Tendency to Distort Due to Liking/Loving or Disliking/Hating

Munger's unified treatment of how both positive and negative emotional orientation toward a person systematically distorts all related cognition. The distortions are symmetrical: liking produces ignoring faults, distorting facts favorably, and accepting ideas uncritically; disliking produces ignoring virtues, distorting facts unfavorably, and rejecting ideas regardless of merit. Both operate below awareness—you don't CHOOSE to distort; the distortion happens automatically in perception and evaluation. The combined tendency is among the most consequential in human cognition because it affects EVERY evaluation involving a person you have feelings about—which is virtually every evaluation in organizational life.

When to use it

When any evaluation is being made about someone toward whom you have strong positive or negative feelings; when hiring, promotion, or project evaluation needs to be insulated from personal affinity; when organizational decision-making needs structural protection against affinity-based distortion; when understanding the systematic nature of emotional evaluation bias.

How it can help

Build structural safeguards against both directions of distortion. The practices: (1) Blind evaluation whenever possible (remove identity from work products, proposals, and ideas before evaluation). (2) Explicit criteria (evaluate against pre-defined standards rather than global impressions). (3) Cross-check by asking others with different emotional orientations to evaluate the same thing. (4) Self-monitoring: when you notice strong positive or negative feelings about a person, flag ALL evaluations involving them as potentially distorted. The meta-practice: assume that your evaluation of anything associated with a liked or disliked person is distorted—and seek correction.