MAKING GOOD DECISIONS: AN ATTRIBUTION MODEL OF DECISION QUALITY IN DECISION TASKS

Decision-makers endeavor to obtain the decision quality which puts them in a position to reach their goals. In order to control or influence decision quality, the processes by which individuals form their beliefs must be understood. In addition, many decision makers rely on decision support technologies to help find patterns in data and make sense of the input, so these technologies must be considered in parallel with the processes. There have been numerous studies conducted to illuminate the factors which affect decision quality, however, many of these studies focused on objective measures and factors. This approach ignores individual perception, belief, and judgment. The evaluation of decision quality as perceived by the decision maker is important because these perceptions will direct future processes, decisions, and actions of the decision-makers. Also, by considering the perspective of the decision maker, theory and practice are being brought closer together. The focus of this study is to understand which factors contribute to individual’s perceptions of decision quality by combining a priori and observation-based methods through a theoretical lens. Attribution theory is a well-established theory often applied when researching individual perception and serves as the foundation for the proposed model. The model examines the impact of the environmental attributes of task-technology fit and internal aspects of the decision-maker including intolerance for ambiguity and self-efficacy on decision quality. This study empirically tested the proposed model using a two-phased approach. A pilot of 84 students was used to validate the instrument. The primary study of 413 business decision-makers who used decision support technology was used to validate the structural model. The model was validated using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Results show support that the perception of the fit between the decision support technology and the decision task directly affects decision-makers’ perception of the resulting decision quality, as does the decision-makers’ self-efficacy with decision making and with the decision support technology. Also supported is that task-technology fit and intolerance for ambiguity influence both self-efficacy with decision-making and with the decision support technology

The influence of affect on attitude

Priests of the medieval Catholic Church understood something about the relationship between affect and attitude. To instill the proper attitude in parishioners, priests dramatized the power of liturgy to save them from Hell in a service in which the experience of darkness and fear gave way to light and familiar liturgy. These ceremonies “were written and performed so as to first arouse and then allay anxieties and fears ” (Scott, 2003, p. 227): The service usually began in the dark of night with the gothic cathedral’s nave filled with worship-pers cast into total darkness. Terrifying noises, wailing, shrieks, screams, and clanging of metal mimicked the chaos of hell, giving frightened witnesses a taste of what they could expect if they were tempted to stray. After a prolonged period of this imitation of hell, the cathedral’s interior gradually became filled with the blaze of a thousand lights. As the gloom diminished, cacophony was supplanted by the measured tones of Gregorian chants and polyphony. Light and divine order replaced darkness and chaos (R. Scott, personal correspondence, March 15, 2004). This ceremony was designed to buttress beliefs by experience and to transfigure abstractions into attitudes. In place of merely hearing about “the chaos and perdition of hell that regular performances of liturgy were designed to hold in check ” (Scott, 2003), parishioners shoul

The role of presentation format on decision-makers' behaviour in accounting

The recent increase in researching presentation format area is resulting in an increase in awareness of the importance of presentation format on decision-makers' behaviour. This paper presents a synthesis of prior research on presentation format in the accounting literature which could be used as bases and references for future research. It reviews and evaluates existing accounting literature that examines the linkages of presentation format on decision-makers behaviour. Finally, future research opportunities in this area are made

International Courts as Agents of Legal Change: Evidence from LGBT Rights in Europe

Do international court judgments influence the behavior of actors other than the parties to a dispute? Are international courts agents of policy change or do their judgments merely reflect evolving social and political trends? The authors develop a theory that specifies the conditions under which international courts can use their interpretive discretion to have system-wide effects. The authors examine the theory in the context of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) rulings on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues by creating a new dataset that matches these rulings with laws in all Council of Europe (CoE) member states. The authors also collect data on LGBT policies unaffected by ECtHR judgments to control for the confounding effect of evolving trends in national policies. The authors find that ECtHR judgments against one country substantially increase the probability of national-level policy change across Europe. The marginal effects of the judgments are especially high where public acceptance of sexual minorities is low, but where national courts can rely on ECtHR precedents to invalidate domestic laws or where the government in power is not ideologically opposed to LGBT equality. The authors conclude by exploring the implications of our findings for other international courts

