Modularity in everyday life judgments of aggression and violent behavior

This review focuses on one aspect of moral judgment of aggression and viole nt behavior in the context of the psychodynamics of everyday life: Judgment al modularity. The central hypothesis asserts that, from the victim's persp ective, the severity of judgments or the relative weight assigned to physic al damage, when information on intent and damage is available, will be maxi mized, whereas inverse trends will typify the judgments of the same person from the assailant's perspective. This view resembles the spirit of the fun ctional approach to moral judgment of violent behavior. In this light, rela ted studies that were conducted within the framework of functional measurem ent are reviewed. Judgmental modularity was documented in the majority of t he findings. However, in two studies, the same participants exhibited judgm ental consistency in the first phase and judgmental modularity in a second phase, which manipulated other types of judgmental perspectives. Implicatio ns for the issue of judgmental modularity, for the issue of modularity in v iolent behavior and for a proposal to establish a functional definition of aggression are discussed. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserve d.