Kin Fai Ellick Wong

Understanding the emotional aspects of escalation of commitment: the role of negative affect.

Despite the importance of understanding the emotional aspects of organizational decision making, prior research has paid scant attention to the role of emotion in escalation of commitment. This article attempts to fill this gap by examining the relationship between negative affect and escalation of commitment. Results showed that regardless of whether negative affect was measured as a dispositional trait (Neuroticism) in Studies 1 and 2 or as a transient mood state in Study 3, it was negatively correlated with escalation tendency when one was personally responsible for a prior decision. This pattern of results is consistent with the predictions derived from the coping perspective, suggesting that people seek to escape from the unpleasant emotions that are associated with escalation situations.

The role of anticipated regret in escalation of commitment.

This research tests the general proposition that people are motivated to reduce future regret under escalation situations. This is supported by the findings that (a) escalation of commitment is stronger when the possibility of future regret about withdrawal is high than when this possibility is low (Studies 1a and 1b) and (b) escalation of commitment increases as the net anticipated regret about withdrawal increases (Studies 2a and 2b). Furthermore, the regret effects in the 4 studies were above and beyond the personal responsibility effects on escalation. This research indicates that people in escalation situations are simultaneously influenced by the emotions they expect to experience in the future (e.g., anticipated regret) and by events that have happened in the past (e.g., responsibility for the initiating previous decision).

Effects of rater goals on rating patterns : Evidence from an experimental field study

The goal-based perspective of performance appraisals suggests that raters who pursue different goals give different performance ratings. Yet previous studies have not provided strong empirical evidence that there are different impacts of different goals on mean rating and discriminability, nor have they provided evidence of a goal-rating causality. The authors extend the literature by manipulating rater goals in the context of peer evaluations of graded group projects with a sample of 104 undergraduate students. They find that (a) pursuing a harmony goal increased mean rating and decreased discriminability, and (b) pursuing a fairness goal increased mean rating and decreased discriminability when the group projects had not ended and increased mean rating but did not change discriminability when the group projects had ended.

The roles of rater goals and ratee performance levels in the distortion of performance ratings.

The goal-directed perspective of performance appraisal suggests that raters with different goals will give different ratings. Considering the performance level as an important contextual factor, we conducted 2 studies in a peer rating context and in a nonpeer rating context and found that raters do use different rating tactics to achieve specific goals. Raters inflated their peer ratings under the harmony, fairness, and motivating goal conditions (Study 1, N = 103). More important, raters inflated their ratings more for low performers than for high and medium performers. In a nonpeer rating context, raters deflated ratings for high performers to achieve the fairness goal, and they inflated ratings for low performers to motivate them (Study 2, N = 120).

The Relationship between Attentional Blink and Psychological Refractory Period

This study examined the relationship between attentional blink (AB) and psychological refractory period (PRP) using a conventional AB procedure combined with a requirement of speeded responses to the second target (T2). Experiments 1 and 2 showed that, as with PRP, memory retrieval of targets is not a necessary condition for the occurrence of AB in terms of accuracy and that AB occurred in the speed data. Experiment 3 further indicated that the PRP-like speed data were not due to the first target serving as a warning signal that triggered preparation of responses to T2. Experiment 4 manipulated T2 stimulus intensity to be normal or low. Results showed an underadditive interaction between stimulus intensity and lag position in the speed data, whereas an overadditive interaction was found in the accuracy data, suggesting 2 sources of interference leading to AB: the single-channel bottleneck and resource-limited visual-processing capacity.

Between-Individual Comparisons in Performance Evaluation: A Perspective from Prospect Theory

This article examines how between-individual comparisons influence performance evaluations in rating tasks. The authors demonstrated a systematic change in the perceived difference across ratees as a result of changing the way performance information is expressed. Study 1 found that perceived performance difference between 2 individuals was greater when their objective performance levels were presented with small numbers (e.g., absence rates of 2% vs. 5%) than when they were presented with large numbers (e.g., attendance rates of 98% vs. 95%). Extending this finding to situations involving trade-offs between multiple performance attributes across ratees, Study 2 showed that the relative preference for 1 ratee over another actually reversed when the presentation format of the performance information changed. The authors draw upon prospect theory to offer a theoretical framework describing the between-individual comparison aspect of performance evaluation.

Fair or Not Fair? The Effects of Numerical Framing on the Perceived Justice of Outcomes

The authors draw on prospect theory and demonstrate that the perceived justice of an outcome is affected by the way numerical information is presented. Three experimental studies were conducted using five different samples, representing teachers, general employees, and future employees. People generally tend to see a bigger difference in the performance between the self versus another person when their performance components are presented in frames associated with small numbers (e.g., absence rate of 3% vs. 9%) than when they are presented in frames associated with large numbers (e.g., attendance rate of 97% vs. 91%). Despite the same objective performance difference (e.g., 6% in the above example), people expected different fair shares of rewards and evaluated justice of a given outcome differently across the two frames.

Reducing and exaggerating escalation of commitment by option partitioning.

Options under escalation situations can be presented as a general class (e.g., investing in electronic products) or be partitioned into disjunctive suboptions within that class (e.g., investing in MP3 players, portable TV game consoles, and other electronic products). Drawing from the theoretical bases of partition priming and mental accounting, this research found support from 4 experiments that (a) a decision makers commitment to a failing course of action is exaggerated when the escalation options are partitioned into multiple suboptions, whereas such commitment is reduced when the alternative options are portioned into suboptions, and (b) these partitioning effects are mediated by the subjective utility, including subjective values and probability, of the escalation option.

Comparing predicted and actual affective responses to process versus outcome: an emotion-as-feedback perspective.

One of the conjectures in affective forecasting literature is that people are advised to discount their anticipated emotions because their forecasts are often inaccurate. The present research distinguishes between emotional reactions to process versus those to outcome, and highlights an alternative view that affective misforecasts could indeed be adaptive to goal pursuit. Using an ultimatum game, Study 1 showed that people overpredicted how much they would regret and be disappointed by the amount of effort they exerted, should the outcomes turned out worse than expected; nonetheless, people could accurately predict their emotional responses to unfavorable outcomes per se. In a natural setting of a university examination, Study 2 demonstrated that actual regret and disappointment toward favorable outcomes were more intense than the level people expected, but this discrepancy was not observed in their emotional responses to efforts they had invested. These two distinct patterns of results substantiate the argument that the deviation between predicted and actual emotions is dependent on the referents of the emotional reactions.

Forward and Backward Repetition Blindness in Speed and Accuracy.

Repetition blindness (RB) was investigated in a new paradigm in which effects could stem from items preceding or following a target. Speeded-response tasks were used in which 3 critical items (C1, C2, and C3) were sequentially presented on each trial. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were asked to judge whether C2 (the target) was present on each trial. Forward RB was examined in Experiment 1 via manipulation of whether C1 and C2 were repeated and backward RB was probed in Experiment 2 via manipulation of whether C2 and C3 were repeated. RB was successfully demonstrated in both experiments: Target presence judgments were slower and less accurate with repeated conditions than with unrepeated conditions. Experiment 3 involved a semantic categorization task in which participants had to judge whether C2 was a letter or a digit. Manipulating forward and backward repetition produced reliable effects on both reaction times and accuracy. The results are consistent with the idea that RB is due to failure in token individualization rather than type refractory problems or failure in memory retrieval.