ABSTRACT
The goal-oriented activities and decisions made by groups in business and politics very frequently involve the search for and evaluation of information. Such search and evaluation processes are not complete once provisional or even final decisions have been reached, but should instead be regarded as ongoing activities. Of considerable interest is the question of whether the search for and evaluation of decision-relevant information are carried out in an unbiased way or whether they are more likely to be “distorted.” The model of the “Homo Oeconomicus” suggests, for example, that persons involved in this process very carefully search for and evaluate all information relevant to the problem before reaching a provisional or final decision. However, because persons and groups active in politics and business are subject to the same laws of human information processing as other people, the opposite may indeed be the case: Empirical research on the phenomenon of “groupthink” (Janis, 1972, 1982) and one of the most important theories of social psychology—the theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957, 1964)—lead to the conclusion that people involved in a decision-making process prefer and even selectively search for specific information that will support a decision that has already been made or that the actor intends to make.
