Julie Beck: What are the conditions where being held accountable makes people consider other points of view, and when does it not really change how people make decisions?

Philip Tetlock: It virtually always influences how people make decisions, but it’s not always good. Accountability is a multidimensional concept. It refers to who must answer to whom for what under what ground rules. It’s not a single independent variable, to use the terminology of social science. So it’s not all that surprising that it has many different effects. In our work we found that only quite specialized, carefully crafted forms of accountability induce people to think more self-critically and make them more resistant to cognitive biases. Most forms of accountability do not have beneficial effects on judgment and choice.

Engineering forms of accountability that help requires a degree of patience. People need to believe that they’re going to be answerable to an audience whom they respect, and they need to feel accountable to an audience with unknown views. They also need to feel that they’re not under pressure to justify what they’ve previously said or done. That’s a form of accountability that induces a relatively unnatural cognitive act, which is preemptive self criticism—to think of possible ways in which you might be wrong before other people do it for you.

Beck: When can holding people accountable can have bad effects?

Tetlock: One obvious one is when people cope with accountability simply by subordinating their judgment to others. Conformity and obedience, Solomon Asch and Stanley Milgram and all that sort of thing. We call that strategic attitude shifting. That makes it sound a little more conscious than it sometimes is—sometimes people just move their attitudes totally unconsciously toward what they think is the social center of gravity. But sometimes they move quite deliberately. What we call elastic-band shifts are when people move to where the audience is, but when the audience disappears they snap back.

Perhaps the coping response to accountability that people regard as more perverse is actually rooted in the old cognitive-dissonance literature. It’s the idea that when you’re accountable for something you can’t change—you’ve said something or done something, and you can’t undo it, and you’re being held accountable for it—most of your cognitive effort goes into generating reasons why you’re right and your critics are wrong. That’s sometimes called post-decisional bolstering. And it makes people more extreme and more rigid.

It’s almost the opposite of what I call preemptive self-criticism. Preemptive self-criticism is where you de-center, you become less egocentric in your thinking, you try to anticipate grounds reasonable people might have for objecting. Whereas post-decisional bolstering is where you really hunker down and raise the defenses.