Jawn Lam

Jonathan Baron

ThinkersBorn 1944Psychologist

Works

  • Outcome Bias in Decision Evaluation, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1988
  • Reluctance to Vaccinate: Omission Bias and Ambiguity, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 1990
  • Omission and Commission in Judgment and Choice, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1991

In Tactics of Organizational Politics

Ideas

Outcome bias. Across five studies, people rated the same decision, made with the same information, as better thought out and its maker as more competent when the outcome happened to be good than when it was bad. Outcomes are used as evidence about decision quality even where they carry no such information. Caveat: A large preregistered replication of Experiment 1 (International Review of Social Psychology, 2023) reproduced the direction of the effect.

Omission bias. People judge harm caused by failing to act as less bad than the same harm caused by acting, even when intentions and consequences are the same, partly because they do not see omissions as causing outcomes. Baron and colleagues describe this as a useful rule of thumb applied where it does not belong. Caveat: A preregistered replication (Jamison and colleagues, 2020) reproduced the original result.

What it explains

Baron explains why results are used to grade decisions after the fact, so whoever is present when results land collects the credit or blame, and why harm done by not acting draws less condemnation than harm done by acting. Both let people steer outcomes while staying hard to fault.

Tactics that draw on Jonathan Baron (31)

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