Trait Judgmentalism: Contextual Moderation Failure and the Architecture of Evaluative Rigidity

Version 4 Notes: This version is the current statement of the framework. Version 3 is superseded in full. The Revision Assumption is introduced: comprehension of mitigating context is routinely treated as evidence that it entered the evaluation, and whether it received any weight is not separately tested. Contextual Moderation Failure is restated as a failure of post-comprehension weighting at an evaluative gate, specified as a computational-level model that must earn its interpretation. The utilisation-deficit formulation is superseded. The Tripartite Model is superseded by an antecedent architecture: a core trait of reduced post-comprehension contextual weighting, two proposed antecedents (evaluative rigidity and violation-contingent negative affect), and two expression channels. Unexpressed judgmentalism replaces latent judgmentalism. A preregistered Stage-0 secondary reanalysis of public blame-updating data is reported in full. It supplies no evidence for or against the existence claim and fixes the design requirement carried into the staged validation ladder, whose rungs each carry explicit falsification conditions. Self- and other-directed judgmentalism are modelled as correlated direction factors of a shared threshold, with direction-generality carrying its own falsification criterion. The paper remains the conceptual foundation for the Judgmentalism Assessment Scale. Abstract Psychological paradigms routinely treat comprehension of mitigating context as sufficient evidence that it entered the evaluation. Whether it received any weight is not separately tested. This paper names that default the Revision Assumption and names its proposed exception Trait Judgmentalism: a stable individual difference in which an evaluator comprehends relevant, credible mitigation and does not revise the evaluation of the person. The defining mechanism, Contextual Moderation Failure, is a failure of post-comprehension weighting at an evaluative gate, specified as a computational-level model that must earn its interpretation. The paper states the conditions any valid test must satisfy, separates the construct from its neighbours, and distinguishes overt from unexpressed judgmentalism. A preregistered reanalysis of public blame-updating data serves as Stage 0. Its registered hypothesis was supported. That support turns out not to help. The registered criterion sits inside the dispersion of the individual change it classifies, fires on 81 per cent of a no-information retest control, and the data contain no matched baseline to correct the count. Stage 0 therefore supplies no evidence for or against existence. What it supplies is the design requirement carried into a staged validation ladder with explicit falsification conditions: a matched within-person baseline. Supplementary Material S1, included in this record, specifies the evaluative gate observation model, its identifiability constraints, the censoring rules, the model-comparison protocol, the parameter-recovery study that gates Stage 1, and the full Stage-0 forensic record.