Cognitive biases and organizational correctives: Do both disease and cure depend on the politics of the beholder?

The study reported here assessed the impact of managers' philosophies of hu man nature on their reactions to influential academic claims and counter-cl aims of when human judgment is likely to stray from rational-actor standard s and of how organizations can correct these biases. Managers evaluated sce narios that depicted decision-making processes at micro, meso, and macro le vels of analysis: alleged cognitive biases of individuals, strategies of st ructuring and coping with accountability relationships between supervisors and employees, and strategies that corporate entities use to cope with acco untability demands from the broader society. Political ideology and cogniti ve style emerged as consistent predictors of the value spins that managers placed on decisions at all three levels of analysis. Specifically, conserva tive managers with strong preferences for cognitive closure were most likel y (a) to defend simple heuristic-driven errors such as overattribution and overconfidence and to warn of the mirror-image mistakes of failing to hold people accountable and of diluting sound policies with irrelevant side-obje ctives; (b) to be skeptical of complex strategies of structuring or coping with accountability and to praise those who lay down clear rules and take d ecisive stands; (c) to prefer simple philosophies of corporate governance ( the shareholder over stakeholder model) and to endorse organizational norms such as hierarchical filtering that reduce cognitive overload on top manag ement by short-circuiting unnecessary argumentation. Intuitive theories of good judgment apparently cut across levels of analysis and are deeply groun ded in personal epistemologies and political ideologies.