Justifying the judgment process affects neither judgment accuracy, nor strategy use

Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2017, Vol 12, Issue 6

Abstract

Decision quality is often evaluated based on whether decision makers can adequately explain the decision process. Accountability often improves judgment quality because decision makers weigh and integrate information more thoroughly, but it could also hurt judgment processes by disrupting retrieval of previously encountered cases. We investigated to what degree process accountability motivates decision makers to shift from retrieval of past exemplars to rule-based integration processes. This shift may hinder accurate judgments in retrieval-based configural judgment tasks (Experiment 1) but may improve accuracy in elemental judgment tasks requiring weighing and integrating information (Experiment 2). In randomly selected trials, participants had to justify their judgments. Process accountability neither changed how accurately people made a judgment, nor the judgment strategies. Justifying the judgment process only decreased confidence in trials involving a justification. Overall, these results imply that process accountability may affect judgment quality less than expected.

Authors and Affiliations

Janina A. Hoffmann, Wolfgang Gaissmaier and Bettina von Helversen

Keywords

Related Articles

Outcomes and expectations in dilemmas of trust

Rational trust decisions depend on potential outcomes and expectations of reciprocity. In the trust game, outcomes and expectations correspond to the structural factors of risk and temptation. Two experiments investigate...

Investigating intuitive and deliberate processes statistically: The multiple-measure maximum likelihood strategy classification method

One of the core challenges of decision research is to identify individuals’ decision strategies without influencing decision behavior by the method used. Bröder and Schiffer (2003) suggested a method to classify decision...

Psychometric characteristics of two forms of the Slovak version of the Indecisiveness Scale

The study investigates the psychometric characteristics of the Slovak version of the original and short form of the Indecisiveness Scale on three samples of university students and one general population sample. An explo...

Semantic cross-scale numerical anchoring

Anchoring effects are robust, varied and can be consequential. Researchers have provided a variety of alternative explanations for these effects. More recently, it has become apparent that anchoring effects might be prod...

Moral judgments of risky choices: A moral echoing effect

Two experiments examined moral judgments about a decision-maker’s choices when he chose a sure-thing, 400 out of 600 people will be saved, or a risk, a two-thirds probability to save everyone and a one-thirds probability...

Download PDF file
  • EP ID EP678321
  • DOI -
  • Views 157
  • Downloads 0

How To Cite

Janina A. Hoffmann, Wolfgang Gaissmaier and Bettina von Helversen (2017). Justifying the judgment process affects neither judgment accuracy, nor strategy use. Judgment and Decision Making, 12(6), -. https://europub.co.uk/articles/-A-678321