Effects Of Process And Outcome Accountability On Escalating Commitment: A Two-Study Replication

Escalating commitment describes the phenomenon that decision makers may become stuck in losing courses of action, throwing good money after bad. In a seminal study, testing interventions against escalating commitment, Simonson and Staw (1992) found that holding decision makers accountable for the decision process (i.e., the decision strategies they use) decreases escalating commitment, whereas accountability for the decision outcomes tends to increase it. The initial aim of our study was to extend the original findings by testing for interactive effects of both types of accountability. However, as we did not replicate the original effects in a first experiment, in spite of the fact that our materials and our procedure resembled the original study as closely as possible, we conducted a second experiment with an even stronger accountability manipulation as compared to the original study, and with an increased sample size. Once again, no effects of accountability were found. Taken together, the results of these two experiments question the robustness of the original findings.