The effect of accountability on susceptibility to decision errors

Abstract

Recent research indicates that accountability can influence both what and how people think and might reduce decision makers' susceptibility to a variety of common judgment and choice errors. It is proposed that accountability can reduce decision errors if (1) decision makers are able to anticipate which response will be evaluated as more rational, and without concerns about accountability decision makers tend to select a different response, or (2) the normatively correct response can be identified by the more thorough and complex information processing associated with accountability. Consistent with the first proposition, four experiments demonstrated that accountability can reduce the sunk cost effect. The findings suggest that this debiasing effect reflects the subjects' expectation that they would be evaluated more favorably if they ignored sunk costs. Contrary to the second proposition, the prediction that accountable decision makers, due to their more thorough and multidimensional processing, would exhibit more consistent preferences across preference elicitation procedures was not supported in two studies. Finally, as hypothesized, accountability did not reduce a variety of decision errors for which the correct response was not known and was unlikely to be identified with more thorough information processing. These results are consistent with the notion that accountability effects in decision making are driven by the desire to be favorably evaluated and avoid criticism by others.