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 &

Research suggests that causal judgment is influenced primarily by counterfactual or covariational reasoning. In contrast, the author of this article develops judgment dissociation theory (JDT), which predicts that these types of reasoning differ in function and can lead to divergent judgments. The actuality principle proposes that causal selections focus on antecedents that are sufficient to generate the actual outcome. The substitution principle proposes that ad hoc categorization plays a key role in counterfactual and covariational reasoning such that counterfactual selections focus on antecedents that would have been sufficient to prevent the outcome or something like it and covariational selections focus on antecedents that yield the largest increase in the probability of the outcome or something like it. The findings of 4 experiments support JDT but not the competing counterfactual and covariational accounts. If causation is the cement of the universe, as the philosopher David Hume (1740/1938) put it, then it is fair to say that causal knowledge is the cement that binds together each person’s representational universe. Causal reasoning—the process that generates this glue—confers many functional advantages. In virtually every sphere of human interest, our abilities to learn and categorize

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When participants assess the relationship between two variables, each with levels of presence and absence, the two most robust phenomena are that: (a) observing the joint presence of the variables has the largest impact on judgment and observing joint absence has the smallest impact, and (b) participants’ prior beliefs about the variables ’ relationship influence judgment. Both phenomena represent departures from the traditional normative model (the phi coefficient or related measures) and have therefore been interpreted as systematic errors. However, both phenomena are consistent with a Bayesian approach to the task. From a Bayesian perspective: (a) joint presence is normatively more informative than joint absence if the presence of variables is rarer than their absence, and (b) failing to incorporate prior beliefs is a normative error. Empirical evidence is reported showing that joint absence is seen as more informative than joint presence when it is clear that absence of the variables, rather than their presence, is rare.

this paper we refer to the experts in charge of creating design systems as developers, and to

The significance of counterfactual thinking in the causal judgment process has been emphasized for nearly two decades, yet no previous research has directly compared the relative effect of thinking counterfactually versus factually on causal judgment. Three experiments examined this comparison by manipulating the task frame used to focus participants’ thinking about a target event. Prior to making judgments about causality, preventability, blame, and control, participants were directed to think about a target actor either in counterfactual terms (what the actor could have done to change the outcome) or in factual terms (what the actor had done that led to the outcome). In each experiment, the effect of counterfactual thinking did not differ reliably from the effect of factual thinking on causal judgment. Implications for research on causal judgment and mental representation are discussed.

When Tom Givón asked me a while ago what my chapter would be about, I said, “Roughly, about the relation between language and theory of mind. ” His laconic response was, “Well, they are inseparable. ” So, I thought, there goes my chapter. But not really. There is reason to believe that language and theory of mind have coevolved, given their close relation in development and their tight connection in social behavior. However, they are clearly not inseparable—physiologically, cognitively, or functionally. So the question becomes, “What is the exact relation between language and theory of mind, in evolution, development, and social behavior? ” To answer this question is a daunting task; I will try merely to clear a path toward an answer. I will consider several possible relations between the two faculties, bring conceptual arguments and empirical evidence to bear on them, and end up arguing for an escalation process in which language and theory of mind have fueled each other’s evolution. Language Some Stipulations About Language and Theory of Mind What constitutes genuine language? Modern language is typically described on several

This article describes recent research on counterfactual reasoning in causal judgment and details implications for future research on consumer and managerial decisions. Two types of counterfactual reasoning may be employed in causal judgment, one of which involves outcome contrasts, and is used to generate possible causal explanations, and the other of which involves antecedent contrasts and is used to test candidate explanations. Prior research on outcome contrasts indicates that people compare instances in which the event occurred to instances in which the event did not occur and base their causal explanations on distinctive features between these two types of occurrences. Explanations may therefore vary as a function of the instances chosen for comparison. Prior research findings suggest that consumers and managers may choose different comparison instances depending on their perspective, culture, and perceived norms. Prior research on antecedent contrasts indicates that people test possible explanations for an event by considering instances in which the candidate factor was absent and asking whether the event would have occurred anyway. Findings suggest, however, that consideration of antecedent contrasts may depend on the type of category on which the explanation is based, with less emphasis on antecedent contrasts for explanations based on categories of objects found in nature (natural kind categories) compared to categories of objects made by humans (artifactual categories). This article proposes the hypothesis that people may perceive some brands and product categories as more like natural

It is generally accepted that the sense of self is constructed rather than directly perceived or experienced. The hypothesis is advanced here that people's rules of self-inference derive in large part from if-then expectancies about the contingencies of interpersonal interaction; that is, expectancies about how other people will react to one's behaviors. If so, a central type of cognitive structure contributing to self-construal is the relational schema, representing regularities in interaction. Research examining the cognitive representation of interpersonal expectancies, the activation of those representations, and the effects on self-experience is described. I occasionally play golf with my older brother. He is a better player than I, but once in a while I hit a spectacular drive--long and to the center of the fairway. As I look at my shot with admiration, growing self-confidence, and a hint of pride, he often says something along the lines of, "Great drive! That's your best shot all day! That may be the best golf shot I've ever seen you hit! Look--- you're right up there by me! " I find I tend to gloat less when playing with my brother than when playing with other friends. It is generally accepted that the sense of self, including self-concepts and self-appraisals, is constructed rather than directly perceived or experienced. Over the past 4 decades, much social-cognitive research on this topic has been conducted, with an emphasis on the knowledge structures and self-evaluative processes that tend to influence people's self-construal. More recently the focus has been turning toward the question of how these cognitive processes are shaped by interpersonal contexts and various social concerns. I review some recent work that has used social-cognitive models and methods to examine the influence of internally repre-sented social information on the sense of self,

Research suggests that counterfactuals (i.e., thoughts of how things might have been different) play an important role in determining the perceived cause of a target outcome. Results from 3 scenario studies indicate that counterfactual content overlapped primarily with thoughts of how an outcome might have been prevented (preventability ascriptions) rather than with thoughts of how it might have been caused (causal ascriptions). Counterfactuals and preventability ascriptions focused mainly on controllable antecedents, whereas causal ascriptions focused mainly on antecedents that covaried with the target outcome over a focal set of instances. Contrary to current theorizing, causal ascriptions were unrelated to counterfactual content (Study 3). Results indicate that the primary criterion used to recruit causal ascriptions (covariation) differs from that used to recruit counterfactuals (controllability).