This post is based on selections from: “Kenneth R. Hammond’s contributions to the study of judgment and decision making,” written by Mandeep K. Dhami and Jeryl L. Mumpower that appeared in  Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2018, pp. 1–22. I am going to become more familiar with the work of the authors since they clearly share my admiration for  Hammond and were his colleagues. They also understand better than I how he fit into the discipline of judgment and decision making (The links take you to past Posts.). I merely cherry pick my opinion of his most significant contributions.

As a student of Egon Brunswik, Hammond advanced Brunswik’s theory of probabilistic functionalism and the idea of representative design. Hammond pioneered the use of Brunswik’s lens model as a framework for studying how individuals use information from the task environment to make judgments. Hammond introduced the lens model equation to the study of judgment processes, and used this to measure the utility of different forms of feedback in multiple-cue probability learning.

Hammond proposed cognitive continuum theory which states that quasirationality is an important middle-ground between intuition and analysis and that cognitive performance is dictated by the match between task properties and mode of cognition. Intuition (often also referred to as System 1, experiential, heuristic, and associative thinking) is generally considered to be an unconscious, implicit, automatic, holistic, fast process, with great capacity, requiring little cognitive effort. By contrast, analysis (often also referred to as System 2, rational, and rule-based thinking) is generally characterized as a conscious, explicit, controlled, deliberative, slow process that has limited capacity and is cognitively demanding.  For Hammond, quasirationality is distinct from rationality. It comprises different combinations of intuition and analysis, and so may sometimes lie closer to the intuitive end of the cognitive continuum and at other times closer to the analytic end. Brunswik  pointed to the adaptive nature of perception (and cognition). Dhami and Mumpower suggest that for Hammond, modes of cognition are determined by properties of the task (and/or expertise with the task). Task properties include, for example, the amount of information, its degree of redundancy, format, and order of presentation, as well as the decision maker’s familiarity with the task, opportunity for feedback, and extent of time pressure. The cognitive mode induced will depend on the number, nature and degree of task properties present.

Movement along the cognitive continuum is characterized as oscillatory or alternating, thus allowing different forms of compromise between intuition and analysis. Success on a task inhibits movement along the cognitive continuum (or change in cognitive mode) while failure stimulates it. In my opinion,  Glöckner and his colleagues have built upon Hammond’s work. Parallel constraint satisfaction theory suggests that intuition and analysis operate in an integrative fashion and in concert with Hammond’s idea of oscillation between the two. Glockner suggests that intuition makes the decisions through an iterative lens model type process, but sends analysis out for more information  when there is no clear winner.

Hammond returned to the themes of analysis and intuition and the cognitive continuum in his last book entitled Beyond Rationality: The Search for Wisdom in a Troubled Time, published at age 92 in 2007. This is a frank look at the world that pulls few punches. At the heart of his argument is the proposition that the key to wisdom lies in being able to match modes of cognition to properties of the task.

In 1996, Hammond published a book entitled Human Judgment and Social Policy: Irreducible Uncertainty, Inevitable Error, Unavoidable Injustice which attempted to understand the policy formation process. The book emphasized two key themes. The first theme was whether our decision making should be judged on coherence competence or on correspondence competence. The issue, according to Hammond, was whether in a policy context, it was more important to be rational (internally and logically consistent) or to be empirically accurate. Analysis is best judged with coherence, while intuition is best judged by accuracy. To achieve balance–quasirationality and eventually wisdom, the key lies in how we think about error, which was the second theme. Hammond  emphasized the duality of error. Brunswik demonstrated that the error distributions for intuitive and analytical processes were quite different. Intuitive processes led to distributions in which there were few precisely correct responses but also few large errors, whereas with analysis there were often many precisely correct responses but occasional large errors. According to Hammond, duality of error inevitably occurs whenever decisions must be made in the face of irreducible uncertainty, or uncertainty that cannot be reduced at the moment action is required. Thus, there are two potential mistakes that may arise — false positives (Type I errors) and false negatives (Type II errors)—whenever policy decisions involve dichotomous choices, such as whether to admit or reject college applications, claims for welfare benefits, and so on. Hammond argued that any policy problem involving irreducible uncertainty has the potential for dual error, and consequently unavoidable injustice in which mistakes are made that favor one group over another. He identified two tools of particular value for analyzing policy making in the face of irreducible environmental uncertainty and duality of error. These were Signal Detection Theory and the Taylor-Russell  paradigm. These concepts also applicable to best designing airplane instruments (See post Technology and the Ecological Hybrid.).