Judgment as a character strength

What does judgment mean as a character strength?

Judgment as a strength is the habit of thinking things through carefully, looking at all sides, and being willing to change your mind when the facts say so. Put another way, it is the discipline of turning a question over before deciding what it is, and of letting evidence win.

The word is doing something specific here, and it is nearly the opposite of the everyday sense. Being judgmental is arriving at a verdict early and defending it. Judgment in the classification is the discipline of not doing that: examining a question from several sides, looking for the evidence that would count against what you already think, and revising when it turns up. The alternative name used by most publishers, open-mindedness, is the clearer label for what is being measured.

Two things it is not. It is not indecision. The strength includes reaching a conclusion and acting on it; what it rules out is reaching the conclusion before the looking is done. And it is not intelligence. Careful reasoning is a style rather than a capacity, which is why a very quick thinker can be poor at it and a slow one excellent.

It is also not neutrality. Someone high on judgment has opinions, sometimes strong ones. What distinguishes them is what they do with an inconvenient fact.

Which virtue does judgment sit under?

Judgment is one of 24 character strengths grouped under six broad virtues in the classification assembled by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, who set out to describe what is best in people with the seriousness usually reserved for what goes wrong (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). The six virtues are wisdom and knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence.

Judgment sits under wisdom and knowledge, the virtue the classification describes as acquiring and using what you know. Its companions there are creativity, curiosity, love of learning and perspective. Within that group it is the quality control: curiosity goes and gets the material, love of learning deepens it, creativity makes something from it, and judgment decides what of it is true.

The list was built by reading across philosophical, religious and educational traditions for qualities praised almost everywhere, then filtering the candidates against criteria such as being fulfilling in itself and expressible without diminishing anyone else. The six virtues are organising headings from that process rather than factors recovered from data.

How is judgment different from open-mindedness and reflective-mindedness?

They describe overlapping ground and are still different kinds of thing. Open-Mindedness as a Big Five facet is a descriptive statement about how readily you entertain unfamiliar ideas and values. Reflective-Mindedness is the tendency to examine your own thinking. Judgment the strength covers both, and adds the part people find hardest, which is acting on what the examination turns up.

A facet is value-neutral by design. The Big Five came out of decades of lexical research into which trait words travel together, and the model deliberately has no good end (Goldberg, 1993). A strength is the opposite: it was chosen for being valued, it carries a moral flavour, and it is described as something you use rather than something you simply have.

The practical difference is where each one shows up. Open-mindedness as a facet shows up in what you are willing to consider. Judgment as a strength shows up in what you are willing to give up.

What does the research say about judgment?

Judgment is named directly in two of the larger strengths studies, in a pattern worth sitting with.

• Endorsement across countries. An analysis of more than a million online responses from 75 nations found the rank order of the 24 strengths was substantially similar from place to place, and judgment was among the most endorsed strengths everywhere, with honesty, fairness, kindness and curiosity, while self-regulation, modesty, prudence and spirituality were least endorsed (McGrath, 2015). The samples were self-selected, so the ordering is better evidence than any national average.
• Life satisfaction. In a survey of 5,299 adults, the strengths most consistently associated with life satisfaction were hope, zest, gratitude, love and curiosity. Judgment was among the intellectual strengths, with appreciation of beauty, creativity and love of learning, that related only weakly (Park et al., 2004). The relationships were monotonic, so more judgment was not associated with less satisfaction.
• Using a strength deliberately. In a randomised, placebo-controlled online study, three of five tested exercises produced lasting gains in happiness and reductions in low mood, and two did not (Seligman et al., 2005). A later meta-analysis of signature strengths interventions found they raised life satisfaction and positive affect and lowered reported low mood, with small to moderate effects drawn from 29 effect sizes in 14 articles (Schutte & Malouff, 2019).

Read together, those two findings say something honest about this strength. People almost everywhere claim it and admire it, and it is not one of the strengths that tracks how satisfied people feel. That is not a mark against it. Judgment is a strength that mostly benefits the accuracy of your beliefs and the people who rely on them, and accuracy is not always comfortable.

One caution applies to the whole field. These are self-reports about your own virtues, which is the kind of question where people tend to present themselves well. Self-rated open-mindedness is a particularly generous item type, since almost nobody thinks of themselves as closed. Treat the ordering within your own profile as more informative than the absolute height of the score.

How does judgment relate to the Big Five?

As a reading rather than a measured crosswalk, judgment draws on two dimensions at once, which makes it unusual among the strengths. The looking-at-all-sides half sits with Openness to Experience, and the weighing-before-deciding half sits with Conscientiousness, particularly the facets of cautiousness and reflective thought.

