Affect and Intellect in Judgments: Factors Which Determine Level of Evaluative Heterogeneity

What determines whether someone has a one-sided view of the world or perceives both the negative and positive aspects of something? To understand the factors which determine the extent to which human judgments are absolute we have to take into account studies of conscious and non-conscious information processing (Reber, 1993; Underwood, 1996; Hassin et al., 2005), and implicit and explicit emotions (Zajonc, 1980; Greenwald and Banaji, 1995; Ohme, 2007), which can be interpreted as evaluative processes of different types (Reykowski, 1968; Oatley and Jenkins, 1996; Sander and Scherer, 2009). Understanding human judgment requires a knowledge of psychology and neurobiology (Damasio, 1994; LeDoux, 1996, 2012; Sander et al., 2003; Sander and Scherer, 2009; Armony and Vuilleumier, 2013), both of which help to explain the conditions in which individuals make extreme, absolute evaluations and the mechanisms which enable more complex, moderate and nuanced appraisals. We argue that models of judgment processes should refer to the dual mind theories (Epstein, 1990; Chaiken and Trope, 1999; Liberman, 2003; Deutsch and Strack, 2006; Kahneman, 2011), and emphasize the distinction between affective (automatic) vs. intellectual (reflective) premises of evaluative appraisals (Jarymowicz and Bar-Tal, 2006; Jarymowicz, 2009; Jarymowicz and Imbir, 2015).