Moral Intuitions and Organizational Culture

Many efforts to understand and respond to a succession of corporate scandals over the last few years have underscored the importance of organizational culture in shaping the behavior of individuals. This focus reflects appreciation that even if an organization has adopted elaborate rules and policies designed to ensure legal compliance and ethical behavior, those pronouncements will be ineffective if other norms and incentives promote contrary conduct. Responding to the call for creating and sustaining an ethical culture in organizations requires appreciating the subtle ways in which various characteristics of an organization may work in tandem or at cross-purposes in shaping behavior. The idea is to identify the influences likely to be most important, analyze how people are apt to respond to them, and revise them if necessary so that they create the right kinds of incentives when individuals are deciding how to act. This can be a tall order even if we assume that most behavior is the result of a deliberative process that weighs multiple risks and rewards. It’s even more daunting if we accept the notion that conscious deliberation typically plays but a minor role in shaping behavior. A focus on what two scholars describe as “the unbearable automaticity of being” posits that most of a person’s everyday life is determined not by conscious intentions and deliberate choices but by mental processes outside of conscious awareness. In this article, I discuss a particular strand of research that is rooted in the study of non-conscious mental processes, and consider its implications for ethics and culture in the organizational setting. This is work on the process that we use to identify and respond to situations that raise what we think of as distinctly moral questions. A growing body of research suggests that a large portion of this process involves automatic non-conscious cognitive and emotional reactions rather than conscious deliberation. One way to think of these reactions is that they reflect reliance on moral intuitions. When such intuitions arise, we don’t engage in moral reasoning in order to arrive at a conclusion. Instead, we do so in order to justify a conclusion that we’ve already reached. In other words, moral conclusions precede, rather than follow, moral reasoning. If this research accurately captures much of our moral experience, what does it suggest about what’s necessary to foster an ethical organizational culture? At first blush, the implications seem unsettling. The non-conscious realm is commonly associated with irrational and arbitrary impulses, and morality often is characterized as the hard-won achievement of reason over these unruly forces. If most of our moral judgments are the product of non-conscious processes, how can we hope to understand, much less influence, our moral responses? Are moral reactions fundamentally inscrutable and beyond appeals to reason? If reason has no persuasive force, does appreciation of the non-conscious source of our moral judgments suggest that any effort to promote ethical conduct must rest on a crude behaviorism that manipulates penalties and rewards? I believe that acknowledging the prominent role of non-conscious processes in shaping moral responses need not inevitably lead either to fatalism or Skinnerian behaviorism. Research has begun to shed light on how these processes operate. Related work has suggested how our moral responses may be rooted in human evolution. This perspective focuses on the ways in which our capacity for moral judgment is embedded in physical and mental processes that have provided an adaptive advantage in human evolution. These bodies of research contribute to a richer portrait of human cognition and behavior that can be valuable in thinking about how to promote ethical awareness and conduct. As Owen Flanagan has put it, “seeing clearly the kinds of persons we are is a necessary condition for any productive ethical reflection.” If there were such a thing as a normative theory of human movement, it would be futile if it exhorted us to fly. Efforts to create an organizational culture that encouraged people to fly would be doomed as well. In thinking about ethics, we need to have a sense of what lies between simply accommodating what we tend to do and demanding that we fly. My hope is that this article takes a small step in that direction

Up or Down? How Culture and Color Affect Judgments

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.In the Mainland China stock market, an upmarket is represented by the color red, whereas a downmarket is represented by the color green. Elsewhere, including the Chinese Hong Kong stock market, the color representations are the opposite. Three studies were conducted to examine the red-up–green-down effect for Mainland Chinese as well as the green-up–red-down effect for Hong Kong people. Study 1 showed that Mainland Chinese tended to predict greater economic growth (study 1a) and higher growth in consumption trends (study 1b) when the experimental materials were presented in red than in green, whereas Hong Kong participants exhibited the opposite tendencies. Study 2 found that Mainland Chinese implicitly associated red and green with up and down, respectively; Hong Kong people, however, implicitly associated green and red with up and down, respectively. Study 3 further indicated that Mainland Chinese were more likely to predict good outcomes when scenarios were presented in red, whereas Hong Kong participants were more likely to predict good outcomes when scenarios were presented in green. These findings suggest that culturally specific environment cues could influence human prediction and judgment. Implications for judgment generally are discussed

Influence of the Cortical Midline Structures on Moral Emotion and Motivation in Moral Decision-Making

The present study aims to examine the relationship between the cortical midline structures (CMS), which have been regarded to be associated with selfhood, and moral decision making processes at the neural level. Traditional moral psychological studies have suggested the role of moral self as the moderator of moral cognition, so activity of moral self would present at the neural level. The present study examined the interaction between the CMS and other moral-related regions by conducting psycho-physiological interaction analysis of functional images acquired while 16 subjects were solving moral dilemmas. Furthermore, we performed Granger causality analysis to demonstrate the direction of influences between activities in the regions in moral decision-making. We first demonstrate there are significant positive interactions between two central CMS seed regions—i.e., the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC)—and brain regions associated with moral functioning including the cerebellum, brainstem, midbrain, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex and anterior insula (AI); on the other hand, the posterior insula (PI) showed significant negative interaction with the seed regions. Second, several significant Granger causality was found from CMS to insula regions particularly under the moral-personal condition. Furthermore, significant dominant influence from the AI to PI was reported. Moral psychological implications of these findings are discussed. The present study demonstrated the significant interaction and influence between the CMS and morality-related regions while subject were solving moral dilemmas. Given that, activity in the CMS is significantly involved in human moral functioning

Daytime REM sleep affects emotional experience but not decision choices in moral dilemmas

Moral decision-making depends on the interaction between automatic emotional responses and rational cognitive control. A natural emotional regulator state seems to be sleep, in particular rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. We tested the impact of daytime sleep, either with or without REM, on moral decision. Sixty participants were presented with 12 sacrificial (6 Footbridge-and 6 Trolley-type) and 8 everyday-type moral dilemmas at 9 AM and at 5 PM. In sacrificial dilemmas, participants had to decide whether or not to kill one person to save more people (utilitarian choice), and to judge how morally acceptable the proposed choice was. In everyday-type dilemmas, participants had to decide whether to endorse moral violations involving dishonest behavior. At 12 PM, 40 participants took a 120-min nap (17 with REM and 23 with NREM only) while 20 participants remained awake. Mixed-model analysis revealed that participants judged the utilitarian choice as less morally acceptable in the afternoon, irrespective of sleep. We also observed a negative association between theta activity during REM and increased self-rated unpleasantness during moral decisions. Nevertheless, moral decision did not change across the day and between groups. These results suggest that although both time and REM sleep may affect the evaluation of a moral situation, these factors did not ultimately impact the individual moral choices