Accountability: The Neglected Social Context of Judgment and Choice
An empirical and theoretical paper arguing that accountability — being answerable to an audience for one's judgments — is one of the most powerful and neglected determinants of human thought and behaviour. Tetlock's central finding: when people know who they will be accountable to and can anticipate what that audience expects, they optimise their accounts for that audience rather than for accuracy. Accountability to a known audience with predictable preferences produces performance rather than genuine reflection. The paper has devastating implications for organisational accountability systems: post-incident investigations, performance reviews, and compliance reporting are all structured exactly as Tetlock describes — known audience, predictable expectations, accounts optimised for survival rather than truth. The empirical grounding for the argument that forced accountability degrades the quality of information organisations receive.
Save this paper to a bibliography, keep notes on it, and export citations. Create a free account →
Neighbours (13)
- Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams
- Calculus of Voice
- Out of the Crisis
- Power, Approach, and Inhibition
- Accountability
- Organizational Silence: A Barrier to Change and Development in a Pluralistic World
- The Possibilities of Accountability
- A Question of Trust
- Blametropism
- Implicit Voice Theories: Taken-for-Granted Rules of Self-Censorship at Work
- Just Culture
- Learning from Error
- At the Heart of Morality Lies Folk Psychology