Opinion vs Judgement - what's the difference?

[HollyBollyBooBoo]

Just that really. More and more the word 'judgement' is used, i.e 'you're so judgemental', or 'listen without judgement'. It mostly sounds like an accusation.

I'm intrigued by the difference between having an opinion and being judgemental.

To me an opinion is a considered view of the pros or cons of a situation or thing - a beach holiday is better for small children while a city break is good for older teens.
A judgement is “that holiday was rubbish, the teenagers were bored stupid’

^
the ability to make considered decisions or come to sensible conclusions.^

definition of judgement.

We make judgements all the time. Is my tea too hot to drink. Should I leave the pot of boiling water on the stove when my young child is within reach of it.
Judgement is what tells us from past experience when to move cautiously forward and when to rush headlong. The world moves forward because we are able to make judgements oin the past.

I never understand the word being used as an accusation. We should be using our judgement every day. Everyone's conclusions may well be different depending on their past.

On MN it depends whether the person throwing the judgey accusation agrees with you and/or whether the topic is the sort of topic that posters can pretend to be so enlightened that they'd never consider thinking anything negative even though most people offline would definitely have an opinion or make a judgement.

Eg. AIBU to think my friend needs to up her game. She doesn't Dettol or Zoflora every surface 92 times daily = absolutely disgusting and how can people live in filth

Express irritation that you went to a cafe and one parent was allowing their children to treat it as a play area with running and screaming = how dare you be so judgemental. I regularly go to cafes and positively adore seeing happy children. It's refreshing to see kids being kids. Who cares if they were a little noisy. Maybe the parent has mental health issues and that cafe trip was their one moment in the week they left the house. It's such a shame that moment was probably ruined by your judgemental stares. There's no need to be so judgey and superior.

.

but you're still making the judgement that the parent may have mental health issues, and another judgement that it's ok to let the children run wild because of her mental health issues or even because I want everybody to think I'm 'right on'.

pusspuss9
Quite true. Especially the right on part.

Of course, those people couldn't possibly have any judgement at all, other than to judge the life out of anyone they deem to be judgey.

To me, passing judgement on someone else is to form an opinion based on superficial reasons.
So a judgement is a type of opinion.

Could be massively wrong but that’s my logic

Most opinions are based on people just hearing numbers / facts they want to hear or facts they want to believe because it reinforces their views.

It's hard to get a truly independent opinion. Even facts can be presented in a way so you are more likely to use them. 80 out of 100 people believe that's true.

Judgement - past experience - an interesting concept. Do we look at our entire experiences about a situation to make a judgement? How reliable are our judgements of our past experiences?

depends on what you mean by reliable. Most issues have many facets.
if for instance you had a certain risky situation, people that had fallen foul of that in the past would be more careful when faced with it in the future because they knew what would be the likely outcome, whereas people that had never had that experience would make a totally different judgement

To me an opinion is where you say ‘I think xyz’ and acknowledge that others may think differently and that’s ok.
Judgement is where you say outright that someone else is wrong with no regard for their point of view or experiences.

That doesn’t make judgement a worse thing than having an opinion. As a PP said, we’re always making judgements because otherwise we’d all be doing exactly the same thing all the time because we’d all think there was just one specific way to do something I.e no grey area