Introduction to the special issue: Coherence and correspondence in judgment and decision making

In 2007, Kenneth Hammond published Beyond Rationality: The search for wisdom in a troubled time. In this book and in prior works, Hammond (1990; 1996) promotes the recognition and equal acceptance of two different classes of criteria for the assessment of human judgment and decision making (JDM). Coherence criteria are those that are based on normative standards of logic (or some other formal model) while correspondence criteria are based on the accuracy of predicting or judging empirical events. In his 1996 book, Hammond summarizes correspondence research: Correspondence theory focuses on the empirical accuracy of judgments, irrespective of whether the cognitive activity of the judge can be justified or even described. Although correspondence researchers may be interested in describing the processes that produce the judgments, they rarely inquire into the question of whether these processes are rational, that is, conform to some normative, or prescribed, model of how a judgment ought to be reached. (p. 106)