Effects of procedural and outcome accountability on judgment quality

Individuals are said to be accountable whenever their performance is monitored and there are consequences (either tangible or intangible) associated with that evaluation. We propose that there are at least two distinct types of accountability, One focuses on justification of the procedure used to arrive at an action (procedural accountability, or PA); the other focuses on the quality of the outcomes of that action (outcome accountability, or GA). In three experiments, subjects judged the likelihood that each of a set of individuals held a particular attitude on the basis of background information about those individuals, Results from Experiments 1 and 2 suggested that PA encourages people to take more of the available information into account. Whether or not this effect was beneficial, however, depended on how relevant that information was to the target judgment, OA had only detrimental effects, increasing the amount of noise (or ''scatter'') in subjects' judgments and thus leading to lower accuracy overall. Experiment 3 extended the work on PA, focusing on its relationship to the effects of outcome feedback, Results indicated that PA significantly reduced the tendency to be overly responsive to such feedback by reducing the variability in judgment unrelated to the target event, Practical and theoretical implications are discussed. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.