Quinn’s focus during her dissertation research in Ghana shifted away from studying folk taxonomies toward an interest in how people acquired and processed information in natural contexts.
In a series of important papers,[4][5][6] she critiqued both microeconomic and descriptive decision models that assumed people made choices by calculating relative probabilities.
Instead, her observational and in-depth interview data with Fante fish sellers, boat crew members, and elders who judged local disputes showed that they relied instead on simplifying heuristics and cultural precedents to determine outcomes.
These studies also led Quinn to the insight that would shape the rest of her career: knowledge for carrying out cultural tasks is not readily verbalized; therefore, the researcher must develop an eclectic body of methods to reveal underlying assumptions and reasoning processes, something she referred to initially as the “hook or crook” technique (1976:346).
[15] In 2009, Quinn was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Psychological Anthropology, of which she served as President-Elect and President from 1991-1995.