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Losing Our Religion:
On the Precariousness of Precise Normative Standards
in Complex Accountability Systems
Philip E. Tetlock
The Ohio State University
I appreciate Rod Kramer’s helpful comments. Chapter prepared for R. Kramer and M.
Neale (eds.), Influence processes in organizations: Emerging themes in theory and research,
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Support for preparing this chapter was provided by NSF grant SBR #
732396 and by the Mershon Center at The Ohio State University.
Losing Our Religion:
On the Precariousness of Precise Normative Standards
in Complex Accountability Systems
In Paradise Lost, John Milton declared that his task was to explain the ways of God to
man, not the ways of man to God. Modern decision theorists, devoutly secular almost to the last
man or woman, do not anchor their prescriptive rules of judgment and choice in any divine
mandate, but they arguably do do the functional equivalent. They make strong ontological
assumptions from which follow stern normative principles of sound judgment and rational
choice. Some posit, for example, that people are intuitive economists who try to maximize
expected utility in competitive markets (Becker, 1996). People err when they fall short of this
standard by ignoring opportunity costs, struggling to recoup sunk costs, or failing to confront
difficult value trade-offs (Kagel & Roth, 1995; Thaler, 1991). Other contemporary theorists
assume that people are intuitive scientists who aspire to “cognitive mastery of the causal
structure of their environment” (Kelley, 1967). People err when they fail to use rules of causal
or probabilistic inference that the scientific community considers normatively defensible (Fiske
& Taylor, 1991). Examples of judgmental shortcomings within this framework include the
fundamental attribution error (the tendency for people to be too quick to jump to conclusions
about the personalities of others even when plausible situational explanations for others’ conduct
exist), belief perseverance (the tendency for people to be too slow to adjust their prior
impressions in response to new evidence), and overconfidence (the tendency to think that one
knows more than one does).
In this chapter, I do not go so far as to argue that the search for stable normative
benchmarks against which to assess human performance is inherently misguided. But I do
argue that the conceptual problems that arise in making such judgments are often sorely
underestimated. I sketch an approach to judgment and choice that rests on ontological
commitments that highlight the controversial character of claims about human rationality. The
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guiding assumption is that, for many purposes, it is useful to think of people as intuitive
politicians whose primary goal is to protect their social identities in the eyes of the key
constituencies to whom they feel accountable. The core function of thought becomes assessing
the justifiability of response options. Consciously or unconsciously, people often engage in
internalized dialogues of the form: “If I did this, what would others say? What could I say in
response? What conclusions should reasonable observers then draw about my competence or
character?”. Within this intuitive-politician framework, we lose the precise standards for
judging rationality that flow so readily from the intuitive economist and scientist research
programs. Judgments of the rationality or morality of opinions and decisions now become
inherently contestable. What looks like an error from one ideological perspective will often
look eminently reasonable from other perspectives.
Of course, metaphors are not explanations. It clarifies little to say that people are
intuitive politicians. Some politicians are renowned for their flexibility (or opportunism) -- their
chameleon-like ability to take on different personas in front of different audiences (cf. Snyder,
1979). Others are renowned for their rigidity (or faithfulness to principle) -- their unwillingness
to compromise even if it costs them their offices or lives. But, whereas there is a voluminous
body of research that unpacks the exact meaning of the scientist or economist metaphors by
clarifying the various senses in which people are skilled or bumbling intuitive scientists or
economists, there is a relative paucity of studies that shed light on the various senses in which
people might be said to be good or bad intuitive politicians.
It is, accordingly, necessary to
descend from the ethereal realm of metaphorical meta-theory and to advance testable
middle-range theories of how people function as intuitive politicians.
The chapter is organized into two sections. The first section takes up the challenge of
specifying a testable middle-range theory of the intuitive politician. I lay out four foundational
assumptions of accountability theory, sketch predictions concerning when various cognitive,
emotional, and behavioral strategies of coping with accountability are likely to be activated, and
note some pockets of relevant evidence.
In the second section, the focus shifts away from the descriptive and explanatory
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adequacy of accountability theory and toward the normative implications of the framework.
Here a wistful autobiographical digression may be justified. I began experimental work on the
impact of accountability on judgment and choice about seventeen years ago with a
simple-minded mission: to document when people can be induced to think in more complex,
self-critical ways than the emerging cognitive-miser paradigm seemed to permit (cf. Nisbett &
Ross, 1980; Kahneman et al., 1982). I saw accountability as a “de-biasing manipulation” but
my data quickly taught me to circumscribe sharply the types of de-biasing claims I could make
for accountability manipulations (Tetlock, 1985b, 1992). Only certain types of accountability
motivate complex, self-critical thought. Much hinges on what people are asked to justify, on
when they learn of the need to do so, and on the perceived attributes of the audience to whom
accounts must be given. Moreover, even when we succeeded in motivating complex
self-critical thought, doing so was useful in attenuating only certain judgmental biases such as
primacy, overattribution and overconfidence. There are large categories of biases on which
motivating self-critical thought has no effect (e.g., the conjunction fallacy, insensitivity to base
rates and sample sizes, preference reversals) and still other biases that are actually amplified by
encouraging self-critical thought (e.g., the dilution effect, ambiguity aversion, compromise and
attraction effects, loss aversion). Delineating the social boundary conditions on judgmental
biases proved a far more complex undertaking than I initially supposed (Simonson & Nye, 1992;
Tetlock, 1992; Tetlock & Lerner, 1997).
