Biographical Memoirs Volume 61 (1992) / Chapter Skim
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Clyde Hamilton Coombs
Clyde Hamilton Coombs
Pages 58-77
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From page 59... ...
Clyde was endowed with enormous energy, genuine curiosity, and a deep commitment to research and testing. Research, for Clyde, was an exciting adventure in the realm of new ideas, and teaching provided him with an opportunity to share ideas with his students and to convey his contagious enthusiasm, as well as his personal warmth and unfailing sense of humor.
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From page 60... ...
The traditional psychometric approach, applied by Spearman and Thurstone to the measurement of intellectual abilities, employs factor analysis and similar statistical techniques to construct abstract dimensions from observed intercorrelations among variables, such as test scores. An alternative approach, developed by Thurstone for the measurement of attitude and preference, posits an underlying probabilistic process whose location parameters, estimated from choice probabilities, are interpreted as psychological scale values.
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From page 61... ...
. The two dichotomies yielclect four kinds of structures that Coombs called preferential choice data, single stimulus ciata, stimulus comparison data, en cl similarities ciata.
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From page 62... ...
These data give rise to what Coombs called an orcler metric scale, which consists of a partial ordering of the distances between stimuli. This scale represents a new type in the classification of scales introcluced by Stevens; it lies between the purely ordinal scale obtainer!
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In such cases, the utility scale is a monotone function of the attribute in question. For such attri buses, such as temperature, risk, or conservatism, we normally prefer intermediate levels over extreme ones, and < ~ different people prefer different levels.
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Coombs's contribution to the analysis of preference, however, Is not limited to the investigation of its formal structure and its psychological underpinnings. Coombs appliecl these notions to a wide array of psychological problems, ranging from judgments of the severity of crimes to the pattern of citation in psychological journals, and from preferences concerning family composition to the problems of risk perception and risk preferences, to which he devoted much of his research.
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From page 65... ...
Contrary to the classical assumption of risk aversion according to which all people minimize the risk component, Coombs argued that different individuals have different ideal levels of risk at the same level of expected value, and that people choose between gambles in order to achieve the level of risk they desire. The ideal point model is very typical of Coombs' style and character.
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Tolman, Robert Tr,von, and Nathan Shock. His preference for hard science lecT him to pursue courses in chemistry and biology, aiming to study psychological problems from a physiological perspective.
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As a graduate stucient, Coombs was asked to teach an elementary course in social psychology, a field with which he was not acquainted. Approaching this task with his characteristic enthusiasm, Clyde put an enormous amount of effort into preparing the course, which made him appreciate both the significance of social psychology and the difficulty of applying the scientific method to the complicated problem of interpersonal relations.
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From page 68... ...
The result of the summer institute, held in Santa Monica, was a book edited by Thrall, Coombs, and Davis~entitled Decision Processes, which played an important role in shaping the emerging field of behavioral decision research and mathematical psychology. While Coombs was developing and refining his theoretical ideas, he also carried out an innovative experimental program.
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He took enormous pride in his students and followed their intellectual development throughout the years. His lively and exciting course on mathematical psychology attracted many students, who convinced him to write an elementary graduate text based on this course.
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HONORS AND RECOGNITIONS For many years, Clycle Coombs chaired the Mathematical Psychology Program at the University of Michigan. He served on numerous review committees for the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Canadian Research Council, and the Deutsche Forschungs
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the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Aware! of the American Psychological Association in 1985.
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Psychometr~ka 6:267-72. Mathematical biophysics of the galvanic skin response.
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Mathematical models and measurement theory. In Decision Processes, ed.
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Testing expectations theories of decision making without measuring utility or subjective probability.
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Tests of a portfolio theory of risk preference.
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The mathematical psychology of single-peaked performance functions. In The Proceedings of the International Con~ress on Multidimensional Scaling.
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Social choice observed: Five presidential elections of the American Psychological Association.
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