How we judge others — and why we can’t seem to stop

An essay between personal experience, cognitive psychology, and philosophy.

Introduction: The Judge Who Lives Inside Us

There is a moment, sometimes quiet, in which we realize we carry within ourselves an entire courtroom — judge, jury, and sentence — devoted to evaluating countries, cultures, behaviors, and people who never asked for our opinion. That courtroom operates with brutal efficiency: in fractions of a second it classifies, condemns, and files away. The person who cuts the line. The country that does things “the other way.” The colleague who thinks differently. All judged, all sentenced.

This essay was born from a personal observation: that even after formally leaving a religious tradition that organized the world into binary categories — right and wrong, saved and lost, pure and impure — the mechanism of judgment survived the exit intact. It only changed vocabulary. Where there used to be “sinner,” now there is “ignorant.” Where there used to be “worldly,” now there is “backward.” The structure remains; only the labels change.

What psychology and philosophy reveal about this habit is both disturbing and liberating. Disturbing because they show moral superiority to be one of the most resistant illusions of the human mind. Liberating because, once we understand the mechanism, we can begin to dismantle it.

Part I — What Science Says: The Illusion of Moral Superiority

The Tappin and McKay Experiment

In 2017, researchers Ben Tappin and Ryan McKay, of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition at the University of London, published a study that has since become a reference in moral psychology. Titled “The Illusion of Moral Superiority,” the paper investigated something many suspect but few admit: most people believe they are morally superior to the average.

The study asked 270 participants to rate themselves on three fundamental dimensions of social perception: morality, agency (competence, ambition), and sociability (warmth, cooperation). Then they rated the “average person” on the same dimensions. The result was revealing: practically every individual irrationally inflated their moral qualities, and the magnitude of that inflation was significantly larger than in the other dimensions. In other words: we think we’re more competent and more sociable than others — but we think we’re much more moral than others.

One detail makes the finding even more unsettling. Unlike other self-enhancement biases, irrational moral superiority was not correlated with self-esteem. Normally, when we inflate our qualities, we do so because it makes us feel good. But in the moral domain, we inflate even when this produces no measurable emotional benefit. The researchers speculate there may be an evolutionary reason: from a survival standpoint, the safest bet is to assume someone is less trustworthy than you — unless there is evidence to the contrary.

Moral Superiority and Moral Hypocrisy

In 2019, Mengchen Dong, Jan-Willem van Prooijen, and Paul van Lange published “Self-enhancement in moral hypocrisy,” a study that connects two phenomena that often travel together: the tendency to consider ourselves more moral than others (moral superiority) and the tendency to present ourselves as more moral than we actually are (moral hypocrisy). The authors argue that both serve the same purpose: managing moral appearance. It’s not just about believing we’re good — it’s about looking good, both to others and to ourselves.

This explains why judging others is so seductive: every time we point out someone else’s moral failure, we reinforce — consciously or unconsciously — the narrative that we are on the right side. Judgment is not just an opinion about the other; it is the construction of an identity about ourselves.

The “Inflated Moral Self” and Its Effects

Subsequent research has shown that moral superiority is not a harmless trait. It is associated with harsher judgments of social transgressions, less willingness to understand different perspectives, and greater moral rigidity — even when rigidity becomes counterproductive. People with an elevated sense of moral superiority tend to punish more and forgive less, not because others are worse, but because punishment reaffirms their moral position.

Part II — What Philosophy Says: Nietzsche and Creative Resentment

The Genealogy of Judgment

Long before social-psychology laboratories, Friedrich Nietzsche had already diagnosed the mechanism of moral superiority with surgical precision. In On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), he proposes that Western morality was not born of reason or empathy, but of something far darker: ressentiment.

Nietzsche describes what he called the “slave revolt in morality”: a process by which socially powerless groups, unable to act directly upon the world, transformed their impotence into virtue and the strength of others into vice. Ressentiment, when it becomes creative, generates values: the morality of ressentiment says “No” to everything that is exterior, different, not-self — and that “No” is its fundamental creative act. Instead of action, what we have is reaction. Value is placed on how we react (turn the other cheek) rather than how we act (do something noble and exemplary).

The central point — and one deeply relevant to anyone who recognizes themselves in the habit of judging — is that ressentiment departs from a place of unhappiness and hatred, and can only derive satisfaction by external means, especially by unfavorable comparison with “enemies.” Chronic judgment is, in this reading, a disguised way of defining who we are by what we reject in others — not by what we build in ourselves.

Ressentiment Survives Religion

For those who have left a conservative religious tradition, Nietzsche’s analysis takes on an extra layer of meaning. The binary moral structure — pure/impure, saved/lost, right/wrong — is not just a doctrine: it is a mode of organizing perception. When the doctrine is abandoned, the mode of perception frequently remains. The ex-religious person who judges “backward people” with the same intensity they once judged “sinners” has not been freed from the mechanism — they have only swapped the content.

Nietzsche would say that ressentiment is more persistent than faith. Faith can be abandoned by arguments; ressentiment cannot. It inhabits deeper layers of the psyche — the habits of perception, the way we organize the world into categories of value, the speed with which we classify before we understand.

Guy Elgat, in his detailed study Nietzsche’s Psychology of Ressentiment (Routledge, 2017), argues that ressentiment is the interpretive key to the entire Genealogy of Morals and shows how this affect is intimately linked to the concept of justice — or, more precisely, to the distortion of justice into moralism.

Part III — The Elephant and the Rider: Jonathan Haidt and the Judging Mind

Intuition Comes First

If Nietzsche diagnosed the problem philosophically, Jonathan Haidt confirmed it empirically. In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012), Haidt presents twenty-five years of research on moral psychology and arrives at a conclusion that should be uncomfortable for anyone who considers themselves rational: our moral judgments do not arise from reason, but from instant gut feelings. Reason comes afterward — not to evaluate, but to justify what we have already felt.

