THE LITERATURE ON HUMAN judgment emphasizes numerous distinctions between modes whereby such judgments are attained. Thus, the persuasion literature distinguishes between the "peripheral" or "heuristic" and the "central" or "systematic" routes to judgment, the stereotyping literature distinguishes between the "category based", or "individuating" modes, the attributional literature distinguishes between phases of dispositional attribution assumed to be governed by qualitatively different processes, and the judgment and decision making literature distinguishes between "heuristic" and "extensional" reasoning also assumed to represent qualitatively different modes of reaching judgment.

Rather than focusing on such distinctions, our "unimodel" identifies the essential commonalities that all instances of judgment must share. These constitute several orthogonal parameters that, at some values, are represented in any judgmental instance. Moreover, our claim is that the voluminous evidence in support of the distinctions (above) in modes of human judgment is better accounted for in terms of specific intersections of the same fundamental parameters. The appearance of qualitative differences in modes of judgments derives from the attachment of different contents of judgment (e.g., "Psychological" versus "statistical" contents) to different parametric intersections. We assume that parameters are independent of contents, and once the confounding is eliminated, it appears that the variance in target phenomena (various aspects of human judgments) are better understood in terms of the "unimodel" than in terms of the multifarious dual-mode conceptions proposed thus far. We are presently engaged in intensive empirical research in an attempt to cast light on these possibilities.