Please Don’t Judge Me Like I Judge You

A candid look at everyday hypocrisy.

Photo by @obiefernandez

It happened earlier today. And again, just now. It happens all the time actually and it is wildly annoying. You see, I can be quite judgmental.

I am rapid-fire and efficient in my judgments, offering a swift verdict, often accompanied by hyper-annoyance, contempt, or anger. The dilemma is that within minutes, sometimes in the very next breath, I do the EXACT SAME THING for which I just judged someone else.

It’s a basic two-step process. First, I judge someone, like raging against a driver who hasn’t used her turn indicator and then, moments later, I realize I just failed to use my turn indicator after a turn.

First, I am annoyed when someone doesn’t return my text and within minutes I realize I forgot to text a friend back. Or first, I feel angry at my husband for forgetting something at the grocery store and then, later I will run a similar errand and return home having also forgotten an item.

It is extremely inconvenient because I would much prefer to simply judge people around me, usually with heaping amounts of righteous indignation, and then go about my day. But over the years I have been more and more interested in living with less judgment of others, less vitriol, and less contempt. I don’t want to be so angry or contemptuous.

But this requires becoming hyper-aware of my own hypocrisy.

Perhaps it’s my years in a faith that espoused the golden rule, “do unto others as you’d have them do unto you” or the proverb “judge not lest ye be judged.” Perhaps it’s because I don’t like the feeling of being judged, starting with the harsh voices in my head. Or it might be that I like the idea of moving through the world with a little more grace and magnanimity.

And now that I’ve seen this pattern of inconsistency in my life, I can’t unsee it.

The more I examine this phenomenon, the more fascinated I am by its existence in the first place. It helps that there are behavioral theories to explain some of this.

In graduate school, I was introduced to Attribution Theory and The Attribution Error. It floored me. This theory posits that we tend to judge other people and their behavior way more harshly than we judge our own behavior.

Even if we engage in the same behavior as another person, we will judge them based on internal causes but justify our own actions, maybe the exact same actions, based on external reasons. We are remarkably quick to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt without extending it to other people.

Specifically, if you do something I judge to be wrong, I will attribute to that behavior an internal cause for why you did what you did. You have a character flaw. You are inherently bad. It’s in your DNA. Cut me off in traffic? You’re a moron, a jerk, an asshole. It’s something about you that made you do it. You, yourself, are flawed.

However, if I do the same thing, cut you off in traffic, I will justify my behavior because something outside of my control made me do it. I attribute to that behavior an external cause for why I did it.

It isn’t that I’m an asshole, but rather that my clock was slow and I left later than I planned. There isn’t something inherently wrong with me (like I just determined about you), the external circumstances around me are wrong. It’s the clock’s fault.

Observing this hypocritical pattern in myself started several years ago when our family adopted a dog. I was certain, smug even, that the process of selecting the perfect dog was rather straightforward. The prospective owner, us, writes a list of the non-negotiable qualities and criteria for the future pet and does not deviate from the list one bit. Then, after much searching and scrutiny, the right dog will be chosen.

I was especially on my high horse with this list after having just judged a person I knew for lamenting their dog selection. They diverged from their list, and were now living with a nightmare puppy. They were struggling and although I offered outward support, inside I was rolling my eyes. I judged them for not sticking to their list.

And then, within months, we brought home a dog I fell in love with at an adoption event. She was needy, scared, beautiful . . . and fit none of the criteria on my list. She was just under a year old; I had listed “dog must be over one-year old.” She was a shedder; I listed “no shedding.” These were just two of the many items on the list that I promptly ignored and tossed in the trash to adopt our dog.

It didn’t take me very long to see my hypocrisy. I was so quick to judge the other family for their choice and then found myself, say it with me, in the EXACT SAME POSITION. Sigh. As our dog proceeded to shed all over the house, chew my pillows, and terrorize every guest who arrived with her loud half pit-bull bark (no pit-bull mix was also on my discarded list), I was struck by how easily, how unconsciously I had arrived in this situation.

But becoming aware of this pattern of inconsistency, judging others and then doing the same behavior myself, takes away the sweet righteous indignation of judging in the first place. It also puts me one step closer to offering grace to others who find themselves in similar positions.

One reason I pay attention to this at all is that, as I mentioned above, I’d like to be a more consistent person, less judgmental, and less angry. I don’t like the lingering sensations of anger and irritation. I don’t want to live this way.

It helps to know I’m not alone in this. If the behavioral theorists are accurate in their theory, this is a common human experience, one that, when unexamined, is quite toxic.

So what then can be done about it? Often I employ a strategy that helps when I’m tempted to be judgmental. I ask a very simple question: what is going on for them? This offers an alternative attribution to the other person’s behavior, looking to consider external reasons for their behavior. Instead of immediately concluding the driver in front of me is an inept idiot, I ask “what’s going on for them?”

They might be racing to meet their wife who is in labor with their first child. They might have just unexpectedly lost a job they loved and are distracted by thoughts of “what next?” They might simply not have seen my car. This cools my jets.

I often wonder why I even challenge myself to think differently because who cares, we’re naturally judgmental and it just is what it is. But I am also an optimist, about myself and others. I believe living a consistent, less judgmental life calms the spirit, builds community, and might even create a little reprieve in a very angry world.