About
Independent researcher in moral psychology and AI evaluation.
CFA charterholderFinancial Risk Manager (FRM)
BA Applied Psychology (cum laude)MSc Psychology candidate, Northumbria University
Profile
Emile Boullineau is a South African–British independent researcher. His work began with an attempt to define judgmentalism. It asks how moral verdicts are formed, by people and by AI systems, why they may resist revision and how they can be measured reliably. His paper on Motivated Violation Construction has been published in New Ideas in Psychology, and a co-authored paper on evaluating language models has been accepted as a poster at the TAE workshop at NeurIPS 2026.
He came to psychological research recently. He has spent twenty-five years in financial services, building and leading risk functions in global banking and digital assets. He is a CFA charterholder and holds the Financial Risk Manager (FRM) certification. He holds a BCom and a Postgraduate Diploma in Accounting from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a BA in Applied Psychology from the University of South Africa, and is completing an MSc in Psychology by distance learning at Northumbria University.
From risk to judgement
Risk management is the discipline of asking whether a number means what it claims to mean. It treats every estimate as the output of a model that can be wrong, checks whether a measure holds steady when the exercise is repeated, and stress-tests assumptions before relying on them. The same questions run through this research. A moral judgement is treated as a classification with its own error. A language model is treated as an instrument whose calibration has to be shown, not assumed. A rule for excluding unstable models is tested before its verdicts are trusted. The overlap is one of method and habit of mind.
Independence
The Judgmentalism Project is Emile Boullineau’s own research programme. He initiated and leads it, and conducts it in his own time and at his own expense. It is not connected with, funded by or carried out for any employer, and it uses no employer data, systems or confidential information. The views expressed are his own.
Contributor
José Daniel Muñoz Arciniegas contributes to the project’s empirical work. He runs data collection and the registered analyses, serves as second coder, maintains the study logs and OSF registrations, and administers the project’s infrastructure. He holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial design from the National University of Colombia and is enrolled in the master’s programme in information and digital communication consulting at the University of Zaragoza. He is co-author of Same Prompt, Not the Same Instrument, The Cell, Not the Call and The Screen Decides the Verdict.