About five years ago I began to investigate more complex forms of accountability that
prevail in real-life organizational and political settings but are difficult to “stage” in the
laboratory. Here it became plain that accountability is not just a set of “empirical boundary
conditions” on the bias-and-error portrait of the human decision maker: it highlights “normative
boundary conditions” as well. An empirical boundary condition stipulates when a given
response tendency (assumed to be an error or bias) is attenuated or amplified by some form of
accountability. Tetlock and Kim (1987), for example, found that accountability to a
well-informed audience with unknown views sharply reduced overconfidence in the predictions
that subjects made of the future behavior of others -- an effect at least partly mediated by the
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tendency of accountable subjects to form more complex impressions of the personalities of
others that allowed for situational exceptions and characterological inconsistencies to
broad-brush trait attributions such as “he’s dominant” or “she is friendly.” In the jargon of
accountability theory, “pre-exposure-to-evidence accountability to a well-informed audience of
unknown views” defines an empirical boundary condition on the well-replicated overconfidence
bias. A normative boundary condition stipulates when judgments of “error or bias” depend on
both the accountability matrix within which the decision-maker is embedded as well as on the
theoretical or ideological orientation of the observers who are passing judgment on the decision
process. Tetlock, Lerner, & Boettger (1996) offer a simple, apolitical example of a normative
boundary condition that foreshadows the more complex, politically charged cases to be
examined later. They noted that some scholars view the dilution effect -- a form of
underconfidence -- as a rational response to conversational norms that direct us to look for
relevant information in others’ utterances (Schwarz, 1994) whereas other scholars view it as a
cognitive bias rooted in over-reliance on the representativeness heuristic (Nisbett et al., 1981).
Consistent with a conversational-norm interpretation, Tetlock et al. (1996) found the strongest
dilution effect when people expected to justify their judgments to their putative conversational
partner and thought the norm of relevance held; consistent with a cognitive bias interpretation,
however, the dilution effect persisted even when people believed that conversational norms did
not hold and that all judgments were anonymous. The dilution effect can apparently be broken
down into normatively defensible and indefensible components.
In this chapter, I shall focus on the unjustly neglected problem of documenting normative
boundary conditions. Drawing on results from surveys of both public and private sector
managers, I present findings on managers’ views of the rationality of cognitive tendencies often
hypothesized to be errors or biases, their views of the adaptiveness of coping strategies often
hypothesized to be triggered by various types of accountability, and their views of the efficacy
and even morality of accountability ground rules on which institutions often rely to correct
cognitive or motivational shortcomings of individual human beings. Here we discover an
intriguingly lawful pattern of individual differences, with liberals and conservatives often in deep
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disagreement at all three levels of analysis: on what counts as a bias at the individual level, on
what counts as a laudable or at least defensible response to accountability at the meso level and
on what counts as a just or unjust accountability regime at the macro level.
There is an anti-Miltonian moral for social psychology and organizational behavior
lurking here. Rather than judging decision processes against supposedly eternal normative
truths, we need to recognize the conflicting functionalist and normative criteria that different
camps invoke to judge the rationality of individual judgment and of the accountability regimes
designed to correct human imperfections.
I. Accountability Theory. Earlier versions of the theory have been presented elsewhere
(Tetlock, 1985b; 1992). The basic assumptions of the framework can therefore be summarized
simply here:
1. Accountability as a Universal Feature of Decision Environments. Accountability is a
ubiquitous feature of judgment and choice outside the psychological laboratory. It links
individual decision makers to the institutions within which they live and work by reminding
them of the need to: a) act in accord with prevailing norms; b) advance compelling justifications
or excuses for conduct that deviates from those norms. No social system can function for long
without accountability checks on group members (Axelrod, 1984; Edgerton, 1985). Of course,
social systems also cannot rely exclusively on external modes of social control for maintaining
order (Kramer & Tyler, 1996). The transaction costs of monitoring everybody all the time
would be staggering. Accordingly, accountability theory stipulates that trust and
self-accountability are necessary for the smooth functioning of institutions, but hardly sufficient.
