The consequences of our judgments

Sometimes, neighborhood communities are an example of life itself. A small nearby microcosm where all these processes so common among people are developed on a small scale. Friendships, disagreements, criticisms, chains of favors, rumors and, in essence, that familiar everyday life that we all know are established.

Think about it for a moment. When a new neighbor arrives to the community, to the development or to your property on the street where you live, you usually observe them for a while. In a discreet way and without giving excessive importance. Day by day you obtain your own information until, finally, you make a value judgment. They are responsible people. Or it is a closed family with relationship problems. They do not educate their children well or they spoil them too much. You can reach these conclusions without even having had dealings with them. We drop value judgments so easily that we don’t even question ourselves. Why do we do it?
Now think, for example, of all those times they have passed a value judgment on you, and remember how you have felt. On most of these occasions they have always made us feel uncomfortable. Nobody likes to be judged, let alone labeled with a term. But let’s look at it in more detail.

Why do we make value judgments?

People need to obtain information from everything around us to have a minimum sense of control. The brain collects small data from everything that surrounds us and classifies this information into categories. Normally value judgments are closely associated with our values ​​and our personality.

If you, for example, are a person who loves animals, you will see negatively that neighbor who is uncomfortable bumping into your dog, who avoids and who scolds every time he hears it barking. If your value scale does not include love for pets, for example, your value judgment towards that person will be somewhat different and, without a doubt, more softened. That is, we make judgments according to our personal principles, our values ​​and also a scale of emotions.

In 1994, Hamilton and Sherman defined value judgments as “cognitive structures that include our knowledge, beliefs, and expectations about social groups and their members“. In 1995, Fazio’s team added to this description that value judgments often have feelings and emotions associated with them.
Margarita del Olmo, in her article “Prejudices and stereotypes: a reconsideration of use and utility as social mechanisms”ensures that prejudices or value judgments “more than describing others, what they do is describe our relationship with them, highlighting those aspects that most distinguish us from each other”.

Dichotomous judgments

One thing to keep in mind is that most of the time value judgments are exclusively dichotomouss, that is, we establish them according to the two poles of the same adjective: good-bad, responsible-irresponsible, trustworthy-unwelcome person, close-cold, sincere-liar, prudent-reckless…

They are adjectives that we emit according to the sensations that the person themselves provoke in us, which is why the topic of emotions and values ​​has so much weight. Because basically, they are almost unconscious dimensions that have to do with our own personality.

If we were to make an objective value judgment, we would need data and countless variables. But everyday life is not a laboratory. Life moves quickly and we need quick value judgments to determine if we like someone or not. Whether or not we can trust a certain person according to “said sensations.”

Should we express our value judgments out loud?

Let’s take another simple example. Imagine that you have a very special coworker. A person who continually expresses what is going through his head with total sincerity and coldness. He complains about how uncomfortable the chair is, how overweight his boss is, how ugly the secretary is, how useless the administrator is, about the office computers, which are so slow…

He complains about his family, his job, he labels you a gossip and at the same time, he considers himself the most misunderstood person in the world. How do you think it might be to work with a person with this profile? With a person who, in effect, puts all his value judgments out loud?

It’s not about being sincere. It’s about maintaining a limit and respecting balance. Value judgments expressed out loud are almost always painful. Before issuing them, we must remember that we are all “sensitive flesh” and that they will have emotional consequences for the person themselves. Because most of the time a value judgment expressed out loud is a label we give to someone. It is, perhaps, judging without knowing everything about that person themselves, and it is something that we cannot do lightly.

More acceptance and less prejudice

The best way to maintain respect and personal balance with others is to accept others as they are: without judging. Now, we all know that there are objectively unacceptable aspects to which we should react: intolerance, racism, violence… where there is room for unanimous value judgments to defend what we all conceive as universal values ​​and rights.

But when it comes to day-to-day life, it pays to be cautious. Don’t judge that neighbor by the way he dresses, maybe tomorrow he will become one of your best friends. Don’t judge lightness and think that you don’t like to be judged either. Although obviously, it is something that we have always done and that we will do at every moment almost without realizing it…

Image Courtesy:Alla Vereshchagina.