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Reassigning responsibility is the most prominent and best-replicated intervention against escalating commitment (i.e., the failure to withdraw from losing courses of action). This intervention is considered effective because it reduces reinvestments after negative feedback in decision scenarios with a single reinvestment decision. However, we argue that any intervention against escalating commitment should fulfill two additional criteria. The first is temporal stability, that is, the beneficial effects of the intervention need to persist beyond a single reinvestment decision. The second is specific effectiveness, that is, the intervention should reduce commitment only if the project continues to fail after an initial setback (structural failure) but not if it recovers and is ultimately profitable (temporary failure). To subject reassignment of responsibility to this critical test of effectiveness, we introduce a modification of the escalation paradigm that allows testing for temporal stability and differentiates between structural and temporary failure. In the first of two experiments, we did not find evidence of temporal stability. Experiment 2 found persistent short-term effects of responsibility reassignment, but these effects were unspecific, reducing commitment to both losing and ultimately successful courses of action. Our findings question the usefulness of responsibility reassignment as an effective intervention against escalating commitment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Using an advice-taking paradigm, we investigated how people use information about the wisdom of the crowds when revising their judgments. We focused on two types of information: information about the size of the advisor crowd and information about the distribution of the judgments within the crowd. To test whether judges use these two types of information, we varied the size of the advisor crowd (two, four, or eight advisors) and orthogonally manipulated whether judges received advice in the form of a crowd estimate or in the form of the separate individual judgments. In a third condition, participants received the crowd estimate, but it was labeled as stemming from an individual. We found no evidence that judges used information about the size of the crowd, but they considered information about the distribution of the advice when revising their opinions. Compared with crowd estimates, receiving the individual judgments as advice led to less advice taking but not to substantial differences in post-advice accuracy. Exploratory analyses showed that judges receiving multiple pieces of advice heeded advice less when their initial judgments were closer to the center of the distribution of judgments. In those instances, their initial judgments were also the most accurate, so they stood to gain less from the advice. Receiving multiple pieces of advice also led to smaller confidence gains, suggesting that judges receiving crowd judgments as advice might underestimate the variance of the underlying individual judgments.