Does holding decision-makers accountable make them less loss averse? A three-study replication attempt.

Holding people accountable has been heralded as a valuable measure for debiasing judgments and decisions. Vieider reported that holding people accountable for their decisions reduces loss aversion, the irrational tendency to overemphasize losses relative to gains. The present research initially aimed to clarify whether the reduced loss aversion under accountability reported by Vieider is driven by either process or outcome accountability. However, as we did not find any effects of either process or outcome accountability on loss aversion in two experiments, our focus shifted toward a direct replication attempt. Our third experiment used materials, procedures, and manipulations that closely matched those of the original study, and almost doubled its sample size. Despite these efforts, we still did not replicate Vieider's findings, with a Bayesian test providing substantial evidence in favor of the null hypothesis of no difference between experimental conditions. We discuss two potential reasons for this replication failure, namely the possible unsuitability of the loss aversion measure in the original study and our replication experiments, and the possibility of a missing link between accountability and loss aversion.