Philip E. Tetlock

Accounting for the Effects of Accountability

This article reviews the now extensive research literature addressing the impact of accountability on a wide range of social judgments and choices. It focuses on 4 issues: (a) What impact do various accountability ground rules have on thoughts, feelings, and action? (b) Under what conditions will accountability attenuate, have no effect on, or amplify cognitive biases? (c) Does accountability alter how people think or merely what people say they think? and (d) What goals do accountable decision makers seek to achieve? In addition, this review explores the broader implications of accountability research. It highlights the utility of treating thought as a process of internalized dialogue; the importance of documenting social and institutional boundary conditions on putative cognitive biases; and the potential to craft empirical answers to such applied problems as how to structure accountability relationships in organizations.

The psychology of the unthinkable : Taboo trade-offs, forbidden base rates, and heretical counterfactuals

Five studies explored cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses to proscribed forms of social cognition. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that people responded to taboo trade-offs that monetized sacred values with moral outrage and cleansing. Experiments 3 and 4 revealed that racial egalitarians were least likely to use, and angriest at those who did use, race-tainted base rates and that egalitarians who inadvertently used such base rates tried to reaffirm their fair-mindedness. Experiment 5 revealed that Christian fundamentalists were most likely to reject heretical counterfactuals that applied everyday causal schemata to Biblical narratives and to engage in moral cleansing after merely contemplating such possibilities. Although the results fit the sacred-value-protection model (SVPM) better than rival formulations, the SVPM must draw on cross-cultural taxonomies of relational schemata to specify normative boundaries on thought.

The Impact of Accountability on Judgment and Choice: Toward A Social Contingency Model

Publisher Summary This chapter advances to a testable middle-range theory predicated on the politician metaphor: the social contingency model of judgment and choice. This model does not map neatly in any of the traditional levels of analysis: the individual, the small group, the organization, and political system. The unit of study is the individual in relation to these social milieux. The model borrows, qualifies, and elaborates on the cognitive miser image of the thinker that has been so influential in experimental work on social cognition. The model adopts the approval and status-seeker image of human nature that has been so influential in role theory, symbolic interactionism, and impression management theory. The model draws on sociological and anthropological theory concerning the necessary conditions for social order in positing accountability to be a universal feature of natural decision environments. The social contingency model is not tightly linked to any particular methodology. The theoretical eclecticism of the model demands a corresponding commitment to methodological eclecticism. The social contingency model poses problems that cross disciplinary boundaries, and that require a plurality of methodologies. The chapter ends with considering the potential problem of proliferating metaphors in social psychological theory.

Social and Cognitive Strategies for Coping With Accountability: Conformity, Complexity, and Bolstering

This experiment tested predictions derived from a social contingency model of judgment and choice that identifies 3 distinctive strategies that people rely on in dealing with demands for accountability from important interpersonal or institutional audiences. The model predicts that (a) when people know the views of the audience and are unconstrained by past commitments, they will rely on the low-effort acceptability heuristic and simply shift their views toward those of the prospective audience, (b) when people do not know the views of the audience and are unconstrained by past commitments, they will be motivated to think in relatively flexible, multidimensional ways (preemptive self-criticism), and (c) when people are accountable for positions to which they feel committed, they will devote the majority of their mental effort to justifying those positions (defensive bolstering). The experiment yielded results supportive of these 3 predictions. The study also revealed some evidence of individual differences in social and cognitive strategies for coping with accountability.

Accountability: A Social Check on the Fundamental Attribution Error

Previous attitude-attribution studies indicate that people are often quick to draw conclusions about the attitudes and personalities of others-even when plausible external or situational causes for behavior exist (an effect known as the overattribution effect or fundamental attribution error). This experiment explores whether accountability-pressures to justify ones causal interpretations of behavior to others-reduces or eliminates this bias. Subjects were exposed to an essay that supported or opposed affirmative action. They were informed that the essay writer had freely chosen or had been assigned the position he took. Finally, subjects either did not expect to justify their impressions of the essay writer or expected to justify their impressions either before or after exposure to the stimulus information. The results replicated previous findings when subjects did not feel accountable for their impressions of the essay writer or learned of being accountable only after viewing the stimulus information. Subjects attributed essay-consistent attitudes to the writer even when the writer had been assigned the task of advocating a particular position. Subjects were, however, significantly more sensitive to situational determinants of the essay writers behavior when they felt accountable for their impressions prior to viewing the stimulus information. The results suggest that accountability eliminated the overattribution effect by affecting how subjects initially encoded and analyzed stimulus information.

