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Justification and the Processing of Information
Author(s) -
Parks Judi McLean,
Conlon Edward J.
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/j.1559-1816.1990.tb00433.x
Subject(s) - ambiguity , blame , pessimism , psychology , social psychology , decision maker , information processing , affect (linguistics) , context (archaeology) , process (computing) , decision process , cognitive psychology , economics , computer science , management science , epistemology , communication , paleontology , philosophy , biology , programming language , operating system
This study explores, within the context of escalating commitment, how ambiguous information affects decision making. By analyzing subjects' looking times and allocation decisions, we examined the process by which individuals abstract and use information to arrive at their decisions. We found that subjects spent more time processing ambiguous information than they did either purely optimistic or purely pessimistic information. This tendency to process ambiguous information longer increased when the decision maker was not exonerated from blame for the failure of an original decision; presented with ambiguous information, nonex‐onerated subjects also made smaller allocations than did exonerated subjects. In this study, the predominant effect of felt responsibility on allocations was withdrawal rather than escalation. Our results suggest that the ambiguity of information about the future plays an important role in escalation and that the combination of responsibility and failure may affect allocations only when the prospective information is ambiguous.