2. Audience-Approval Motive. People seek approval for both intrinsic and extrinsic reasons.
Evidence for an intrinsic motivation comes from laboratory studies that point to a propensity -that appears remarkably early in human development -- to respond automatically and viscerally
to frowns, angry looks, and other signs of censure. We can interpret this robust finding
(Baumeister and Leary, 1995) in either a social-learning framework (in the course of life, other
people become incredibly potent secondary reinforcers via their association with primary drive
reduction) or in an evolutionary framework (people have been naturally and sexually selected to
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be sensitive to signs of disapproval because the survival of our ancestors hinged on maintaining
the goodwill of their fellow hominids). Evidence for extrinsic motivation comes largely from
the exchange theory tradition (Rusbult et al., 1988) in which we seek the approval primarily of
the powerful who control what we want to a greater degree than we control what they want
("asymmetric resource dependency").
3. Motive Competition. Although social approval is a major motivator, it is not the simple and
sovereign regulator of all conduct. The model identifies four additional motives that may
conflict with or transform the expression of the approval motive, including (a) achieving
cognitive mastery of causal structure (emphasized by classic attribution theory (Kelley, 1967),
(b) minimizing mental effort and achieving quick closure (emphasized by more recent theories of
social cognition -- Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Kruglanski & Weber, 1996), (c) maximizing benefits
and minimizing the costs of relationships (emphasized by exchange theories - Blau, 1964), (d)
holding true to one's principles and convictions (emphasized by theories of ego and moral
development as well as by theories of cognitive consistency -- Loevinger, 1976; Festinger,
1964).
4. Linking Motives to Coping Strategies. The final component of the model links broad
motivational orientations to particular coping strategies by specifying how each core motive can
be amplified or attenuated by the interpersonal and institutional context. The conceptual
formula for generating predictions is to identify situational or dispositional variables that either
increase or decrease the perceived importance of a core motive or the perceived feasibility of
achieving motivational objective in a given context.
For example, well-known individual
difference scales such as social anxiety, public self-consciousness, self-monitoring and need for
affiliation should moderate the approval motive; scales such as need for cognition, need for
closure, and tolerance for ambiguity should moderate willingness to invest cognitive effort in
solving accountability predicaments; scales such as Machiavellianism should predict a
calculating exchange-theoretic approach to social life; measures of moral and ego development
should predict resistance to social pressure to violate internalized values. Situational
manipulations -- like the importance of the audience or the size of the material incentive to act
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opportunistically -- should respectively alter the perceived importance of social approval or the
temptation to “defect”; manipulations like the perceived ability of the audience to detect sloppy
or self-serving thinking should motivate complex self-critical thought; manipulations of
cognitive load should affect decision-makers’ ability to engage in complex, self-critical thought.
Accountability theory maintains that every request for justification raises the question of
how one will “define oneself” in the eyes of either external constituencies (that one sees as
separate from one’s “self”) or internalized constituencies (familiar voices “inside one’s head”
that one accepts as integral parts of one’s self). In each case, diverse facets of one’s social
identity may be at stake: Will others view me as cooperative or confrontational, sycophantic or
candid, flexible or rigid, principled or opportunistic, compassionate or efficient, a can-do
implementer or a chronic complainer, a supine yes-person or a courageous whistle-blower,...?
Below I consider five identity-defining choices that frequently arise in accountability
predicaments, how people might deal with them, and how observers might react to the various
strategies people might deploy.
(1) To Accommodate the Audience or To Be True to One’s Self. Perhaps the most
fundamental choice in any accountability predicament is the balancing of internal convictions (“I
believe x”) and external pressures (“they want me to endorse y”). Accountability theory posits
that the widely observed phenomenon of attitude shifting (Cialdini et al., 1976; Jones &
Wortman, 1973; Tetlock, 1983a) is likely to the degree that the social approval motive is strong:
the audience should be powerful (it should control resources that the decision maker values but
the decision maker should control little that the audience values) and the audience should be
firmly committed to its position and intolerant of other positions (a further incentive for
accommodating it rather than arguing or reasoning with it). Strategic attitude shifting is,
however, a feasible strategy only to the degree that one knows the views of the anticipated
audience and attitude shifting becomes a psychologically costly strategy to the degree that it
requires compromising basic convictions and principles (triggering dissonance) and it becomes
socially costly to the degree that shifting one's attitude requires backtracking on past
commitments (making one look duplicitous, hypocritical or sycophantic to others). But when
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the optimal preconditions have been satisfied, attitude shifting represents a cognitively efficient,
politically expedient strategy that does not undermine one's concept as a principled being or
one's reputation for integrity in the wider social arena.
Accountability theory also warns is to expect controversy over how to evaluate coping
strategies. Some audiences (especially those with individualistic values) will deplore attitude
shifting as duplicitous or sycophantic and applaud expressing one’s true attitudes as candid and
courageous; other audiences (especially those who value collectivist interdependence) will react
in the opposite fashion: applauding attitude shifters as diplomatic team players and denouncing
those who say what is on their minds as tactless boors.
