Question
Why do people judge other people?
Answer
I am just reading Francis Fukuyama's excellent new book The Origins of Political Order.
One of the things he does successfully is reframe classic "Man in the State of Nature" ideas (due to Hobbes and Rousseau in two different forms) to argue that the "state of nature," far from being a state of individuals from which communities (and therefore states) had to coalesce, was actually a communal state. Individualism is what had to evolve later, not communal situations.
You can still apply Hobbes and Rousseau type thinking about political evolution, but you do it in a different way.
Why am I bringing this up here? Because it provides an answer that satisfies me more than any other than I've heard. It's not the behavior of judging that has to be explained. It is the behavior of non-judging.
Judging others is the natural existential behavior of communal creatures, like eating or sleeping. In fact you don't even need a name for it until the opposite behavior, not judging, evolves.
So the real question is: when and why did humans stop consciously judging each other all the time?
Answer: when larger states arose that were governed by impersonal mechanisms and institutions, and which required objectified, impersonal forms of trust.
A revealing factoid in Pankaj Ghemawat's World 3.0 about this is that traditional nomad/hunter-gatherer societies are far more likely to cheat outsiders, but not their own clansmen/tribesmen. Farmers by contrast, are more likely to deal honestly with strangers and foreigners. They "judge" them if you will, by simply testing the authenticity of the currency they offer.
If you want a first principles reason why in the "state of nature" judging others is as natural as eating, think of it not as an individual behavior in interactions among individuals, but an internal behavior of a communal creature within which the concept of "individual" is meaningless. So in that sense, asking "why do people judge each other?" is like asking "why does your liver cooperate with your kidney?" It is a somewhat meaningless question. A better question is "what is the mutual relationship of these two organs within a larger organism? Metaphors like organ transplant rejection might be more fruitful here than individualized models of trust (and therefore, judgement, since the purpose of judgment, in the first instance, is merely to decide whether or not to engage in more complex ways with another entity; more refined judgments are about the hows and whys of the engagement).
One of the things he does successfully is reframe classic "Man in the State of Nature" ideas (due to Hobbes and Rousseau in two different forms) to argue that the "state of nature," far from being a state of individuals from which communities (and therefore states) had to coalesce, was actually a communal state. Individualism is what had to evolve later, not communal situations.
You can still apply Hobbes and Rousseau type thinking about political evolution, but you do it in a different way.
Why am I bringing this up here? Because it provides an answer that satisfies me more than any other than I've heard. It's not the behavior of judging that has to be explained. It is the behavior of non-judging.
Judging others is the natural existential behavior of communal creatures, like eating or sleeping. In fact you don't even need a name for it until the opposite behavior, not judging, evolves.
So the real question is: when and why did humans stop consciously judging each other all the time?
Answer: when larger states arose that were governed by impersonal mechanisms and institutions, and which required objectified, impersonal forms of trust.
A revealing factoid in Pankaj Ghemawat's World 3.0 about this is that traditional nomad/hunter-gatherer societies are far more likely to cheat outsiders, but not their own clansmen/tribesmen. Farmers by contrast, are more likely to deal honestly with strangers and foreigners. They "judge" them if you will, by simply testing the authenticity of the currency they offer.
If you want a first principles reason why in the "state of nature" judging others is as natural as eating, think of it not as an individual behavior in interactions among individuals, but an internal behavior of a communal creature within which the concept of "individual" is meaningless. So in that sense, asking "why do people judge each other?" is like asking "why does your liver cooperate with your kidney?" It is a somewhat meaningless question. A better question is "what is the mutual relationship of these two organs within a larger organism? Metaphors like organ transplant rejection might be more fruitful here than individualized models of trust (and therefore, judgement, since the purpose of judgment, in the first instance, is merely to decide whether or not to engage in more complex ways with another entity; more refined judgments are about the hows and whys of the engagement).