Zajonc seems to have been right; human beings are automatic evaluators. We tend to assign adjectives to nouns, whether consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly. When you think about it, Zajonc almost had to be right. From natural selection’s point of view, the whole point of perception is to process information that has relevance to the organism’s Darwinian interests—that is, to its chances of getting its genes spread. And organisms register this relevance by assigning positive or negative values to the perceived information. We are designed to judge things and to encode those
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