Effects of Judgment on Memory: Experiments in Recognition Bias and Process Dissociation in a Professional Judgment...

Three experiments investigated post-judgment memory bias in a professional task for which the judge is liable. The experimental setting replicates a task in which a subordinate documents evidence after making a judgment, and a reviewer affirms or overrules the judgment from evidence the subordinate documents. This setting is common, for example, in auditing firms, law firms, and investment banking houses. The results lead to three findings. First, subordinates' judgments interact with evidence in memory to bias their post-judgment recognition of the evidence they will document in evidence files. Second, subordinate memory performance is consistent with the predictions of process dissociation: Conscious recollection is lower when attention is divided, but unconscious familiarity is invariant to attention manipulations. Third, the incomplete evidence sets that subordinates recognize and document systematically bias reviewers' judgments in the direction of subordinates' judgments.