The last decade has witnessed a dramatic increase in experimental studies of the cognitive processes underlying judgment and choice. Although significant theoretical and empirical advances have been made, the research literature has virtually ignored the social and organizational context of judgment and choice. People do not live in a normative vacuum. A pervasive feature of everyday life -- but not of laboratory experiments on cognitive processes -- is the fact that people are potentially accountable for the views they express. The proposed research will be concerned with testing and refining hypotheses derived from a """"""""social contingency"""""""" model of decision-making that focuses on the strategies people use to cope with demands for accountability from important constituencies in their lives. The major hypotheses to be tested fall into two interrelated categories: (1) hypotheses concerned with the impact of situational and personality variables on how people cope with accountability (e.g., strategic attitude shifts, complex, self-critical thought, defensive bolstering of past decisions); (2) hypotheses concerned with the impact of accountability on specific judgmental biases and errors documented in the experimental literature. Good theoretical and empirical reasons exist for suspecting that, under certain conditions, accountability can be an effective means of """"""""debiasing"""""""" judgment and decision processes. The proposed research will investigate the impact of various types of accountability on a number of common biases and errors, including the reluctance to acknowledge value trade-offs, overconfidence in the correctness of one's judgment, the fundamental attribution error, salience effects, and lack of awareness of one's own cognitive processes. The proposed research has a variety of health-related applications. Research on clinical judgment in psychotherapy and medical settings indicates that even highly trained professionals fall prey to many of the judgmental shortcomings documented in the literature. The results of the planned research will have important implications for designing social systems of accountability in ways that improve the quality of decision-making in health-care settings. The results will also contribute to our understanding of psychosocial processes underlying effective cognitive and interpersonal functioning.