The Openness half can be located more precisely. Factor analyses of facet scales from two large inventories found that each Big Five domain splits into two correlated aspects, and for Openness those are an intellect aspect and an openness aspect (DeYoung et al., 2007). Judgment leans toward intellect: reasoning, argument and the handling of abstractions, rather than imagination and aesthetic experience. That is the cleanest place to put it on the familiar map.

None of the trait evidence was collected with a strengths inventory, so read the mapping as orientation rather than as a finding about the strength itself.

What do high and low judgment look like?

High judgment shows up less in what a person concludes than in how they got there.

• You can state the strongest version of the view you disagree with.
• New evidence changes the conclusion rather than the subject.
• You separate how much you like an idea from how likely it is to be true.
• People bring you a decision when they want it tested rather than approved.

The costs are specific. Weighing takes time, and some decisions are worth less than the deliberation spent on them. Perpetual re-examination can read as a lack of conviction to people who wanted a position from you. And the strength can be performed rather than practised, which looks like a great show of considering the other side followed by the original conclusion.

Lower judgment is not stupidity and it is not a fault. It describes a firmer relationship with your own conclusions, and it comes with advantages: you decide quickly, you are easy to plan around, and people know where you stand. The costs land when the situation has changed and the old conclusion no longer fits. Neither end is the good end, and most people sit between them.

How does Wellington measure judgment?

Wellington is a science-based personality assessment from Therabot Labs LLC. It measures personality as continuous traits, built on the Big Five and HEXACO models, and writes the results back as a personal report rather than a type.

The free Snapshot is 60 questions, about 7 minutes, and scores six broad dimensions: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness to Experience, Honesty-Humility. The first ten questions are answered before anything is asked of you; after question ten you sign in with an email address so your answers are saved and your results can be shown. There is no card. The Snapshot does not cover character strengths.

The judgment strength is scored from 7 statements rated on a five-point accuracy scale, and it is one of the 90 traits reached with the Wellington Membership, which adds the Portrait: 336 questions in 4 chapters, the last of them devoted to character. All 24 strengths in the classification are scored there, grouped under their virtue. In the bank this one carries the name Judgment and Open-Mindedness in the Wisdom cluster, and the scales behind it are: VIA-IS Judgment / Critical Thinking (Wisdom and Knowledge virtue); Actively Open-Minded Thinking scale.

Your average is placed against a reference sample as a percentile and reported in one of three bands: Quiet below the 30th percentile, Balanced up to the 70th, High above it. The bands exist to make the result easier to talk about; the percentile is the measurement, and it is always shown alongside. Those norms are provisional until the norming sample is complete. Every trait has three pages written in advance by the writing and psychology team, one per band, and your answers choose which you read. For judgment, Quiet is The Clear Conviction (You know what you think, and people know where you stand), Balanced is The Reasonable Voice (Willing to be persuaded, ready to decide), and High is The Fair Witness (You would rather be corrected than be certain).

The report then draws a strengths constellation from the pattern, showing which strengths cluster for you and which sit at your growth edge. The Wellington Membership carries the same method on toward 255 traits across eight domains. Wellington is a wellness tool for reflection, not a medical or psychological diagnosis, and it does not replace care from a qualified professional. It is not designed for hiring, and you can export or delete your data at any time.

Questions people ask

How do I build judgment?

The best supported route is to use a strength you already have in a new way. In a randomised, placebo-controlled study, three of five tested exercises produced lasting gains in happiness and reductions in low mood (Seligman et al., 2005), and pooled across later studies the gains are small but consistent (Schutte & Malouff, 2019). For judgment the practical version is to write down, before you decide, what would have to be true for you to be wrong, and then look for it.

Is judgment the same as being judgmental?

No, and the two are close to opposites. Being judgmental means arriving at a verdict quickly and holding it. Judgment as a character strength means examining a question from several sides and revising when the evidence points elsewhere. Most publishers use the alternative name, open-mindedness, precisely because the everyday word points the wrong way.

Can judgment change?

Yes, modestly, and this strength is more learnable than most because it is partly a thinking style. A systematic review found trait measures shifted during interventions by about a third of a standard deviation over roughly six months, largest for Emotional Stability, and drawn mostly from therapy and counselling trials (Roberts et al., 2017). In two 16-week studies, wanting to change was followed by measured change, and specific if-then plans helped more than general intentions (Hudson & Fraley, 2015).

Is a low judgment score a bad thing?

No. Every strength in the classification is desirable, so a strengths profile is a ranking of what is most and least characteristic of you rather than a scale from good to bad. A low rank means deliberation is not the quality you reach for first. Since judgment was among the strengths only weakly related to life satisfaction in the largest survey of the 24 (Park et al., 2004), a low rank says little about how your life feels.