Policy Capturing Method

Policy capturing has its roots in activities central to industrial/organizational (I-O) psychology. Its origins lie in the work of the Personnel Research Laboratory at Lackland Air Force Base in the 1950s, and it achieved prominence in the broader field of psychology with the publication in 1960 of Paul Hoffman’s Psychological Bulletin paper “The Paramorphic Representation of Clinical Judgment.” Although policy capturing is not derivative of Egon Brunswik’s probabilistic functionalism, scholars in the Brunswikian tradition have been attracted to policy capturing as a method to address certain research questions. This attraction is based on the practice in good policy capturing research of faithfully representing the situation to which generalization is aimed. Hence, policy capturing is often loosely associated with social judgment theory, which is the contemporary ...