From Dramatic courtroom confrontations to international peace-making missions, the critical role of human judgment - complete with its failures, flaws, and successes - has never been more hotly debated and analyzed than it is today. This landmark work examines the dynamics of judgment and its impact on events which require the direction and control of social policy.

Drawing on 50 years of empirical research in judgment and decision making, Hammond examines the possibilities for wisdom and cognitive competence in the formation of social policies, and applies these lessons to specific examples, such as the space shuttle Challenger disaster and the health care debate. Uncertainty, he tells us, can seldom be fully eliminated; thus error is inevitable, and injustice for some unavoidable.

But the capacity for making wise judgments increases to the extent that we understand the potential pitfalls and their origin. With numerous examples from law, medicine, engineering, and economics, the author presents a comprehensive examination of the underlying dynamics of judgment, dramatizing its important role in the formation of social policies which affect us all.