REGULATORY FOCUS AND STRATEGIC INCLINATIONS - PROMOTION AND PREVENTION IN DECISION-MAKING

A promotion focus is concerned with advancement, growth, and accomplis hment, whereas a prevention focus is concerned with security, safety, and responsibility. We hypothesized that the promotion focus inclinati on is to insure hits and insure against errors of omission, whereas th e prevention focus inclination is to insure correct rejections and ins ure against errors of commission. This hypothesis yielded three predic tions: (a) when individuals work on a difficult task or have just expe rienced failure, those in a promotion focus should perform better, and those in a prevention focus should quit more readily; (b) when indivi duals work on a task where generating any number of alternatives is co rrect, those in a promotion focus should generate more distinct altern atives, and those in a prevention focus should be more repetitive; and (c) when individuals work on a signal detection task that requires th em to decide whether they did or did not detect a signal, those in a p romotion focus should have a ''risky'' response bias, and those in a p revention focus should have a ''conservative'' response bias and take more time to respond. These predictions were supported in two framing studies in which regulatory focus was experimentally manipulated indep endent of valence. (C) 1997 Academic Press.