Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

An fMRI Investigation of the Neurocognitive Processing of Strategies and Measures

2020; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

10.2139/ssrn.3659646

1556-5068

Paul W. Black, C. Brock Kirwan, Thomas O. Meservy, William B. Tayler, Jeffrey O. Williams,

Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics

A central feature of most organizations is the use of measures to represent key elements of performance across multiple strategic objectives. Prior research has demonstrated a tendency for individuals to treat these measures as though they are the higher-order strategic objectives the measures were intended to represent, as opposed to imperfect representations of those strategic objectives—a phenomenon labeled surrogation. We employ an experiment to further understand this phenomenon. In this study, we capture neural activation when processing measures and when processing strategic objectives. We find that differences in brain activity when processing measures and strategic objectives are similar to the differences in brain activity when processing concrete and abstract words. We further find evidence that greater brain activity and longer response times are associated with less surrogation. This affirms the notion that increased cognitive involvement can reduce surrogation.