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RE: I find your post interesting ...
There's a branch of head shrinking called "evolutionary psychology" that tries to address a lot of these things. The fundamental premise is that the development of the mind is significantly guided by evolutionary factors - that there are algorithmic building blocks, as it were, that were coded for genetically, and possibly triggered by early development.
For example, when you consider the factors that seem fairly universal in our aesthetic judgement of other humans, one thing that kind of jumps out is that they tend to correlate quite well with good health. Clear skin, symmetrical features, medium weight (not too skinny, not too fat), and so on. People who fit those parameters are more likely to be healthy, which means they're more likely to have healthy children. People who are attracted to those features are more likely to have children with them, which gives an evolutionary advantage not just to the pretty people, but to people who are attracted to them.
Steven Pinker's book How the Mind Works is an excellent introduction to the ideas. His discussion on the evolutionary strategies associated with monogamy and promiscuity are enlightening.
Of course, one hugely complicating factor for the whole mess is that recorded civilization is just a tiny part of our evolutionary history - it's so short that it's had very little meaningful effect on our genome. Our evolutionary history is designed to adapt us to living as hunter-gatherers on the African savanna, not as computer programmers in mega-cities, or even as fast-food workers in the 'burbs.
RE: I find your post interesting ...
Trim is a great term for this. Like you, I would see the individual's sense of judgment as analogous to a mixer board full of knobs, buttons, switches and various other "tweakery": all set to some configuration like the spines on a snowflake: none like any other.
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I find your post interesting ...
... as it's something I've considered on different occasions although with a particular spin. My train of thought lied with what triggered attraction between two people. Now yes, there is a whole train of science that identifies the chemical responses, etc - my favorite was an article about brain chemistry of infatuation matching "madness" exactly. But I digress.
The point was, why a response for a particular hair color? Shape? Somehow, in the course of growing up, exposure to particular stimuli began forming positive and negative "trims" towards different conditions. As people are encountered, these basic factors are patched against their trim score, subtotalled and a subconscous determination of like/dislike is computed. Granted, there is significantly more to it than that - but in a nutshell, it establishes a baseline by which humans make determinations based on experience.
That same logic applies to what you're talking about here - whatever conditions established a person's decision making process continue to be used as criteria, even more so as time reinforces those conditions. In the end, many people become very predictable due to the "human algorithm" if they can be studied long enough to discern their patterns. I suppose that's what makes assassins so successful; the ability to learn their mark's patterns and decide what they're going to do before they do it.
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