(2) Self Criticism Versus Self Justification. People can respond to demands for accountability in
a pre-emptively self-critical fashion (anticipating reasonable objections that critics might raise to
one's position -- Tetlock et al., 1989) or they can respond in a self-justifying fashion (directing
mental effort toward generating as many plausible reasons as they can to bolster past positions
taken -- Staw, 1980). In each case, accountability motivates thought, but in the former the
thoughts take a dialectically complex form (on the one hand,... on the other...) and in the latter
the thoughts all run in one evaluative direction.
Accountability theory identifies certain conditions as most conducive to pre-emptive
self-criticism: (a) decision-makers are accountable either to an audience with unknown views
(there is good reason to anticipate objections from both ends of the political spectrum) or to two
audiences with conflicting views who recognize the legitimacy of the other point of view (there
is hope of finding a viable compromise); (b) decision-makers perceive the audience to be
powerful (and equally powerful if more than one audience); (c) decision-makers perceive the
audience or audiences to be cognitively sophisticated (and equally sophisticated if more than one
audience); (d) decision-makers do not hold strong private views and are unconstrained by public
commitments. Defensive bolstering, the cognitive mirror image of pre-emptive self-criticism, is
most likely to be activated when decision-makers: (a) are accountable to powerful audiences that
are not believed to be knowledgeable about the topic; (b) are accountable for past actions that
cast some doubt on their competence or morality and that cannot be retracted or reversed; (c)
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recognize that it is impossible to deny responsibility for the conduct in question.
Again, accountability theory predicts political controversy over the “value spin” to be
placed on coping strategies. Audiences who are tolerant of ambiguity and dissonance will see
pre-emptive self-criticism as a sign of cognitive maturity (pointing to its effectiveness in
attenuating biases such as overattribution, overconfidence, and belief perseverance -- Tetlock,
1992) and defensive bolstering as a sign of self-righteous rigidity (pointing to its role in
escalating commitment to sunk-costs -- Staw, 1980). Audiences of a more authoritarian bent
will take the opposite perspective: viewing self-criticizers as confused or weak-kneed
vacillators (pointing to their increased susceptibility to the dilution effect and loss aversion -Tetlock & Boettger, 1989, 1994) and viewing the bolsterers as principled souls who take
courageous stands (in politics, consistency often connotes strength -- Suedfeld, 1992; Tetlock et
al., 1991).
To duck, to take a stand, or to mediate. People are often accountable not just to a single audience
but to two or more audiences who may be in deep disagreement. Accountability theory posits
that people cope with these contradictory demands in one of three distinct ways: (1) by decision
evasion tactics such as buckpassing (transferring responsibility to others), procrastination
(delaying the decision until the controversy subsides), and obfuscation (shrouding one’s position
in opaque bureaucratic and technical language). These tactics are especially likely when the
conflicting constituencies are powerful and roughly equally so, each constituency denies the
legitimacy of the other’s point of view (an apparently irreconcilable conflict), there are no
institutional precedents for evading taking a stand, and decision makers' own views are relatively
weak; (2) by plunging into controversy and aligning oneself with one or another constituency.
This tactic is tempting when the conflicting constituencies deny each other’s legitimacy, there
are no institutional precedents for decision avoidance, one audience is more powerful than the
other and favors a position similar to one’s own personal preference, and the decision makers
themselves are publicly committed to strongly held personal opinions; (3) by mediating the
dispute between the conflicting constituencies. This strategy is likely when the disputants are
both powerful and equally powerful, they acknowledge each other’s legitimacy ( so the conflict
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appears, in principle, to be resolvable) and there are no institutional precedents for decision
evasion.
Again, only a modicum of political imagination is required to envision the positive and
negative value spins that might be attached to these strategies: Is decision evasion cowardly or
shrewd? Is plunging into controversy brave or reckless? And is trying to mediate a dispute
public spirited or naive meddling?
To implement or resist the collective mission? Thus far, the focus has been on contexts in which
people feel accountable for expressing opinions or decisions, but not for actual work
performance (be it assembling more widgets, upping billable hours for the firm or generating
more publications). In many work settings, doing what the evaluative audience wants may
require long days of grueling labor and emotionally wrenching trade-offs involving family and
friends. The identity-defining choice is now between “good organizational citizenship” and
resisting the new accountability regime.
