Judgment as a Mirror Reflection: An Insight into the Neurological Correlation Between Judginess and Insecurity

Have you ever heard of the phrase, “never judge a book by its cover?” Between mothers, teachers, and even babysitters, it’s a saying most people grow up hearing. Usually it's used to remind us that our first impressions of a stranger don't typically accurately reflect a person's character, yet in everyday life judgment and criticism have become a second language. Situations like these emphasize how many people are quick to point out flaws and mistakes.

When receiving criticism or a verbal judgment of character, it is instinct to take it to heart and feel antagonized. Why am I not normal? Why would they say that about me? These questions can make us quickly spiral and question who we are as individuals. However, psychology and neuroscience suggest that the criticism is often less about the person receiving it and more about the mental state of the person giving it. In fact, “many studies have shown that personal characteristics, beliefs, and feelings may influence a person’s inferences about others” (Kaufmann).

We commonly explain this as projection: redirecting personal insecurities into frustrations onto someone else. Instead of dealing with internal conflict in an individual manner, the brain unconsciously shifts the effort towards perceiving someone else's flaws as a highlighted character reel. In many cases, antagonizing someone else's personality can often relieve temporary feelings towards one's own self inadequacy. The judgment they give to others is a direct reflection of how they treat themselves. Rather than being compassionate and understanding with others' insecurities, some people magnify them as enormous personal shortcomings. In doing so, they end up ignoring any sense of humanity, emphasizing the incapability of being supportive to anyone, even themselves, ironically. This is the why behind how they act.

Further effort to explain this phenomenon has been done through neuroscience. There is a region of the brain that is responsible for processing our very own emotions and analyzing potential threats for our own bodily responses: the amygdala. Here, “a single spot deep in the brain...[is connected to] different target locations across the brain...form[ing] a single anxiety-control region” (Deisseroth 21). Similarly, an emotion regulating cortex that controls human impulse, the prefrontal cortex, often works with the amygdala hand in hand. Ideally, this cortex allows us to pause and reflect on our next actions without acting impulsively; however, when someone is experiencing insecurity, this team of regulating emotion essentially imbalances, it weakens. In other words, when interpreting insecurity and dealing with comparison, our brain sees judgment as a danger that needs to be defended against.

When this happens, our brain seeks a way to restore the stability of the psychological state that it once had using subtle strategies of comparing in social environments. According to Deisseroth, “We display our inner state with this odd external signal...not [meaning] violation or intent, just broadcasting feelings to all observers and ourselves” (Deisseroth 37) By pinpointing different flaws in other individuals, we momentarily feel comfort within ourselves, temporarily silencing the internal monologue that creates

insecurity. From a neurological perspective, the scene of evaluating details about another person is more about the one judging and less about the one who has all the so called “flaws.” Ironically, those who appear most confident in saying things about others are often the ones experiencing internal tension of great depth, with a brain working overtime trying to process their own emotions.

So the next time someone says something to which you feel offended by, don’t automatically relate it to being not enough and deprecating your own self worth. Instead, have compassion for the fact that they may be incapable of giving themselves validation and are instead projecting it on you as a human’s neurological last resort. Everyone is going through things, even if that's hard to believe.

Never judge a book by its cover.

Works Cited:

Deisseroth, K. (2023). Projections: The new science of human emotion. Random House.

Kaufmann, M., Quirin, M., & Baumann, N. (2022). Blaming others: Individual differences in self-projection. Personality and Individual Differences, 196, 111721. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2022.111721