Accountability and judgment processes in a personality prediction task.

Abstract

In this experiment, we investigated the impact of accountability--social pressures to justify one's views to others--on cognitive processing in a personality-prediction task. Subjects were presented with the responses of actual test-takers to 16 items from Jackson's Personality Research Form (PRF) and asked to predict how these individuals responded to an additional set of 16 items from the same test. Subjects were assigned to a no-accountability condition (they learned that all of their responses would be anonymous), a preexposure-accountability condition (they learned of the need to justify their responses before seeing the test-takers' PRF responses), and a postexposure-accountability condition (they learned of the need to justify their responses after seeing the test-takers' PRF responses). Preexposure-accountability subjects reported more integratively complex impressions of test-takers, made more accurate behavioral predictions, and reported more appropriate levels of confidence in their predictions than did either no-accountability or postexposure-accountability subjects. We conclude by considering possible psychological mediators of these effects as well as the broader theoretical implications of the findings for the development of contingency models of judgment and choice.

Cites (4)

1. Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes.
   Nisbett, Richard E., Wilson, Timothy D. · 1977 · Psychological Review
2. Accountability and complexity of thought.
   Tetlock, Philip E. · 1983 · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
3. Accountability and the Perseverance of First Impressions
   Tetlock, Philip E. · 1983 · Social Psychology Quarterly
4. Training for calibration
   Lichtenstein, Sarah, Fischhoff, Baruch · 1980 · Organizational Behavior and Human Performance

Show all 4 references

Cited by (36)

1. The case for motivated reasoning.
   Kunda, Ziva · 1990 · Psychological Bulletin
2. Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises
   Nickerson, Raymond S. · 1998 · Review of General Psychology
3. Representativeness revisited: Attribute substitution in intuitive judgment.
   Kahneman, Daniel, Frederick, Shane · 2002 · Heuristics and Biases
4. Accounting for the effects of accountability.
   Lerner, Jennifer S., Tetlock, Philip E. · 1999 · Psychological Bulletin
5. The Affect Heuristic
   Slovic, Paul, Finucane, Melissa, Peters, Ellen, MacGregor, Donald G. · 2002 · Heuristics and Biases

See all 562