Accountability theory predicts internalization of demanding performance-appraisal
standards when people perceive the standards to be high but attainable, perceive that the
standards were set through fair procedures, and perceive the standards to be necessary for
organizational survival (cf. Kelman, 1958). Accountability theory also identifies predictors of
covert or overt forms of resistance to standards. Resistance is especially likely when people
perceive the standards: (a) to be unreasonably high (employees see no method of achieving them
that does not involve either unethical conduct or superhuman effort); (b) to have been set in a
procedurally unjust manner (employees’ perspectives were ignored); (c) to be unnecessary for
organizational survival (the standards “privilege” some small group -- such as top management -that may reap “windfall profits”). The preferred first line of resistance is some variant of the
voice option. Drawing on the arguments of Hirschman (1970) and the evidence of Tyler (1990),
accountability theory predicts not only that people will seize opportunities to protest, to offer
accounts and to appeal to higher authorities but that the institutional availability of such
opportunities will both enhance the legitimacy of the accountability regime and reduce the
anger triggered by the imposition of "unfair" performance standards. The mere existence of the
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voice option can thus reinforce loyalty to the system. Depriving people of the voice option
triggers a second, more destructive, form of resistance that undermines both organizational
loyalty and efficiency. People may now express their resentment by exploiting loopholes in the
performance appraisal standards or by doing the bare minimum necessary to avoid dismissal.
Cornercutting is the preferred coping response when people are alienated from the accountability
regime, perceive exploitable ambiguities or inconsistencies in performance appraisal standards,
and regard dismissal as unlikely and exit as unattractive. Finally, there is the third line of
resistance: exercising the exit option -- an option likely to be triggered when people are
alienated from the accountability regime, see no loopholes to be exploited in performance
appraisal standards, and regard dismissal for nonperformance as likely and exit as more attractive
than the status quo (Rusbult et al., 1988; Withey & Cooper, 1989).
It is relatively easy to attach a negative, positive, or neutral value spin on each resistance
strategy. ''Protest" can be deplored as whining or praised as willingness to stand up to authority
(Ashforth, 1992). Excuses or justifications for performance shortfalls may be dismissed as
transparently defensive efforts to escape responsibility for failure or heeded as valuable
information that highlights the work unit’s perspective on the difficulties it confronts and on
other contributions it is making (Scott & Lyman, 1968; Schlenker, 1985). Strategic redirection of
work effort may be condemned as immoral, even criminal, or it may be viewed (from, say, a
Marxist viewpoint) as a laudable effort to reclaim workers' right to control the terms of their
employment (Jackall, 1988). Appeals to higher authority may look like litigious game-playing
and bureaucratic obstructionism from the authority's standpoint but it may look like courageous
whistle-blowing and a valiant effort to protect important values under siege from the standpoint
of workers and their activist allies outside the organization (Near & Miceli, 1987). Role
disengagement may be viewed as apathetic, self indulgent, and lazy or as a self-protective or
affirmative response to an abusive work environment. And finally, exiting the accountability
system may be disparaged as desertion and disloyalty or accepted as a rational response to a
competitive labor market.
When all forms of resistance to "illegitimate" accountability demands have been blocked,
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the theory predicts "grudging compliance" -- a prediction consistent with the portrait that
Withey and Cooper (1989) offer of some loyalists as "entrapped persons" who have abandoned
hope of successfully exercising either the voice or exit options. Grudging compliance is,
however, much less attractive (from an organizational perspective) than voluntary internalization
of the accountability mandate. Grudging compliance carries a high price tag in terms of
demoralization of work force (the feeling of being treated with contempt, and intrusively
monitored) as well as in terms of transaction costs (the agents of social control need to be
continually on their guard that subordinates have not come up with some new ingenious strategy
for identifying loopholes or disengaging from their roles or appealing to external authorities).
Consistent with the advice of a long string of social theorists from Weber to Parsons to
Hirschman, accountability theory affirms that effectively functioning social systems are
populated by people trying to do the right thing even when no one is watching.
Diffusing Sacrifice Versus Concentrating Pain. A burdensome requirement of many managerial
roles is the necessity of implementing budget cuts. One strategy is to spread the required
sacrifice across many constituencies, thereby avoiding severe impact on any one; another is to
concentrate the pain of the budget cuts on a small subset of constituencies that might be chosen
on efficiency grounds (the least productive) or on political grounds (the least connected). The
former strategy is especially likely when decision makers confront small budget cuts (that can be
easily diffused to the point of invisibility across many constituencies), it is difficult to identify
distinctive pockets of inefficiency, and the groups singled out for deep budget cuts in the past
have demonstrated a formidable ability to mobilize political protest. Here many observers,
especially those sympathetic to communitarian notions of corporate social responsibility, will
approve of spreading the pain of the budget cuts widely (although others will be unconvinced,
warning of demosclerotic degeneration -- Rauch, 1994). By contrast, decision makers will be
inclined to concentrate cuts on a small number of constituencies to the degree they confront large
budget cuts, they can easily distinguish more from less efficient work units, and they know that
groups previously singled out for deep cuts have little capacity to resist.
Here many observers,
especially those who have internalized the efficiency value of neoclassical economics, should
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applaud the “bite-the-bullet” willingness of decision-makers to do what is necessary to preserve
the long-term viability of the organization (although others will be unconvinced, warning of the
damage to “social capital” from ruthless “downsizing” -- Etzioni, 1996).
