Blaming the Strawless Brickmaker: Constraint Neglect in Judging Decision Quality

Abstract

People often judge the quality of selection decisions made by others: The CEO of a firm may judge the quality of hiring decisions made by the firm's HR personnel; the readers of a journal may judge the quality of manuscript-acceptance decisions by the journal's editor. To accurately judge others' selection decision quality, evaluators should consider not only the outcome of the selection decisions but also the constraints of the decision-maker. For example, to judge the quality of the hiring decisions made by the HR personnel, the CEO should consider not only how many high-quality (vs. low-quality) candidates the HR personnel hired, but also how many high-quality (vs. low-quality) candidates applied, and how many candidates the HR personnel needed to hire. We theorize that evaluators tend to overlook these constraints, and, consequently, judge decision-makers who faced greater constraints as having made worse decisions than decisions-makers who faced lesser constraints, even if the former's decisions were actually as good as or better than the latter's. We refer to this phenomenon as Blaming the Strawless Brickmaker (from the saying “making bricks without straw”). Eight studies, employing mixed methods, demonstrate the Blaming-the-Strawless-Brickmaker effect, examine its underlying mechanism, and suggest ways to improve the quality of judged selection decision quality.