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Judgement can have a number of meanings in psychology
- Most commonly it is related to the decision-making process of forming an opinion on the basis of the available evidence and is the term applied to the decision reached. Some sense of the weighing of alternatives within a given set of values is implied.
- In older works it was assumed there was a faculty of judgement.
- In psychophysics a judgement applies to the decision made as to whether, for example, a signal is present of not
Traditionally, the word has been spelled judgment in all forms of the English language. However, the spelling judgement (with e added) largely replaced judgment in the United Kingdom in a non-legal context. In the context of the law, however, judgment is preferred. This spelling change contrasts with other similar spelling changes made in American English, which were rejected in the UK. In the US at least, judgment is still preferred and judgement is considered incorrect by many American style guides. As with many such spelling differences, both forms are equally acceptable in Canadian English and Australian English. In New Zealand English the form judgment is the preferred spelling in dictionaries, newspapers and legislation, although the variant judgement can also be found in all three categories. We follow the spelling judgment following the APA Thesaurus
In decision makingEdit
In non-legal contexts, a judgment is a balanced weighing up of evidence preparatory to making a decision. A formal process of evaluation applies. A judgment may be expressed as a statement, e.g. S1: 'A is B' and is usually the outcome of an evaluation of alternatives. The formal process of evaluation can sometimes be described as a set of conditions and criteria that must be satisfied in order for a judgment to be made. What follows is a suggestive list of some conditions that are commonly required:
- there must be corroborating evidence for S1,
- there must be no true contradicting statements,
- if there are contradicting statements, these must be outweighed by the corroborating evidence for S1, or
- contradicting statements must themselves have no corroborating evidence
- S1 must also corroborate and be corroborated by the system of statements which are accepted as true.
One should be cautious in attributing, without a rigorous analysis, a rigid set of criteria to all forms of judgment. Often this results in unnecessary restrictions to judgment methodologies, excluding what may otherwise be considered legitimate judgments. For analogous difficulties in science and the scientific method see the Wikipedia entry on the scientific method.
From the criteria mentioned above, we could judge that "It is raining" if there are raindrops hitting the window, if people outside are using umbrellas, and if there are clouds in the sky. Someone who says that despite all this, it is not raining, but cannot provide evidence for this, would not undermine our judgment.
However, if they demonstrated that there was a sophisticated projection and audio system to produce the illusion of our evidence, then we would probably reconsider our judgment. However, we would not do this lightly, we would demand evidence of the existence of such a system. Then it would need to be decided again upon available new evidence whether or not it was raining.
Many forms of judgment, including the above example, require that they be supported by, and support, known facts which are themselves well supported, and its negation must be shown to be unfounded, before it is accepted as well founded.
Factors affecting judgementEdit
Factors leading to judgement disturbances include:
- Analytic reasoning
- Clinical judgement
- Clinical judgement (not diagnosis)
- Critique of Judgment - by Immanuel Kant, principly on aesthetics
- Common sense
- Heuristics in judgment and decision making
- List of biases in judgment and decision making
- Category:Judgement researchers
- Natural deduction
- Personality judgment - in interpersonal evaluation
- Probability judgment
- Remember versus know judgements
- Shifting standards model
- Social judgment theory
- Society for Judgment and Decision Making
- Suspension of judgment
- Thin-slicing judgements
- Value judgment
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