II. Normative Boundary Conditions. The foregoing discussion underscores the ease of putting
flattering or unflattering “spins” on each coping strategy identified by accountability theory.
Which interpretation prevails often hinges on a political struggle in which ideological proponents
and detractors do their utmost to convince moderates that decision makers have responded
prudently or imprudently to accountability demands.
This political dimension to judgments of irrationality is strangely missing from both
laboratory studies of individual judgment and even many field studies of organizational
decision-making.
In a series of questionnaire studies of private and public sector managers, I
have tried to correct this omission by systematically probing the implicit normative theories that
managers possess concerning the (ir)rationality of widely discussed cognitive biases (such as
overconfidence and the fundamental attribution error), the (mal)adaptiveness of coping strategies
for dealing with accountability demands (from attitude shifting to pre-emptive self-criticism to
protest to cornercutting), and the (in)appropriateness of alternative accountability systems for
achieving organizational or societal goals (e.g., shareholder vs. stakeholder models of corporate
governance, hierarchical vs. multiple advocacy methods of structuring decision-making
systems).
Table 1 presents some illustrative scenarios to which an ad hoc sample of private
and public sector managers (n=259) was asked to respond -- either by judging the character of
the central actor or the soundness of the institutional configuration of accountability ground
rules.
Although the results will not startle students of political ideology, they merit serious
consideration from students of decision making. Systematic individual differences emerge in
the evaluations offered of both coping strategies and institutional ground rules (for more detailed
presentation, see Tetlock, 1997). The most reliable predictor of evaluations was a six-item
political-ideology scale that measured confidence that free-market solutions were superior to
government intervention in solving societal problems, concern about the income inequality that
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“unregulated free enterprise” creates, skepticism toward government bureaucracy, belief that
high taxes impede economic growth, and ideological self-identification. A useful
supplementary predictor proved to be an ad hoc cognitive-style scale that was created by
sampling items from Kruglanski’s need-for-closure scale.
Key findings included:
(1) Ideology and cognitive bias. Liberal managers regarded overattribution and overconfidence
as more serious errors than did conservatives who, in turn, were more concerned with the
dangers of underconfidence and of failing to hold people responsible for outcomes they could
have controlled. Overconfidence connoted arrogance for many liberals but a can-do enthusiasm
to for many conservatives; insensitivity to situational explanations struck many liberals as harsh,
uncaring and punitive but struck many conservatives as a useful check on unbridled discretion
and as a powerful means of focusing employee attention on “what matters.” From this
conservative perspective, insensitivity to situational explanations was not a sign that managers
were defective intuitive scientists guilty of the fundamental attribution error; rather, it was a sign
that they were shrewd intuitive prosecutors who know how to pressure people to perform;
(2) Ideology and Coping Strategies. Liberal managers often praised “pre-emptively
self-critical thought” as a sign of an open-minded willingness to consider plausible objections to
one’s point of view whereas conservatives often viewed the same coping strategy as evidence of
an irresolute, wishy-washy and confused style of thinking (echoing Truman’s famous complaint
that he needed a one-handed economist from whom he could extract some unequivocal advice).
These ideological disagreements carried over to other coping strategies as well. Conservatives
gave more positive evaluations than did liberals to “bolsterers” who downplayed trade-offs and
made as strong a case as they could for a specific policy recommendation (bolsterers were seen
as clear and decisive versus simplistic and rigid). And liberals were more sympathetic than
conservatives to “underdogs” in accountability regimes who tried to escape responsibility to
conflicting audiences by buckpassing (sensible, not cowardly) or who exercised the “voice
option” to protest “unfair” new performance standards (justifiable complaint, not whiny) or who
exploited loopholes in performance standards when all the voice options of expressing discontent
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had been systematically foreclosed (understandable frustration, not just “cheats and liars”).
Liberals were also likely to defend managers who diffused the pain of budget costs across a wide
range of constituencies (fair and compassionate) whereas conservatives were more inclined to
defend managers who “bit the bullet” and concentrated budget cuts on the least efficient sectors
of the organization.
(3) Ideology and Accountability Regimes. The dependent variable now shifts from judgments
of actors to those of organizational and social systems. Turning first to evaluations of
hierarchical versus multiple advocacy methods of structuring internal decision making, liberals
were more negative toward the top executive team in which tightly constraining norms limited
the arguments that could be raised but kept meetings moving along quickly. By contrast,
liberals were more positive toward the team that displayed tolerance for dissent even though at
the price of prolonged meetings. Relative to conservatives, liberals stressed the dangers of
incestuous in-group accountability (sometimes mentioning groupthink). By contrast,
conservatives stressed the advantages of like-minded people working together smoothly and
making decisions efficiently.
