The outcome bias is an error in evaluating the quality of a past decision once the outcome of that decision is already known, so that the same choice draws more ethical condemnation when chance happens to produce a bad result than when it produces a good one. It is often confused with the related hindsight bias, already live on this atlas, but the two are distinct: hindsight bias involves a distortion of memory that favors the person who made the decision, while outcome bias involves weighting the eventual result more heavily than the other information that was actually available at the time the decision was made.
Facts
Core ClaimThe outcome bias is an error in judging the quality of a past decision by how it turned out rather than by the quality of the reasoning behind it at the time it was made. 1 First Described Year Classification
Type of Phenomenon Connections
Associated With
Wikipedia distinguishes the two directly: outcome bias weighs the outcome of a decision itself, while hindsight bias is a memory distortion favoring the actor.
Source Wikipedia: Outcome bias
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Outcome bias
Wikimedia Foundationlead section
The outcome bias is an error made in evaluating the quality of a decision when the outcome of that decision is already known.
Overview section
Baron and Hershey (1988) presented subjects with hypothetical situations in order to test this.
lead section, phenomenon-kind classification
The outcome bias is an error made in evaluating the quality of a decision when the outcome of that decision is already known.
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