Understood but Unmoved: A Theory of Trait Judgmentalism and the Architecture of Evaluative Rigidity
Abstract
This paper is the theory-stage statement of the Judgmentalism research programme and the direct companion to a peer-reviewed article now published as Boullineau, E. (2027), Moral violations are made, not found: A theory of motivated violation construction, New Ideas in Psychology, 84, 101313, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2026.101313. This version supersedes the earlier posted version in full, under a new title, and has been submitted to Review of General Psychology.
Psychology can explain why people condemn, but not who cannot be moved. Everyone knows the evaluator who understands every mitigating fact and remains unmoved. Across moral judgment, person perception and belief updating, paradigms treat comprehension of mitigating context as proof that the context entered the evaluation. Whether it received any weight is a separate question, rarely put. This paper names that default the Revision Assumption and proposes the construct it has hidden. Trait Judgmentalism is a stable individual difference in which an evaluator comprehends relevant, credible mitigation and does not revise the verdict on the person. The mechanism, Contextual Moderation Failure, sits after every input stage has succeeded. The context is perceived, understood, retained and accepted, and it weighs nothing. The trait has an architecture, two candidate antecedents and two expression channels, one of them silent. It is a sibling, not a twin, of dogmatism, of low intellectual humility and of low forgivingness. Five falsifiable predictions follow, and the paper names what would kill the construct. The programme's classification stage is already published. Psychology has measured who judges harshly, who judges at first sight and who judges out loud. It has never measured who cannot be moved. This paper states what it would take.
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BibTeX
@misc{boullineau2026understood,
title = {{Understood but Unmoved: A Theory of Trait Judgmentalism and the Architecture of Evaluative Rigidity}},
author = {Emile Boullineau},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/54hpm_v3},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/54hpm_v3/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Understood but Unmoved: A Theory of Trait Judgmentalism and the Architecture of Evaluative Rigidity
AU - Emile Boullineau
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/02
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/54hpm_v3
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/54hpm_v3/
AB - This paper is the theory-stage statement of the Judgmentalism research programme and the direct companion to a peer-reviewed article now published as Boullineau, E. (2027), Moral violations are made, not found: A theory of motivated violation construction, New Ideas in Psychology, 84, 101313, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2026.101313. This version supersedes the earlier posted version in full, under a new title, and has been submitted to Review of General Psychology. Psychology can explain why people condemn, but not who cannot be moved. Everyone knows the evaluator who understands every mitigating fact and remains unmoved. Across moral judgment, person perception and belief updating, paradigms treat comprehension of mitigating context as proof that the context entered the evaluation. Whether it received any weight is a separate question, rarely put. This paper names that default the Revision Assumption and proposes the construct it has hidden. Trait Judgmentalism is a stable individual difference in which an evaluator comprehends relevant, credible mitigation and does not revise the verdict on the person. The mechanism, Contextual Moderation Failure, sits after every input stage has succeeded. The context is perceived, understood, retained and accepted, and it weighs nothing. The trait has an architecture, two candidate antecedents and two expression channels, one of them silent. It is a sibling, not a twin, of dogmatism, of low intellectual humility and of low forgivingness. Five falsifiable predictions follow, and the paper names what would kill the construct. The programme's classification stage is already published. Psychology has measured who judges harshly, who judges at first sight and who judges out loud. It has never measured who cannot be moved. This paper states what it would take.
ER -