Thinking the unthinkable: sacred values and taboo cognitions

Many people insist that their commitments to certain values (e.g. love, honor, justice) are absolute and inviolable - in effect, sacred. They treat the mere thought of trading off sacred values against secular ones (such as money) as transparently outrageous - in effect, taboo. Economists insist, however, that in a world of scarce resources, taboo trade-offs are unavoidable. Research shows that, although people do respond with moral outrage to taboo trade-offs, they often acquiesce when secular violations of sacred values are rhetorically reframed as routine or tragic trade-offs. The results reveal the peculiar character of moral boundaries on what is thinkable, alternately punitively rigid and forgivingly flexible.

Taboo Trade-offs: Reactions to Transactions That Transgress the Spheres of Justice

Taboo trade-offs violate deeply held normative intuitions about the integrity, even sanctity, of certain relationships and the moral-political values underlying those relationships. For instance, if asked to estimate the monetary worth of ones children, of ones loyalty to ones country, or of acts of friendship, people find the questions more than merely confusing or cognitively intractable: they find such questions themselves morally offensive. This article draws on Fiskes relational theory and Tetlocks value pluralism model: (a) to identify the conditions under which people are likely to treat trade-offs as taboo; (b) to describe how people collectively deal with trade-offs that become problematic; (c) to specify the conceptual components of moral outrage and the factors that affect the intensity of reactions to various explicit trade-offs; (d) to explore the various strategies that decision-makers—required by resource scarcity and institutional roles to confront taboo trade-offs—use to deflect the wrath of censorious observers; (e) to offer a method of dispute resolution based on pluralism.

Sober Second Thought: The Effects of Accountability, Anger, and Authoritarianism on Attributions of Responsibility

This experiment explored the joint impact of accountability, anger, and authoritarianism on attributions of responsibility. Participants were either accountable or anonymous while watching an anger-priming or a neutral-emotion-priming video clip. In an ostensibly separate study, participants also were either accountable or anonymous while determining responsibility and punishment in fictional tort cases. As predicted, priming anger both simplified cognitive processing(i.e., reduced the number of cues used in making judgments) and amplified the carryover of self-reported anger to punitive attributions and actual punishment. By contrast, accountability increased the complexity of the judgment process and attenuated the carryover of anger to attributions and punishment. These results generalized across four replication cases that varied in story content; degree of defendant intentionality; and target, type, and severity of harm.

Attribution bias: On the inconclusiveness of the cognition–motivation debate.

Abstract Social psychologists have given considerable theoretical and research attention to whether motivational variables bias the attributions people make for behavior. Some theorists maintain that motivational constructs must be invoked to explain certain attributional phenomena; other theorists maintain that information-processing variables can adequately explain these phenomena. The present article critically examines existing cognitive and motivational approaches to attribution and analyzes the assumptions underlying the cognition-motivation debate. We argue that cognitive and motivational theories are currently empirically indistinguishable. In particular, its is possible to construct information-processing explanations for virtually all evidence for motivated bias. We conclude by examining the implications of this indeterminacy of cognitive and motivational explanations. Future research in the area can most profitably be addressed to improving the specificity of cognitive and motivational theories rather than to resolving the between-theory confrontation.

Integrative Complexity of Communications in International Crises

Diplomatic communications during international crises that resulted in war (1914 and 1950) and crises that were settled peacefully (1911, 1948, 1962) were scored for integrative complexity. This is a dimension of information processing characterized at one pole by simple responses, gross distinctions, rigidity, and restricted information usage, and at the other by complexity, fine distinctions, flexibility, and extensive information search and usage. Complexity of the messages produced by governmental leaders was significantly lower in crises that ended in war. As the crisis approached its climax, complexity declined in 1914 and increased in 1962. The results demonstrate the usefulness of information processing complexity, which can be measured objectively in a wide range of materials, for analyzing political and diplomatic events.