Tesser & Martin define evaluation as "a positive or negative response to some person, idea, or thing that can manifest itself in affect, cognition or behavior."

Simply said, evaluative judgments are those that define for us whether we like or don't like something.  Tesser & Martin make reference to psychologist Charles E.  Osgood's defininition of evaluations (p. 400).  Using connotative dimensions such as good-bad, strong-weak, black-white, up-down, active-passive, and nice-awful on a 7-point scale, he generated a matrix of intercorrelations among the connotative dimension and from his factor analysis found three fundamental dimensions of connotative meaning.  One factor correlated with the good-bad scale; another factor correlated with the active-passive scale; and the third factor correlated with scales like strong-weak.  Osgood named these factors: evaluation, activity and potency.  So, one way of defining an evaluative judgment, is that if the connotative dimensions are found on the activity or potency scales, they are not evaluative in dimension.  Of all the ways in which our opinions are sampled, whether something is good or bad, it is our evaluations that matter most.

It's important to note that a distinction must be made between feelings and evaluation in order to appreciate conditions in which the two are manipulated orthogonally, as occurs in the situation where people are happy (the evaluation) that the sad movie made them feel so sad (the feeling), or unhappy that the sad movie didn't make them feel as sad as it was supposed to.   So, in addition to not being measures of activity or potency, evaluations are also not necessarily feelings.  So, how do we come to the process of evaluation?

 Psychologically,  there are three components of the process of evaluation:

• The cognitive representation of a thing
• An affective reaction to a thing
• A pre-action behavioral response to a thing

The question is, how are these sequenced?  Do they occur always in this order?  Do we cognitively recognize an item as a "snake" or a "stick" and then have a feeling response to it which becomes a prelude to action?   Or do we have an instant affective response prior to cognitive recognition?  Or do our bodies respond and we think and feel later?  Though we may think we're recognizing an object and have an affective response to it, the work in social psychology and biological psychology indicates that may not be true.  We may have affective reactions first, and the ordering may even appear like this:

• An affective reaction to a thing
• A pre-action behavioral response to a thing
• The cognitive representation of a thing

To answer the question, social psychologists parsed the domain of attitudes into these cognitive, affective and behavioral components, and empirically isolated and examined their interrelationship.  The results of their work has upturned many of our commonly held beliefs (or ideals?) about ourselves.  Their work demonstrated that our Western assumption that we use what we know to guide what we do and how we feel is not well founded.

We've held a belief in our culture that we know certain information about a thing and that we evaluate those things based on that information.  But Cognitive Dissonance Theory went so far as to say that it was the other way around:  our behaviors shaped our evaluations.  These studies demonstrate that people will repeatedly shape their thinking to match what they've already done in order to resolve the inconsistencies created by acting in reverse to previously held beliefs.  (After years of reading articles and books by Roger Sperry, Michael Gazzaniga and Robert Ornstein, my immediate explanation of cognitive dissonace theory is that our verbal left brains quickly create hypotheses for the decisions and actions initiated by the right brain.)

We've also believed as a culture that there is (and should be) consistency between our evaluative beliefs and our feelings.  Yet, research shows that if we create bad feelings in a person, (in one study through hypnosis) we can create negative thinking about that object.  So, feelings don't necessarily flow from beliefs; our feelings can affect our beliefs.

R.B. Zajonc, as referenced by Tesser & Martin (p. 403), took this further by demonstrating that affect is independent of beliefs.  He demonstrated that evaluations occur very quickly and without time for cognitive processing.  This happens to be very much in keeping with the premise of evolutionary psychologists that there are biological and evolutionary bases in our evaluations.

It has also been demonstrated that frequency of exposure can have an impact on liking something even if you're not aware of having been exposed to the stimulus.  In fact, the "mere exposure effect" is stronger when subjects are unaware of exposure.  Liking can be shaped without conscious awareness, which means there is a non-conscious cognitive process to toss into the evaluative process.  Again, that fits in with the views of evolutionary psychologists.

The authors contend that development of a response without awareness is a characteristic of automaticity, and automaticity appears to be a vital component of evaluations.  However, this automaticity element  is influenced by the complexity of the decision.  For example:  A preference to interview one person over another for employment will present itself much more quickly than will the decision to actually hire that person.  Here cognition plays a much higher role in the evaluative process.  Yet other studies show that once an evaluation has been made about that person, further evaluations about the person are much easier.  People will refer back to their final evaluation of the person rather than go through the process of gathering original information for subsequent evaluations.

