Where does accountability collide?

In social psychology, accountability is the implicit or explicit expectation that one may be called on to justify one's beliefs, decisions, or actions to others, and that expectation reliably reshapes how people think. Jennifer Lerner and Philip Tetlock's 1999 Accounting for the effects of accountability reviews how anticipated justification can sharpen effortful, self-critical reasoning when the audience's views are unknown, yet produce conformity or rationalization under other conditions. The referent is a cognitive-motivational state inside the individual, studied in the laboratory, and it is a different construct from the institutional account-giving relationship that governance scholars name with the same word.[1]

Unit

The anticipated need to justify one's judgments to an audience

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Manipulated experimentally by telling participants they will have to justify their judgments, then tracking effects on effort, judgment quality, and bias

In public administration and political science, accountability is a relationship in which an actor is obliged to explain and justify conduct to a forum that can pose questions, pass judgment, and impose consequences. Mark Bovens's 2007 Analysing and assessing accountability: A conceptual framework treats it as this account-giving relationship between an actor and a forum rather than as a personal virtue, distinguishing the political, legal, administrative, and professional forums to which an actor must answer. The referent is an institutional mechanism of answerability and sanction, not a feeling, and it is unrelated to the private evaluative pressure that psychologists call by the same name.[2]

Unit

The obligation to render account to a forum empowered to judge and sanction

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed by mapping who owes account to whom, through what procedures, and with what possible consequences, across political, legal, administrative, and professional forums