💡 Judgment

VIA describes judgment as critical thinking and open-mindedness: examining things from several sides, not jumping to conclusions, and changing your mind when the evidence changes. Checking a used car’s service history before trusting the seller, or tracing a viral article back to its source, are everyday examples.

At work it is the person who asks where a number came from. Among friends, it is hearing both sides of a story before agreeing that someone was in the wrong.

Through Niemiec’s (2019) golden mean, overused judgment turns into cynicism, a rebuttal ready for every idea, or analysis paralysis that delays decisions. Pointing out the flaw in a friend’s plan when they only wanted to be heard is a small version of it.

Underused, it lets the first claim or the loudest voice win. Busy weeks make skipping the checking step easy, so keep one habit for big decisions: look for a single strong reason you might be wrong.

“Use a signature strength in a new way” was tested by Seligman et al. (2005) as a one-week online exercise. Gains in happiness lasted about six months in that study, yet replications are mixed, so see it as a low-cost trial.

For judgment, write the strongest case against a view you hold. Make a quick pros-and-cons table for a small choice such as a subscription, then revisit the decision a week later and note what you would weigh differently.

Rather than “I am analytical”, show the review: “Before the team adopted a new tool, I compared contract terms, found hidden costs and laid out two alternatives for the decision.” What matters is how you prepared evidence when you disagreed.

An interview may ask about disagreeing with a manager. Instead of proving you were right, include a moment when new information changed your mind. That shows the open-minded side of the strength.

With perspective, careful analysis gains a bigger picture. Kindness makes critique sound like help rather than attack, and creativity moves you from spotting problems to proposing fixes.

It resembles the intellectual side of Big Five openness without being the same thing. For career links, see how VIA and RIASEC fit together.

Peterson and Seligman’s 2004 classification lists judgment under Wisdom and Knowledge. The VIA-IS, free online and answered by large numbers of people, measures it through self-report, which can differ from performance on actual reasoning tasks.

The six-virtue grouping is also debated, since factor analyses tend to find fewer clusters. Read a high score as an inclination to think things through carefully.