 Charles Aaron from Spin described the song as "slinking through [Hall's] low-ridin', gum-smackin 'groove, Maddy's hard-bitten ingenue expresses no regrets, but this time you feel for her." Aaron highlighted the lyrics "Would it sound better if I were a man?" as subversive and coy. Author Lucy O 'Brien described in her book, Madonna: Like an Icon, that "Human Nature" was one of the "quirkiest" tracks on Bedtime Stories, "throbbing with with a tightly restrained but devastating anger". For Barry Walters from Moscow-Pullman Daily News, the song had the catchiest chorus among all the other tracks from the album. Jim Farber from Entertainment Weekly gave the song a negative review, noting that Madonna's "on far surer ground thrashing through such neurotic (if not uncommon) views of relationships than she is trashing the media. In striking back at her critics, Madonna simply sounds self-righteous and smug. 'I didn't know I couldn 't talk about sex,' she sneers in 'Human Nature'. 'Did I say something true?' Yes. But tooting your own horn about it just sounds petty". Rooksby said that the repetition of the sample was "wearing" and it "did not suggest that the world of the singer was very appealing".
