JUDGING THE RESULT: Why Bad Decisions Sometimes Appear Right in Hindisight

Have you ever judged a decision as brilliant because it worked out — or foolish because it didn’t?

In this episode of Circuit Breaker: Rewiring Your Decisions, we explore Outcome Bias — the tendency to evaluate the quality of a decision based on its result, rather than the information and reasoning available when the choice was made. We look at how success and failure can colour our judgment of the decisions that led to them.

But does a good outcome always mean it was a good decision? Discover how outcome bias can distort our evaluations, make us overlook uncertainty, and affect the way we learn from our choices — especially when we confuse results with judgment.

Studies and links:

Outcome Bias in Decision Evaluation | Jonathon Baron and John C. Hershey | Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1988, Vol. 54, No. 4, 569-579 outcomebias.pdf

Outcome Bias: Definition, Examples and Effects | clearerthinking.org Outcome Bias: Definition, Examples and Effects