Omission Bias

Omission bias is the moral judgment by which people prefer inaction, or omission, over action, or commission, tending to judge harm caused by doing something as worse than an equal harm caused by failing to do something. Researchers have documented the pattern in three forms: when an omission and a commission produce the same bad outcome, people judge the commission more harshly; within a single choice, a bad action is judged more harshly than a factually worse inaction; and people find omissions more acceptable even when comparing actions that produce an equally favorable overall result. Proposed explanations include psychological inertia, the perceived transaction costs of acting, and a general perception that actions are more directly causal than inactions, and researchers have illustrated the bias through the trolley problem and used it to help explain the endowment effect and status quo bias, both already live on this atlas.