Chapter 9 Social Judgment Theory in Education: Current and Potential Applications

Abstract

This chapter reviews the recent progress made in the application of social judgment theory (SJT) to a variety of problems in education. The study of educational decision ecologies entails working with cue structures and task characteristics as they exist naturally, not as they are experimentally manipulated. The utility of SJT in education is that it provides both a theoretical model of the judgment process and a methodological system within which one can investigate the model's specific implications. The work in SJT has given rise to a particularly useful theory of human cognition: cognitive continuum theory (CCT). Many decisions are accomplished using a mixture of analysis and intuition, which gives rise to a general mode of cognition termed “quasirationality.” This is regarded the fundamental characteristic of CCT: human cognition ranges on a continuum from highly intuitive to highly analytic. The middle and largest region of the continuum is quasi-rational where facets of both intuitive and analytic thinking blend.