An even more pronounced pattern of ideological polarization emerged when managers
judged the merits of the shareholder versus the stakeholder models of corporate governance.
Conservatives favored the monistic regime of accountability solely to shareholders (“It is hard
enough to do one thing well, less still have a dozen”) whereas liberals embraced the value of
accountability to a host of constituencies whose interests would often have to be combined in
different ways in different situations (“Corporations can’t be allowed just to focus on making
money.” “There is more to running a society than just efficiency”).
Although many respondents were aware of normative counterarguments, awareness
should not be confused with acceptance. Some conservatives feared that liberal efforts to
promote the stakeholder model of corporate governance reflected a fundamental
misunderstanding of capitalism and would impair long-term economic growth by encumbering
corporate executives and boards with ever more elaborate communitarian regulations (“You
can’t do anything until the local politicians, labor unions, environmentalists, minority-rights
17
activists, and other assorted opportunists have all had their palms crossed with silver”) and by
creating an open-ended source of excuses for poorly performing managers to put off long
suffering shareholders (“the stakeholder model aggravates the principal-agent problem at the
heart of corporate capitalism -- it gives agents too much wiggle room to evade their
responsibility to promote the principal’s interest”). Some liberals returned the compliment
(“People who like the shareholder model are just out for number one and they really don’t give a
damn what happens to anybody else” or “Society created corporations and it has the right to
define the ground rules under which they operate”).
Concluding Remarks. The current results affirm a key implication of the intuitive politician
metaphor for thinking about judgment and choice: cognitive biases and institutional correctives
are in the eye of the ideological beholder.
The politician metaphor reminds us not only of
when people can be induced to become more thoughtful or vigilant; it reminds us of the inherent
contestability of the standards we use for labeling individuals or institutions as irrational or
flawed. There is no divine mandate for current classifications of errors and biases. People
make normative judgments and these judgments are deeply colored by their intellectual and
ideological preconceptions.
That said, it is still certainly reasonable to ask for a more precise understanding of the
cognitive and motivational mechanisms underlying conflicting evaluations of both social systems
and human responses to those systems. Attributing these individual differences to “political
ideology” or, for that matter, to “cognitive style” leaves much unexplained. We need a more
nuanced understanding of observers’ intuitive theories about how society works and about when
investing cognitive effort in complex decision rules does or does not pay off in particular
environments. We also need to tease apart the relative importance of factual versus value
disagreements in driving ideological controversies over both accountability regimes and
individual rationality. Liberals and conservatives sometimes agree that there is an efficiency
cost, for example, to adopting the stakeholder model of corporate governance but the liberals
may feel that the price is worth paying because of what we gain in promoting other societal
values whereas conservatives may view the price as too steep.
18
Another caveat is in order.
The mere existence of ideological disagreement does not
mean that all existing classifications of error and bias are misconceived. Liberals and
conservatives sometimes agree that certain response tendencies -- e.g., breakdowns in
transitivity, conservatism in Bayesian belief adjustment tasks -- are indeed irrational. And
when liberals and conservatives do disagree on what constitutes a bias -- the fundamental
attribution error or overconfidence -- or on what constitutes a prudent accountability regime for
checking imperfections of human nature, it may still be possible to sort out the various respects
in which one camp is right or wrong. The ideologically charged character of the evaluations
does, however, suggest a serious potential for bias within the overwhelmingly liberal research
community within the behavioral and social sciences (cf. Lipset & Raub, 1978). Insofar as
judgments of judgmental bias and of how to correct it hinge on the observer’s assessment of
human nature, of the political world and of the worthiness of competing values, there is a
nontrivial risk that the disciplines of social psychology, behavioral decision theory, and
organizational behavior may be offering an ideologically skewed portrait of both our cognitive
ills and accountability correctives.
Finally, we return to Milton who has personified high-handed prescriptivism in this
chapter. It is worth noting, however, that William Blake, an unlikely defender, insisted that the
author of Paradise Lost was really of the “devil’s party” without knowing it. Milton,
notwithstanding his protestations, was every bit as interested in explaining the ways of man to
God as those of God to man.
In this spirit, the author of this chapter might also be suspected of
membership in the devil’s party. The intuitive politician metaphor encourages insolence; it
gives us license to talk back to the secular deities of rationality that exert as much influence on
the post-industrial world of the late 20th century as interpretations of God’s will once exerted on
the agrarian theocracy of mid-17th century England.
19
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26
Table 1: Illustrative Scenarios for Assessing Evaluations of
Cognitive Biases, Coping Strategies, and Accountability Regimes
Cognitive Biases:
(1) Insensitivity/hypersensitivity to situational explanations (fundamental attribution/situational
error).
(a) “J.M. is a manager who adopts a “no-excuses” approach to evaluating the people who report
to him. He feels that most people are just far too inventive at concocting stories for failing to
achieve organizational goals. He therefore holds people strictly accountable for objective
performance indicators, taking into account only extreme extenuating circumstances.”
