The Distortion of Information during Decisions

Memory and judgment bias in retrospective evaluations

“…The extensive work by Russo and colleagues highlighted how information encountered early can bias the evaluations of later informationleading to primacy biases in retrospective judgments (Bond, Carlson, Meloy, Russo, & Tanner, 2007;Russo, Carlson, & Meloy, 2006;Russo, Medvec, & Meloy, 1996;Russo, Meloy, & Wilks, 2000;Russo et al, 1998; see also Kardes, 1986;Kardes & Kalyanaram, 1992). When people express preferences for options (e.g., restaurants, dry cleaners etc.)…”

“…whose attributes they learn via sequential displays, they tend to distort the evaluation of subsequent information on the basis of an emerging preference, which is established on the basis of the first few attributes. As soon as people develop a preference for option 1 over option 2 (because early attributes favoured option 1), they interpret any following information in a biased way in favour of option 1 (Russo et al, 1996;.…”

Organizational and Situational Influences on Adjudicative Decisions

“…When an individual has a preliminary intent, or desired end-state, for a judgment, he or she is likely to bias information processing in favor of that intent (Russo, Medvec, & Meloy, 1996;Shafir, 1993;Shafir & Adjudicative Decision-Making 6 Tversky, 1992). The decision-maker is likely to frame the problem (the case) in terms of organizational norms (Tversky & Kahneman, 1988).…”

“…Thus, if the CAF norm is to rehabilitate and an adjudicator believes an individual can be rehabilitated based on available information, the adjudicator is likely to provide developmental opportunities to the individual before ruling him or her not eligible for security clearance (Svenson, 1999). When such an expectation does not exist, however, this processing bias does not seem to occur (Russo, Medvec &Meloy, 1996). With respect to the effect that judgment intent can have on decision-making, our first two hypotheses are as follows: A second norm that might influence how security case-file information is processed is the expectation of evaluation.…”

Confirmation Bias and Related Errors

“…Research under this paradigm has consistently found that people select and read more information that agrees with their existing beliefs (Jonas, Schulz-Hardt, Frey, & Thelen, 2001). Recent research in this paradigm has found the same bias in information search prior to commitment, for alternatives that have emerged as promising (Russo, Medvec, & Meloy, 1996;Luce, Bettman, & Payne, 1997;Simon, Pham, Le, & Holyoak, 2001) As previously noted, this paper will use the term "predictor selection bias" to refer to this phenomenon of search biased in favor of variables expected to be confirmatory. (See page 4 for an explanation of this term).…”