Ward Edwards


Ward Edwards was an American psychologist, who is prominent for work on decision theory and formulation and revision of beliefs.

Biography

Childhood

Edwards was born on April 5, 1927 in Morristown, New Jersey. His family moved twice during his childhood first to Woodbury, Connecticut, and then to Washington D.C. Edwards' father, Corwin D. Edwards was an economist.

Education and career

After serving in the U.S. Navy from 1945-1946, Edwards earned his BA in psychology from Swarthmore College in 1947. Edward earned both an M.A. in psychology and a PhD in psychology from Harvard University. Edwards' major interests in graduate school were psychophysics which later became known as experimental psychology, and probability.
Following his time at the University of Michigan, Edwards came to the University of Southern California in 1973.

Awards

"The Association for Psychological Science named Ward Edwards as a James McKeen Cattell Fellow in recognition of his sustained and seminal contributions to the technology of decision making and to behavioral decision theory", .

Research

Edwards published more than one hundred journal articles and books, including, Decision Analysis and Behavioral Research and Utility Theories: Measurement and Applications. In the introduction to a festschrift for Edwards, Barbara Mellers states,
In 1962, Edwards founded the Bayesian Research Conference with the aim to incorporate and apply Bayesian statistical methods and ideas to decision theory. This conference was renamed the "Edwards Bayesian Research Conference," in his honor, in 2005. In the field of statistics, he is well known as lead author of the review article "Bayesian Statistical Inference for Psychological Research," which introduced the notion of 'stable estimation,' and was the first to note that a p-value of 0.05 in the normal linear model corresponded to a lower bound on the Bayes factor of 0.26.