(b) “J.M. is a manager who thinks it is a bad idea to base evaluations of the people reporting to
him on “so-called objective performance indicators.” He needs to hear the employees’
perspectives on why they failed or succeeded in achieving key organizational goals and always
bases his evaluation primarily on the accounts that employees provide on what is actually going
on in both the business and their personal lives.
Over- and under-confidence.
(a) and (b) “L.B. is a manager who believes that it is possible to make one of two basic mistakes
in decision-making: to be under-confident (to think one does not have useful information in
hand when one really does) or to be over-confident (to think one has useful information in hand
when one really does not). [But L.B. believes that under-confidence/over-confidence is much
the more serious threat to high-quality decision-making.].
Strategies of Coping with Accountability.
Attitude shifting versus candor. (a) and (b) “A.F. has been asked by his boss to write an
analysis of a controversial problem that he has never seen before. His boss however has already
taken a strong and difficult-to-reverse stand. He knows what the boss wants to see in the
analysis. [He responds by putting his own views to the side and slanting the report strongly in
the direction of his boss’s views.] [He responds by offering the most accurate analysis he
knows how to offer, even though some conclusions may run contrary to his boss’s views.]”
Pre-emptive self-criticism versus bolstering. (a) and (b) “K.M. has been asked by senior
27
management for his views on which research and development projects should be put on the
“fast track.” The “favorites” of senior management are at this point impossible even to guess.
And K.M. is not on record as having taken any prior stands on the issue. He responds by
[offering a complex and balanced appraisal of the pro’s and con’s of each project, anticipating
the key criticisms that can be leveled at each, and specifying the trade-offs that management
confronts] [identifying the projects he considers most promising and making as powerful and
compelling a case as he can for those options.]”
Coping with conflicting audiences. (a), (b), (c), and (d) “V.S. is caught between the
conflicting demands of two senior managers who are in bitter disagreement. One wants V.S. to
endorse a particular proposal; the other insists that V.S. should reject it. V.S. [finds a way of
shifting responsibility for making the final decision to a committee] [tries to come up with a
complex compromise solution that might be satisfactory to both senior managers] [makes a
political judgement as to which senior manager is likely to prevail in the struggle for power and
endorses the course of action preferred by the manager] [makes a personal judgement as to
which course of action is the best on its merits and endorses it].”
Coping with rising performance standards. (a) and (b) “P.T. learns that the work unit he
manages will be expected in the coming year to achieve an increase in productivity he considers
unreasonably and unfairly large. His unit was not consulted at all during the process of setting
the new productivity standard and the firm is doing well and is in no danger of insolvency. P.T.
[protests by providing a detailed set of reasons why he considers the new standards to be both
unreasonable and unfair to his work unit] [keeps his objections to himself and does the best he
can do to achieve the new performance standards].”
Coping with loss of voice option. (a), (b), and (c) “P.T. learns that the work unit he manages
will be expected in the coming year to achieve an increase in productivity he considers
unreasonably and unfairly large. His unit was not consulted at all during the process of setting
the new productivity standard and the firm is doing well and is in no danger of insolvency. P.T.
also learns that senior management is absolutely committed to implementing the new
performance standards and wants to hear “no protests, no excuses, no appeals.” P.T. [starts
28
looking for another job] [starts looking for ways to play the performance-evaluation game in a
more strategic way, finding ways to boost the numbers that senior management cares about and
cut back on responsibilities and functions that are important ti the organization but not rewarded]
[does his best to implement the new standards down to the last detail].”
Accountability Regimes.
Shareholder versus stakeholder models of corporate governance. (a) and (b) “Corporation x is
founded on the philosophy that it exists [for one overriding purpose: to maximize return to
shareholders--and that, if all corperations were faithful to the same mission, the net result would
be a vibrant economy that would yield the greatest prosperity for the greatest number] [to
achieve a variety of sometimes conflicting goals, including providing competitive returns to
shareholders, ensuring all employees of good livelihoods and respectful treatment, maintaining
good relations with customers, suppliers, and local communities, and pursuing sound social and
environmental policies. In this view, if all corperations were faithful to the same mission, the
net result would be a fundamentally more decent and just society.]”
Hierarchical versus multiple advocacy models of internal decision making. (a) and (b) “Top
management in this organization have worked together a long time and know each other well.
[They think it most important to make decisions efficiently, minimizing unnecessary discussion
and getting to the key points quickly. Accordingly, they have streamlined the decision process,
requiring top managers to justify important decisions to the group but rarely going outside the
group to solicit critical suggestions.] [They think it critical that important decisions be subjected
to thorough, critical analysis from a variety of viewpoints inside and outside the organization,
even if it is time consuming. Accordingly, top managers can never be sure of the types of
objections that might be raised to their proposals in decision-making meetings.]”