficult. That’s why most people judge.”
This quotation I saw has been playing over and over in my head. There is a lot of truth to it. Though I have to say, I find it to sound a bit judgmental in itself. Maybe that is just a tone I am reading into it.
The fact of the matter is that the human brain does use judgement to decrease the amount of information we need to think about and process. We are surrounded by constant input and we cannot possibly process all of it. To that end, judging provides shortcuts that are adaptive.
Many of us have heard the phrase “use your best judgement.” We often hear it when we are “overthinking” an issue and need to spend a little less time processing all the information. It’s funny to me that I can be just as guilty of overthinking information as of using judgements to under-think an observation.
So, like many other actions in life, judgements have their pros and cons. When they allow us to sift through input to make a quick discrimination, they can be a gift. Consider the last time you picked up on a small detail that allowed you to judge whether someone was in a bad mood. It may have saved you a fight by allowing you to discriminate that this was not a good time to ask for a favor.
Often however, situations do not call for quick judgements. We have all the time in the world and the judgements lead us to filter out a lot of relevant information.
I think about a comment a classmate made to me as we approached high school graduation. I didn’t know her well, but we had shared some recent conversations in gym class. I don’t remember her exact words, but she expressed that she and her friends had previously judged me to be a snob. The judgement came from their observation of the fact that I never talked to them.
The actuality was that I was painfully shy in high school. I didn’t talk to them because I assumed they wouldn’t want to be bothered. Those judgements based on assumptions prevented what might have been some nice friendships. We had all the time in the world to gather more information, but never had. We relied on judgements as shortcuts.
How many times have we all judged a person based on a single action. Perhaps they cut us off in a line or traffic. They may have lost their temper with their child in a public place. What if they voiced a point of view that we disagree with?
It is easy to rely on these single instances and jump to a critical judgement of an entire person. Yet, these are not times we need to filter out additional input. Instead we can ask ourselves how we might be distorting the information. We can ask what assumptions we are making based on our own biases. We can recognize this one action may be out of context of the multitude of other information about the person. We can work towards empathy and validation rather than judgments.
The twist in my writing this is that I have come to a surprising realization. I judge my own judging and I judge people for being judgmental. In doing so I am filtering out the important information that we are programmed to judge. I need to show compassion to myself. Perhaps I can replace the thought “I am being judgmental, which is awful” with “I am being judgmental and I need to continue working on assessing whether this is an effective way to filter out information.
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