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Social judgment theory, developed by the psychologist Kenneth R. Hammond, addresses the implications of our reliance on interrelated multiple fallible cues for making diagnostic and predictive judgments. It addresses the processes of learning to make judgments under uncertainty, learning about the judgments of others, conflict arising from judgmental differences, and how task properties affect judgment processes. It also proposes methods for improving judgment and for addressing problems caused by the fallibility of judgment and our inability to access and describe our own judgment processes or those of others. Those methods are based on a technique called judgment analysis. In medical decision making, social judgment theory and its associated methods address problems arising from difficult diagnostic and prognostic judgments and describe the implications of the judgmental processes of physicians, nurses, other healthcare providers, and patients who must make difficult judgments. Diagnosing otitis media is an example of such a difficult judgment. An application of social judgment theory would address the diagnostic process by identifying the cues to this judgment (e.g., bulging or redness of the tympanic membrane), examining the use of those cues in making diagnoses, and determining whether the most valid cues are the ones that the physician relies on most heavily. Uncertainty about the diagnosis, given the cues, and the unreliability of judgments are also addressed.

Overview

Social judgment theory is an extension of Egon Brunswik's probabilistic functionalism. Hammond extended Brunswik's theory, which is primarily concerned with the perceptual processes of individuals, into the area of diagnostic and predictive judgments of individuals as well as groups. Social judgment theory describes the implications of fallible judgment for people working together as well as for social policy.

Following Brunswik, social judgment theory emphasizes the importance of the task in shaping judgment. The task is both the context for judgment and the context for learning to make judgments. Careful study of the task and understanding how task properties affected judgment is critical for explaining and improving judgmental performance.

People must make judgments under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity about causes. This results in quasi-rational judgment processes, that is, processes that involve both intuition and analysis. Intuitive processes are not accessible to us. We cannot accurately describe our own judgment processes, and because of causal ambiguity, it is difficult to discern the reasons for others' judgments. As a result, (a) it is difficult to learn to make accurate judgments, (b) it is difficult to learn to understand the reasons for the judgments of others, and (c) this can create misunderstandings that can lead to conflict. The remedies proposed by social judgment theory for these problems involve the use of judgment aids that make the judgment process explicit.

Judgment Analysis

Judgment analysis is a method for making a person's judgment strategy explicit. It is used both as a method for studying judgment and to implement the judgment aids recommended by social judgment theory. Judgment analysis begins with judgments about each case in a set of cases. Each case is described by the values of several variables, or cues. Cases can be real (e.g., patients judged in a clinical setting) or hypothetical. If the cases are hypothetical, they and the judgment made must be representative. Representative design means that the conditions that the researcher wants to generalize to must be specified, and those conditions must be adequately represented in the experimental task so that the desired generalizations can be supported.

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