Haidt uses a powerful metaphor: the mind is like a rider mounted on an elephant. The rider is conscious reason; the elephant is the set of intuitions, emotions, and automatic reactions that actually direct our moral behavior. The rider does not control the elephant — the rider serves the elephant, constructing post hoc narratives that explain and legitimize wherever the elephant has already decided to go.

This means that when we judge someone — a country, a culture, a person — we are not being “rational and objective,” as we like to believe. We are rationalizing an emotional reaction that already happened before consciousness even registered the event. The judgment arrives complete; the justification is manufactured afterward.

The Six Moral Foundations

Haidt proposes that human morality organizes itself around six foundations: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty. Different cultures, religions, and political orientations emphasize different foundations. What we experience as “obviously right” or “clearly wrong” depends on which foundations were most activated by our upbringing.

For someone with a Baptist background, the foundations of sanctity and authority tend to be especially salient. The world naturally organizes itself into categories of purity and obedience. When such a person abandons religion but does not examine their moral foundations, they may simply redirect those same intuitions toward new objects: instead of judging “sinners,” they judge “retrograde people”; instead of demanding obedience to God, they demand conformity to their own values — often with the same intolerance they once criticized in others.

Part IV — The Anatomy of Judgment: Why We Judge and What to Do About It

The Hidden Functions of Judgment

If judgment is so universal and so persistent, it is because it serves important psychological functions. Recognizing them is the first step to consciously choosing when — and whether — we want to activate them.

First, judgment builds identity. Every time we say “this is wrong,” we are implicitly saying “I am the kind of person who recognizes what is right.” Judging others is, paradoxically, an act of self-definition. Second, judgment simplifies complexity. The world is frighteningly complex; classifying people and cultures into moral categories reduces that complexity to something manageable. Third, judgment creates belonging. Judging together is a powerful social glue — just observe how groups form around common enemies.

Practical Exercises in Liberation

Research and philosophy converge on a few practical paths for weakening the habit of judgment without losing the capacity for discernment:

Perception without reaction. When a judgment arises, observe it as a mental phenomenon, neither feeding it nor fighting it. Research in mindfulness shows that this simple act of observation creates a space between stimulus and response — and it is in that space that the freedom to choose lives. The point is not to never judge, but to notice when one is judging.

Substitution of the inner question. The judging habit asks automatically: “What’s wrong with this?” Train yourself to substitute: “What don’t I know about this person’s story?” or “Under what circumstances would I do something similar?” That is not the same as agreeing with everything — it is honesty about human complexity.

Audit of information sources. Much contemporary content — especially about countries and cultures — is designed to generate indignation and a sense of superiority. If a certain kind of content consistently feeds the judging impulse, reducing exposure is not censorship: it is mental hygiene.

Nightly expansion exercise. At the end of each day, recall a judgment you made about someone and write down three possible reasons why that person acts the way they do. You don’t have to agree — just expand the moral imagination. Done consistently for a few weeks, this exercise measurably modifies the way one perceives others.

Personal genealogy of values. Inspired by Nietzsche, examine the origin of your most automatic judgments. Ask yourself: “Where does this opinion come from? Who planted it in me? Does it serve me, or do I serve it?” Frequently, we discover that our most passionate judgments are unexamined inheritances from environments we have already left.

Conclusion: Opinion Is Not Identity

Moral superiority is perhaps the most democratic of human illusions. Tappin and McKay showed that practically everyone carries it. Nietzsche demonstrated that it has deep historical roots in ressentiment. Haidt revealed that it is fed by emotional intuitions that precede any conscious reflection.

But recognizing this illusion need not lead to cynicism or relativism. There is a crucial difference between discernment and judgment. Discernment observes, distinguishes, evaluates — and remains open to revision. Judgment classifies, condemns, and closes itself off. The first is a tool; the second is a vice.

For those coming from a binary religious tradition, this distinction is especially liberating. It is possible to abandon the structure of judgment without abandoning the capacity to distinguish what is good for us from what harms us. It is possible to hold strong opinions without turning those opinions into identity — because when an opinion becomes identity, any questioning becomes an existential threat, and dialogue becomes impossible.

The final goal is not to never judge again — that would be as inhuman as judging always. The goal is to choose consciously when a judgment serves understanding and when it serves only our moral comfort. That choice, repeated daily, is what separates reactivity from freedom.

References

Tappin, B. M., & McKay, R. T. (2017). “The Illusion of Moral Superiority.” Social Psychological and Personality Science, 8(6), 623–631. DOI: 10.1177/1948550616673878

Dong, M., van Prooijen, J.-W., & van Lange, P. A. M. (2019). “Self-enhancement in moral hypocrisy: Moral superiority and moral identity are about better appearances.” PLoS ONE, 14(7), e0219382.

Dunning, D. (2016). “False moral superiority.” In A. G. Miller (Ed.), The Social Psychology of Good and Evil (pp. 249–269). Guilford Press.

Dertwinkel-Kalt, M., Feldhaus, C., Ockenfels, A., & Sutter, M. (2025). “The Illusion of Moral Superiority: Evidence from the Energy Crisis.” SSRN Working Paper.

Nietzsche, F. (1887/1998). On the Genealogy of Morality. Hackett Publishing. Translated by Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen.

Elgat, G. (2017). Nietzsche’s Psychology of Ressentiment: Revenge and Justice in On the Genealogy of Morals. Routledge.

Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon Books.

Skitka, L. J., Bauman, C. W., & Sargis, E. G. (2005). “Moral conviction: Another contributor to attitude strength or something more?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(6), 895–917.