You don't judge people the way some types do — out of vanity, or for the cheap pleasure of feeling above them. Your judgments are quieter and feel more legitimate than that, which is exactly what makes them harder to catch. When you watch someone do something a different way — skip the step you'd never skip, wing the thing you'd have prepared, leave undone what you consider plainly necessary — what fires in you isn't 'I'm better.' It's 'that's not how it's done.' A verdict against a standard, not against a person. And because the standard is usually a good one, the verdict feels like simple accuracy rather than judgment at all.
But notice what that verdict does. The moment you've filed someone's behaviour as incorrect — sloppy, unreliable, not the proper way — you stop investigating it. You've reached your conclusion, and you trust your conclusions, so the matter is closed. What you never find out is the part that would actually explain them: the constraint you couldn't see, the trade-off they made on purpose, the reason their odd-looking method is the sane one for their situation. Getting curious instead doesn't mean lowering your standard. It means refusing to let 'that breaks the rule' be the last thing you learn about a person, when it's almost always the first.
Your judgment is procedural, not snobbish — which hides it
When most people picture a judgmental person, they picture a snob looking down their nose. That's not you, and because it isn't, you've quietly let yourself off the hook. Your version doesn't feel like contempt; it feels like correctness. Someone does the report a different way, files things in an order you'd never use, handles a problem without the preparation you'd have insisted on — and your read is instant and certain: not done properly. You're not sneering. You're measuring against a method you've proven works, and finding them short.
But a measurement against your standard is still a verdict, and it shuts the door just as firmly as any sneer. The tell is that you almost never ask the follow-up. You see the deviation, you log it as wrong, and you move on already knowing what kind of person you're dealing with — careless, unreliable, not serious. That certainty arriving so fast is the thing to distrust. Real correctness, the kind you actually pride yourself on, would want the full data before ruling. You've skipped to the ruling.
A different method is not automatically a worse one
Here is the assumption doing the quiet damage: that your proven way is the way, and any departure from it is an error rather than an alternative. It's an understandable assumption — your methods are proven, by you, over years, and they hold up. But 'this works reliably for me, in my conditions' is not the same as 'this is correct for everyone, everywhere,' and you slide between those two without noticing. The person doing it differently may be solving a different problem, under constraints you've never had to work under.
Getting curious here means treating an unfamiliar method as a question, not a violation. Before you conclude they did it wrong, ask what their way buys them that yours doesn't — speed, flexibility, fit for a mess yours assumes away. Sometimes you'll find their method is genuinely worse and your standard was right; you lose nothing by checking. But often you'll find they made a reasonable trade you simply wouldn't have made — and the thing you were about to file as carelessness was a different, defensible kind of care.
Point your thoroughness at the person, not the deviation
You are thorough to a fault — it's one of the truest things about you. But watch where that thoroughness goes when someone behaves oddly. You become exhaustive about the deviation itself: precisely which step they skipped, exactly how far off-standard they went, the full inventory of what they got wrong. You build an airtight case for the verdict you reached in the first two seconds. All that rigour, spent confirming a conclusion instead of testing it.
Turn the same rigour the other direction. You already have the patience and the discipline to gather complete information before deciding anything — that's your gift. So gather it about the person, not just their error. What's the situation they're actually in? What were they optimising for? What do they know that you don't? An ISTJ who investigates people with the same diligence they bring to a problem becomes genuinely hard to fool — because the snap verdict, the thing that makes everyone else easy to manipulate, is the one shortcut you stop taking.
Curiosity costs you nothing you actually value
Part of what keeps the judgment locked in place is a worry that getting curious means going soft — that if you stop ruling things wrong, you're abandoning standards altogether, and standards are not negotiable for you. But that's a false trade. You can hold your method to the same high bar, run your own work exactly the way you've proven works, and still decline to convert every difference you observe into an immediate indictment of the person doing it. The standard for your work and the verdict on a stranger are two separate things.
And curiosity is cheaper than judgment, not more expensive. The snap verdict feels efficient, but it routinely costs you later — you mismanage the colleague you wrote off, you miss the better method because you'd already labelled it wrong, you become the rigid person others route around rather than level with. Asking 'what's going on for them?' before ruling costs you a few seconds and a little of the certainty you enjoy. In return you get accurate information, which is the thing you claim to want most. For you of all people, that's a good trade.
You were never the snob; your judgments come dressed as accuracy, which is exactly why they slip past you. But a verdict against your standard is still a closed door, and the speed with which it arrives is the warning sign — because the thorough, careful version of you would never rule before the evidence is in. So the next time someone does it differently and 'that's not how it's done' fires automatically, treat that thought as the first data point, not the conclusion. Ask what their way is solving for. Spend your considerable rigour on their reasons instead of their error. Keep every standard you hold for your own work, and simply stop converting other people's differences into instant indictments. You'll be harder to fool, easier to be around, and — the part that should matter most to you — far closer to actually correct.