Using examples from some of the most stressful events that any human could encounter -- trying to fly an uncontrollable airliner, commanding a ship that just hit a mine -- psychology Professor Emeritus Kenneth Hammond of the University of Colorado at Boulder has drawn some conclusions about how to make good judgments under the most difficult circumstances.
In "Judgments Under Stress," to be published by Oxford University Press on Nov. 12, Hammond examines the entire field to date and presents some new findings.
According to Hammond, it's a field that is much more difficult to study than it first appears, starting with the definition of the word stress. A leading expert on human decision-making, Hammond did much of his research for this academic book by analyzing the words and actions of people who made good judgments under extremely stressful conditions.
"You really can't do stress research in the laboratory," Hammond said, because it's hard to create conditions that are stressful enough. He presents a theoretical framework that describes how people behaved during events like the Cuban missile crisis, being caught in a forest fire or piloting the airliner that lost part of its fuselage over Hawaii.
One of his recommendations is that if what you are doing to deal with the situation is not working, you should consider moving from an analytical response to an intuitive response, or vice-versa.
When the pilots of United 232 were able to land a plane in Iowa City in 1989 despite complete hydraulic failure, they did it not by analysis, Hammond said, but by intuition. "They didn't know what to think -- literally."
Analysis of the situation didn't work because no one had ever imagined that such a situation could occur. The crew had to learn how to fly the crippled plane as if they were learning to fly for the first time and by doing so saved scores of lives, Hammond said.
A converse situation occurred in the 1949 Mann Gulch fire in Montana when a fire crew leader resisted his intuition, which urged him to run for the ridgeline when a fast-moving fire flared up a gulch. Instead, he analyzed that he would never make it out of the gulch in time and set fire to an area and laid down in the middle of it, letting the fire go over and around him.
Other members of his crew perished, all of whom refused the crew leader's entreaties to follow his example and relied on their intuition to run.
How a person should respond always depends on the particular conditions of the event, Hammond said.
Hammond taught psychology at CU-Boulder from 1948 until 1987. In 1996 he authored an award-winning book titled "Human Judgment and Social Policy: Irreducible Uncertainty, Inevitable Error, Unavoidable Injustice," which also was published by Oxford University Press. That book illustrated the consequences of uncertainty with numerous examples from medicine, engineering, law and economics.