Social Judgment Theory

Social judgment theory explores how social actors—individuals, groups, organizations, and society at large—evaluate social entities, such as organizations, categories, practices, and social structures. The theory thus deals with evaluators at multiple levels and with social entities (the objects being evaluated) that can be present at different levels of analysis. This entry reviews the history of social judgment theory, the main types of social judgments (feature based and category based), the different levels of evaluators, and the different types of entities that can be subjected to evaluation.