Accountability

Accountability refers to the expectation that one will be called on to justify one’s opinions or conduct to others. Following Weber (1910/1978) and Coleman (1990), Tetlock (1992) argues that accountability is a pervasive presence in our lives because it represents a fundamental sociocultural adaptation to the problem of coordinating relationships among agents who are capable of observing, commenting on, and controlling their own actions. In effect, accountability is part of the solution to the Hobbesian riddle of how society is possible. Organized social life cannot exist without regularities, which are provided by shared rules, norms, and social practices. Accountability is a critical norm-enforcement mechanism – the social psychological link between individual decision makers on the one hand and social systems on the other. Expectations of accountability constrain virtually everything people do (in the Mead–Vygotsky symbolic– interactionist tradition, people are constantly asking themselves, “If I did this, how would others react?” and “What could I say in response?”). Failure to act in ways for which one can construct acceptable accounts leads to varying degrees of censure, depending on the gravity of the offense and the norms of the society.

It is, however, a common mistake to depict accountability as a unitary phenomenon. Even the simplest accountability manipulations implicate several distinct components, each a potential independent variable in its own right: the mere presence of an observer, the belief among decision makers that their individual inputs can be identified and will be monitored, the expectation of some form of evaluation, and the expectation of the need to generate reasons for one’s views that will be scrutinized (Lerner & Tetlock, 1999). Accountability connects individual judgment and choice to the institutions whose expectations shape them. The accountability relationships that govern our lives are not only complex (because we must answer to a variety of others under a variety of ground rules), but also fluid and dynamic (as each party in the relationship learns to anticipate the reactions of the other, we observe subtle patterns of mutual adaptation). To paraphrase William James’ famous observation about the social self: There are as many distinct types of accountability as there are distinct relationships among people.