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relationships to see its critical importance. Being observed by one’s mother clearly awakens, even in adulthood, many memories about what it means to engage in “proper behavior.” In social settings, one can think of the basic process at work in legitimation as the imposition of sanctions on a decision maker if social norms are violated in the decision process or in the outcomes resulting from decisions. Social norms serve as jointly recognized reference points that define and reinforce acceptable behavior among members of a group. Hence actions, and/or outcomes, that an actor anticipates will be observed by group members could be affected by social norms held by the group members even when no one in the observing group can formally sanction noncompliance.

This line of thinking has been the subject of a considerable body of experimental work by psychologists and sociologists over the years. For example, psychologists have designed several studies to analyze whether accountability (“anticipation of required justification”) would affect decision making, and they found that it does. Indeed, this whole body of experimental research suggests that observability of behavior, together with expected valuation and social norms, acts to alter reasoning processes and decision outcomes. Environmental cues that draw attention to norms and to norm compliance by others in the reference group are a further factor affecting behavior.

Individual psychology, following Freud and the development of self-knowledge, has also addressed the issue of legitimation. Freud developed the concept of “ego-ideal,” which is a child’s conception of what its parents consider to be morally appropriate and an important element for the child’s developed super-ego. In the psychology of decision making, this idea of evoked ideals is captured by the set of role models, some actual and some constructed, that are triggered in particular contexts, and that act to condition our decisions. We are at one and the same time our mother’s child, parent, grandparent, spouse, professor, ordinary citizen, and so on, and each of these roles may be played off against a different background of learned behaviors and social norms that condition us in these respective roles and provide legitimation for our actions.

An intriguing examination of this nexus between action, reflection, and conditioning role models to legitimate choice is the theory of “possible selves” developed by Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius. They advance a cognitive framework that envisages each individual as having not just a set of “now selves” but also a set of “future possible selves,” which collectively serve to embody the individual’s ambitions, concerns, and legitimation reference points in much the same way as does Freud’s psychoanalytic ego-ideal. Which of these possible selves is evoked as the image of desirable behavior/selves and undesirable behavior/selves is interesting in evaluating an individual’s decisions as well as a focus for psychotherapeutic intervention to ensure that these evoked selves are aligned with a healthy working self.

The point of all these studies is that the nature of anticipated legitimation—that is, “I know in advance that I will have to justify to others after the fact the choices I made, and why I made them”—can have significant effects on the decision process and outcomes of choice. These effects appear to be the result of incentives for the decision maker to align behavior with norms that are viewed as applicable to the decision context. They appear to be strengthened when the decision maker knows that the decision process is being observed or that it will have to be explained afterwards.

LEGITIMATION AND DECISION MAKING

The process of legitimation may begin before outcomes are fully observed, as in the current climate change debate, for which outcomes may not be known for decades or even centuries. The basic argument is that legitimation leads us to use “accepted models” or particular data that are routinely used for particular types of decisions. In this way, if