The issue of how evaluation comes to be is even more complicated than this.  Evaluations are affected by their relativity to context.  If you change the context in which an evaluation is made, you'll change the evaluation.  If you change the accessibility or relevance of a context, you'll change the evaluation.  If you change the applicability of the context to the target, you'll change the evaluation.

All of this begins to look less like an assault on the basic character of human beings when viewed from an evolutionary standpoint.  From reading John Tooby's and Leda Cosmides' chapter on the Psychological Foundations of Culture in The Adapted Mind, one must view these findings with a premise that we are hardwired for evaluations made in these seemingly irrational ways.  These ways of evaluating may, in fact, be evolved mechanisms, specialized for solving "evolutionarily long-enduring adaptive problems."  In its most basic example, getting immediately out of the way of (or aggressing on) the unexpected appearance of a figure appearing out of a shadow (behavior) and thinking and feeling afterward (cognitive and affect) would be evolutionarily adaptive.  Them that did might survive to have grandchildren.  In fact, hypothesizing your rationale for being so quick might even help you get a wife to make babies with.

Tooby & Cosmides explain natural selection in this way: Certain design features are embodied in organisms and "they can, generally speaking, propagate themselves in only two ways; (1) by solving problems that will increase the probability that the organism they are situated in will produce offspring, or (2) by solving problems that will increase the probability that the organism's kin will produce offspring."

In looking at the issue of values and preferences over the past several weeks, the topic seems to only become more complex and less understandable.  Tooby & Cosmides explain why in a sentence:  "Evolution, the constructor of living organization, has no privileged tendency to build into designs principles of operation that are simple and general. Evolution operates by chance – which builds nothing systematic into organisms – and by selection – which cumulatively adds modifications, regardless of whether they add complexity.  Thus psychologists are not likely to find a few satisfying general principles like Maxwell's equations that unify all psychological phenomena, but instead a complex pluralism of mechanisms."

So, though we are capable of evaluating things cognitively, then affectively and then behaviorally, and may because of our biological and/or social manifestations aspire to that ideal, we are for the most part making evaluations in accordance with our evolution.

A classic example of how social psychology's theories of evaluation can be thrown into question is demonstrated by the appearance in many women of  nausea and vomiting during the first trimester of pregnancy.  "Pregnancy sickness" as Margie Profet describes it in her article in Tooby's & Cosmides' book.  My normal cognitive and affective evaluation of a food as, ‘really good, I like that and love how it smells', was often met by my behavioral response with a rather immediate and violent rejection during pregnancy.  My overall evaluation of the food didn't change, though I did develop a rather dismal evaluation of pregnancy for a time.  But Profet's article takes an adaptionist approach to this phenomenon, and she hypothesizes that our perceptual system for evaluating foods is designed so that certain tastes and smells are more aversive than others.  That system becomes more sensitive during the first trimeter of pregnancy, deterring pregnant women from eating certain foods that they would otherwise eat.  And in doing so, the food aversions, nausea, and vomiting of pregnancy sickness that came about during the course of human evolution serve to protect the embryo against maternal ingestion of the wide array of teratogens and abortifacients abundant in natural foods.   "Pregnancy sickness," she says, "represents a lowering of the usual human threshold of tolerance to toxins in order to compensate for the extreme vulnerability of the embryo to toxins during organogenesis."  Her evidence is clearly supportive of an evolutionary basis for considering evaluations, and most certainly for a reversal in that situation of even the highly regarded and revolutionary cognitive dissonance theory of evaluation.

 Psychologically, it seems, there are three components of the process of evaluation.  In the case of the injury the evaluative sequence might take place like this:

• An affective reaction to a thing                            I feel shocked, deprived
                                                                                    and a ngry
• A pre-action behavioral response to a thing        I experience a physiological
                                                                                    surge of desire to act.
• The cognitive representation of a thing               I realize someone stole my
                                                                                    car

 In the case of the act of forgiveness, that evaluative sequencing might look like this:

• The cognitive representation of a thing               I recognize I am not getting
                                                                                    relief from continuing
                                                                                    to resent the perpetrator
                                                                                    and I conclude I must
                                                                                    forgive.
• A pre-action behavioral response to a thing        I experience a physiological
                                                                                    surge of fear
• An affective reaction to a thing                            I feel unprotected as I
                                                                                    consider letting go of my
                                                                                    resentment
• The cognitive representation of a thing               I recognize I am stuck
                                                                                    between my fear and
                                                                                    the discomfort of my
                                                                                    continued resentment
                                                                                    and I conclude I must take
                                                                                    the risk and forgive.
• A pre-action behavioral response to a thing        I experience a physiological
                                                                                    sensation of peace as I
                                                                                    relax my body in response
                                                                                    to  the recollection of the
                                                                                    offense
• An affective reaction to a thing                            I feel safe and peaceful as I
                                                                                    let go of my  resentment
• The cognitive representation of a thing               I recognize I am at peace and
                                                                                    no further harm has come to
                                                                                    me as a result of my action.

