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. Accountability is a modern buzzword. In education (Fairchild &

Recent constraint-satisfaction models of explanation, analogy, and decision making claim that these processes are influenced by bidirectional constraints that promote coherence. College students were asked to reach a verdict in a complex legal case involving multiple conflicting arguments, including alternative analogies to the target case. Participants rated agreement with the individual arguments both in isolation before seeing the case, and again after reaching a verdict. Assessments of the individual arguments (including the competing analogies) shifted so as to cohere with their emerging verdict. Information about the character of the defendant in the initial case triggered a cascade of "spreading coherence", influencing decisions made about a subsequent case involving very different legal issues. Participants ' memory for their initial positions also shifted so as to cohere with their final positions. The coherence shifts were simulated by a constraint satisfaction model. The results demonstrate that an alogical process of constraint satisfaction can transform highly ambiguous inputs into coherent decisions. Bidirectional Reasoning 3 One of the most deep-rooted assumptions about human reasoning is that the flow of

The O.J. Simpson “trial of the century ” in the mid-1990s captured the attention of the American populace more than any other public spectacle since the kidnaping of the Lindberg baby in the 1920s. A prominent football player and popular sportscaster was charged with a gruesome double homicide. The attorneys for the prosecution and defense were of various races and genders. The evidence presented on each side was at times amazingly simple, visual, and emotional, and at times was verbal, abstract, and probably incomprehensible to jurors. The witnesses included individuals of diverse styles, demeanors, and credibility. The jurors, the recipients of the messages from these various sources, were themselves a mixed group of people of diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and personal experiences who had to sift through the trial material and arrive at a decision as to whether the defendant had been proven guilty or not. The context in which all of this took place was at times tense and sad, and at times filled with humor and positive feelings. Not surprisingly, no experiment has ever captured the extraordinary complexity inherent in this situation, yet almost all of the variables present in this trial (and many not present) have been examined in the social psychological literature on attitude formation and change. This chapter provides an overview of research on these diverse variables and addresses the processes by which these variables are thought to result in influence. Although it has become a cliché to say that the attitude construct is the most indispensable concept in

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The author outlines a radically dfferent decision-making model form the one widely used in Economics and in Psychology. Accordingly, most choices are made on the basis of emotional involvements and value commitments. Information processing is often excluded. In other areas of choices, emotions and values allow for some subsets of options to be rationally considered but ‘color ’ them and/or short cut the deliberations. In a still other subset emotion/values require rational decision-malung. Emotions and values are not necessarily disruptive; they have positive functions. Cognitivists ’ objections to the concept of emotions are responded to. Problems of operationalization are raised. The question, if the concepts of emotions and values can be incorporated into the neoclassical paradigm, is explored. 1. Normative-affective persons Intellectual circles in Europe were preoccupied for more than a century shadow boxing with the ghost of Karl Marx, trying again and again to show that history is not dominated by economic or materialistic factors, that ideas matter. Similarly, social scientists and attending intellectuals, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, have been preoccupied- and still are- with extolling, questioning, and attempting to shore up the notion of Rational Man (or homoeconomicus). Indeed, even those who challenge this notion, often define their position in * For a more extensive treatment of this subject, see Etzioni (1988).

Moral rationalization is an individual’s ability to reinterpret his or her immoral actions as, in fact, moral. It arises out of a conflict of motivations and a need to see the self as moral. This article presents a model of evil behavior demonstrating how situational factors that obscure moral relevance can interact with moral rationalization and lead to a violation of moral principles. Concepts such as cognitive dissonance and selfaffirmation are used to explain the processes underlying moral rationalization, and different possible methods of moral rationalization are described. Also, research on moral rationalization and its prevention is reviewed. Religious scholars, philosophers, and laypeople alike have been puzzled for centuries over the problem of evil. When horrendous atrocities such as the Holocaust occur, people scramble for explanations, but they seem to raise more questions than answers. How could a group like the Nazis get away with such extreme

this article we seek further insight into the difference between buying and selling prices. We begin with the basic notion that consumers, be they buyers or sellers, tend to focus attention on what is forgone in the potential exchange. Based on this notion we predict that buyers emphasize their sentiment toward the expenditure, whereas sellers stress their attitude toward giving up the item. This difference in the perspective of a buyer and a seller is significant because it influences how the valuation is constructed. Buying prices, on the one hand, tend to be more heavily influenced by expenditure-related factors, such as reference prices. Selling prices, on the other hand, tend to be more heavily influenced by attitudes toward forgoing possession of the good, such as not getting to enjoy its benefits. In other words, we suggest that some aspects of the exchange draw more attention and have greater impact on buying prices than on selling prices, and the opposite is true of other aspects of the exchange

The studies in the present thesis focus on post-decision processes using the theoretical framework of Differentiation and Consolidation Theory. This thesis consists of three studies. In all these studies, pre-decision evaluations are compared with post-decision evaluations in order to explore differences in evaluations of decision alternatives before and after a decision. The main aim of the studies was to describe and gain a clearer and better understanding of how people re-evaluate information, following a decision for which they have experienced the decision and outcome. The studies examine how the attractiveness evaluations of important attributes are restructured from the pre-decision to the post-decision phase; particularly restructuring processes of value conflicts. Value conflict attributes are those in which information speaks against the chosen alternative in a decision. The first study investigates an important real-life decision and illustrates different postdecision (consolidation) processes following the decision. The second study tests whether decisions with value conflicts follow the same consolidation (post-decision

This article takes advantage of a unique historical opportunity, the transformation of Central-East Europe with the collapse of Communism, to address a fundamental question in the social justice-equity-legitimation research tradition: how strong is the link between a nation’s economy and its citizens’ normative judgments concerning income inequality? We argue (1) that the transition from a socialist economy to a free market economy should increase normative support for income inequality; (2) that to the extent that people perceive differences in pay actually to be large, they will believe more inequality to be morally legitimate; and (3) that normative support for income inequality will be higher among better educated people and among those in higher status jobs. We find that normative support for inequality increased dramatically. In Communist times the Polish and Hungarian publics favored less inequality than citizens of Western nations thought right; but within a decade after the fall of Communism they favored much more inequality than Westerners think right. These normative changes did not arise from socioeconomic or demographic

Post-decision restructuring is the unconscious revision of what one saw and thought in the pre-decision stage as a result of outcome feedback. Professional auditors and auditing students participated in a post-decision restructuring (hindsight) experiment involving going concern judgments. Lack of feedback among professional participants invited more pronounced post-decision adjustments than access to feedback, in particular among participants who chose a going concern report. Whereas professionals were relatively unaffected by outcome feedback, novices were more likely to bolster their supportive signal ratings (and suppress the ratings of counter-indicative signals) following positive feedback. The findings are related to the effect of domain expertise on judgment heuristics. Keywords: Hindsight, Post-Decision Restructuring, Going Concern Judgment 1