Human Judgment and Social Policy

This book introduces a new topic; a critical researched-based analysis of the role of human judgment in social policy formation. It applies what has been learned from research on human judgment to specific examples - from the Challenger disaster to present-day debates on health care. Human judgment can be a source of both hope and fear in the creation of social policy. Yet this important process has rarely been examined because research on human judgment has been scarce. Now, however, the results of 50 years of empirical work offer an unprecedented opportunity to examine human judgment and the basis of our hopes and fears. Numerous examples from law, medicine, engineering, and economics are used throughout to demonstrate these and other features of human judgment in action.

Research on social policy typically focuses on the content of various policies: will they do what the authors want them to do in the way they want it done. This book has a very different focus: how does social policy grow out of the policymaker's judgment about what to do, what can be done, and what ought to be? Answers necessarily emerge from human judgment, and from human error and the unavoidable uncertainty in the world. Using fifty years of research in decision theory, Hammond examines the possibilities for wisdom and cognitive competence in our social policies.