Let's say now that I have, through this rather dreadful experience, established an experiential basis (see Bem) for evaluating forgiveness and for holding it as a value.   The evaluation of forgiveness as a tool in one's values tool chest can easily be affected by context.  As we stated earlier, if you change the context in which an evaluation is made, you risk changing the evaluation.  What if I'm asked to make the evaluation on the basis of someone doing harm to someone I love?  There's a temptation when injured to revert to a position of resentment as defense.  Context, then, can influence whether or not one continues to evaluate a held value like forgiveness as desirable -- even though the reality of relief for the victim hasn't changed.

Now let's look at the value of forgiveness from the standpoing of evolutionary psychology.  Since the easy thing to do is to resent, it might be easiest to examine how resentment has served us from an evolutionary standpoint.  Forgive the simple-mindedness of my example, if you will.

Let's say that someone from another band of hunter-gatherers sneaks into your supplies and steals your food or your weapons so that you can't get more food.  The anger might inspire you to take action to get your things back, or to protect your things more closely.  And the cathexis that results from holding on to that anger might aid you in preventing future violations of the same sort from that source or others.  Since this is obviously the choice that represents  the automaticity that Tesser & Martin say is a vital component of evaluations, then it makes sense that there is a stronger survival instinct in resentment than there is in forgiveness -- at least the way forgiveness is often perceived.  Those who adopted the resentment response might easily have been the ones that survived to make more children and grandchildren.  There's increasing evidence, by the way, that the resentment response to injury creates sufficient stress to induce illness, not the least of which are ulcers and clogged arteries (stroke and heart attack).  However, this would not have influenced reproductive ability since the effects of prolonged stress don't usually strike until later in life.

So, how did forgiveness evolve?  Let's say that you are injured by someone within your band of hunter-gathers.  Your survival and the survival of your offspring might be contingent upon you finding a way to live in peace.  In fact, the sheer fact of living with others and having to find ways of tolerating or, better, accepting the differences, requires that each person find a way to resolve resentment.  Living in close quarters with people who are exceptionally inter-reliant would necessitate the ability to find inner peace with others' shortcomings.  Forgiveness makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint.

However, forgiveness is also self-rewarding.  Perhaps it is just from the sharp physiological and psychological contrast that one experiences going from being mentally churned up and physically assaulted by the effects of our autonomic nervous systems while in that condition, that creates the profound sense of love and relief you feel when you forgive.  My personal inclination is to believe that subtle energies exist in and around us, and that we and those around us are affected positively by the lightened spirit one encounters within when forgiveness is achieved.  Preliminary work by Schwartz & Russek indicates that this is a possibility.

Either way, it makes sense to forgive.  And there may even be an evolutionary basis for the character building that comes in that moment when a person must choose to forgive.  That decision is difficult, and is a powerful internal experience for anyone who is faced with the choice.
 

   Profet, M. (1992).  "Pregnancy Sickness as Adaptation:  A Deterrent to Maternal Ingestion of Teratogens"  in Cosmides, L., Tooby, J., & Barkow, J.H. (Eds.) The Adapted Mind p. 327-366.  Oxford University Press:  New York.

    Tooby, J & Cosmides, L.  (1992).  "The Psychological Foundations of Culture"  in Cosmides, L., Tooby, J., & Barkow, J.H. (Eds.) The Adapted Mind p. 19-136.  Oxford University Press:  New York.

    Tooby, J & Cosmides, L.  (1990).  "On the Universality of Human Nature and the Uniqueness of the Individual:  The Role of Genetics and Adaptation."  Journal of Personality, 58, 1.  March 1990.
  

Links that relate to Tesser & Martin's  work:    Ruminative thoughts:  Advances in      Social Cognition  Striving and feeling:  Interactions      Among Goals, Affect, and      Self-Regulation Links that relate to Tooby & Cosmides' work:  Evolutionary Psychology:  A Primer  The Evolution of Despair  Our Emotions:  Why we feel the     way we do  Leda Cosmides  The Center for Evolutionary      Psychology  Human Behavior and Evolution      Society Links that relate to Margie Profet's work:  Is Nausea in Pregnancy Nature's      Way of  Protecting The Fetus      From Toxins  1994 Interview

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