ABSTRACT
Most theories of human judgment assume that we evaluate persons or objects on the basis of declarative or propositional information that bears on the target and that happens to come to mind at the time of judgment (for reviews, see Higgins, 1996; Wyer & Srull, 1989). However, a growing body of research has challenged this assumption by documenting that our subjective experiences and feelings (terms that we propose to use interchangeably) play a crucial role in many judgment processes. The emerging findings can be conceptualized by assuming that our feelings serve informative functions and provide information that we as judges systematically draw on in forming judgments (for a review, see Schwarz & Clore, 1996). Relevant examples include the influence of moods (e.g., Schwarz & Clore, 1983), emotions (e.g., Keltner, Ellsworth, & Edwards, 1993), bodily feelings (e.g., Strack, Martin, & Stepper, 1988), and physical arousal (e.g., Zillman, 1978), as well as cognitive experiences that accompany memory and reasoning, such as the subjective experience of ease or difficulty of recall (e.g., Schwarz, Bless, Strack, Klumpp, Rittenauer-Schatka, & Simons, 1991; Schwarz, 1998) or the experience of perceptual fluency (e.g., Reber, Winkielman, & Schwarz, 1998). When our feelings reflect our actual response to the target, such as when seeing a friend elicits a happy mood or makes our heart beat faster, they provide direct and useful information. In these cases, subjective experiences are properly sensitive to the structure of the environment, and are likely to reflect highly adaptive thinking (e.g., Schwarz, 1996; Schooler & Anderson, 1997; Skurnik, Moskowitz, & Johnson, 1999).
