AN INFORMATION-PROCESSING APPROACH TO LENIENCY IN PERFORMANCE JUDGMENTS

The traditional rendering-bias explanation of leniency in performance judgments was postulated to be incomplete. To demonstrate this insufficiency, an encoding-bias model of leniency was proposed, and hypotheses generated from both models were tested in a laboratory experiment. Sixty students viewed a videotape of a lecture, and their expectations of providing face-to-face feedback to the instructor were manipulated preobservation, postobservation, or not at all. Dependent variables included measures of encoding, private appraisals, retrieval, and public appraisals. As expected, results supported both explanations of leniency. However, the pattern of results suggests that a retrieval bias may also contribute to leniency in performance judgments. A more complex view of leniency effects is proposed on the basis of principles of motivated cognitive processing.