Preemptive Self-Criticism

Preemptive Self-Criticism

Shifting an attitude to match an audience can be an easy way to gain approval, but it depends on knowing what that audience wants. The model described here predicts that decision makers will engage in flexible perspective taking, in which they try to anticipate plausible objections of reasonable critics, when they are accountable either to an audience with unknown views or to multiple audiences with conflicting views. To maximize the likelihood of preemptive self-criticism, the evaluative audience should be perceived to be well informed (so that it cannot be tricked easily) and powerful (so that decision makers want its approval), and the decision makers should not feel constrained by prior commitments that it would now be embarrassing to reverse. In the case of accountability to conflicting audiences, the audiences should be approximately equally powerful (otherwise a low-effort expedient is to align oneself with the more powerful audience), the two audiences should recognize each other’s legitimacy (otherwise searching for complex integrative solutions is seen as futile), and there should be no institutional precedents for escaping responsibility (otherwise the evasion tactics of buck-passing, procrastination, or obfuscation become tempting).

Several experiments demonstrate that the hypothesized forms of accountability do activate more complex and self-critical patterns of thinking (Ashton, 1992; Weldon & Gargano, 1988; Hagafors & Brehmer, 1983). For instance, Tetlock et al. (1989) reported a set of experiments in which subjects took positions on controversial policy issues under one of four conditions: expecting the positions they took to be confidential (low accountability) or expecting to justify their positions to a liberal, conservative, or unknown audience. In addition, subjects reported their thoughts (confidentiality always guaranteed) on each issue prior to committing themselves to positions. These thought protocols were subjected to detailed content analysis designed to assess the integrative complexity of subjects’ thinking on the issues: How many facets of each issue did they distinguish? Did they interpret issues in dichotomous, good–bad terms, or did they recognize positive and negative features of both sides of the issues?

Subjects coped in two qualitatively distinct ways: shifting their public positions (thus making the task of justification easier) and thinking about issues in more flexible multidimensional ways (thus preparing themselves for possible counterarguments). They relied on attitude shifting when they felt accountable to an audience with known liberal or conservative views. Accountability to known audiences had minimal impact, however, on the complexity of private thoughts. The reverse pattern emerged among subjects accountable to an unknown audience. Accountability now had virtually no effect on public attitudes, but a substantial effect on the complexity of private thoughts. Subjects were markedly more tolerant of evaluative inconsistency (recognizing good features of rejected policies and bad features of accepted ones) and more aware of difficult value trade-offs. Subjects accountable to unknown audiences appeared to engage in preemptive self-criticism in which they tried to anticipate arguments of potential critics. This can be viewed as an adaptive strategy to protect both one’s self-image and social image. Expecting to justify one’s views to an unknown audience raised the prospect of failure: the other person might find serious flaws in one’s position. To minimize potential embarrassment, subjects demonstrated their awareness of alternative perspectives: “You can see that I am no fool. I may believe X, but I understand the arguments for .”