1Respect comes from the Latin for looking, with the prefix meaning again. It is literally the second look, the head that turns as somebody important walks past.
Knowing that does something useful. A word that felt close to sacred turns into a plain social behaviour you can examine: who gets looked at twice, when, and what it is actually worth to you. You can still want it. It just stops being the thing your standing rests on.
Islamic evidence
Do not turn your nose up at people, nor walk about the place arrogantly (Quran 31:18). The two things named there are postures, small and describable, which is a useful size for something that usually feels enormous.
“Do not turn your nose up at people, nor walk about the place arrogantly, for God does not love arrogant or boastful people”
Qur'an 31:18
Psychological evidence
A meta-analysis of perfectionistic self-presentation, meaning the need to appear perfect rather than to be perfect, found it associated with a range of mental health problems. The trouble sits in the appearing. It pooled cross-sectional studies, so it shows this pattern travelling with distress rather than causing it.
Casale S, Svicher A, Fioravanti G, Hewitt PL, Flett GL, Pozza A. (2024). Clinical psychology & psychotherapy · doi
Review detail
Why it works. A word you can define is a word you can weigh, and one you cannot define tends to rule you.
Feedback
none yet2Your mind is always slightly behind what is happening. Reality moves and you are the response, which leaves you permanently a step late and permanently not quite sure.
Put that way, uncertainty is not a flaw in your thinking, it is the position you are standing in. You are flying into the next moment without having seen it yet. There is a strange comfort in that, and it takes some of the shame out of being wrong, which is one of the things anger is usually protecting you from.
Islamic evidence
God knows what they conceal and what they reveal (Quran 16:23). Complete knowledge is placed with God, which quietly concedes that yours is partial.
“There is no doubt that God knows what they conceal and what they reveal. He does not love the arrogant”
Qur'an 16:23
Psychological evidence
In a pharmacological challenge study, physiological levels of testosterone rapidly increased how strongly the brain reacted to threat cues in healthy men, and a small placebo controlled study of twelve participants found a similar rise in responsiveness to social threat. Both point at threat processing running fast and early, ahead of anything deliberate. Both were small and involved giving men a hormone, so they say nothing about anybody's ordinary Tuesday.
Goetz SM, Tang L, Thomason ME, Diamond MP, Hariri AR, Carré JM. (2014). Biological psychiatry · doi
Hermans EJ, Ramsey NF, van Honk J. (2008). Biological psychiatry · doi
Review detail
Why it works. You cannot be certain about something you are still catching up with.