Why We Don't Judge Winners Even When They Do Bad

Imagine coming home after work and drinking something alcoholic. After that, your friends called you and called you to the camp site. It is too expensive to travel by taxi, so you decide to take the risk and hit the road by car. As a result, you got there without any problems, had fun all night and even met the love of your life.

Was the decision to go to the camp site a good one? You will think so. However, driving under the influence is actually a bad idea. And if you were deprived of your rights, you would admit it.

Life is not a logical puzzle, it is dominated by chance.

Therefore, bad decisions can lead to success, and good decisions can lead to disastrous consequences. This is fine. The bad news is that we evaluate decisions by outcome. This cognitive bias is called outcome bias, and it forces us not to judge dishonorable winners and to sprinkle ashes on our heads without any guilt.

Why We Don't Judge Winners

This distortion was discovered by researchers J. Baron and J. C. Hershey during a series of psychological experiments. They asked the participants to rate how the doctor did the right thing when deciding on a risky operation. The people were warned that the doctor had the same information that was available to them - no more, no less. At the same time, one was told that the patient survived, the second - that he died.

The early participants acknowledged that the decision was good, the doctor was competent and they would have done the same in his place. The second called the decision an error, and the competence of the doctor was assessed lower. Scientists have come to the following conclusion:

People do not take into account the quality of the decision itself and the associated risk. They are focused only on the result.

Later research revealed a few more interesting points.

1. We are so attached to the result that we do not really notice the decision itself. In one variant, the subjects were given to take turns to evaluate two identical initial situations with different outcomes, and in the other - to evaluate both at the same time. It would seem that in the second case, people should admit that the decisions are equally good or bad. But it turned out the other way around: the effect not only did not disappear, but even intensified.

2. We choose the winners, even if they are selfish. People were given two cases to evaluate: in one, a sympathetic doctor prescribed cheap pills because he was taking care of the patient's finances, and in the end, the treatment gave a side effect. In the second, the selfish doctor prescribed an expensive drug because he received a percentage of its sale, and the patient was doing great. The participants knew the motives of both specialists, but still chose an egoistic doctor for further cooperation. However, when they did not know how the story would end, they always chose a sympathizer.

We agree to work with egoists and villains if they are lucky.

Why is that bad

'Cause you wait until the thunder hits

For many years, audit firms in the United States have worked with clients not only as auditors, but also as consultants. Their independence of opinion was in question, but the state ignored this problem.

Despite the fact that objectivity and impartiality are the key factors of the audit, employees turned a blind eye to ancillary services for a long time until a conflict of interest led to the fall of the large companies Enron, WorldCom and Tyco. Only after that did the USA revise the activities of auditors. Evidence of dishonest work existed long before the bankruptcy of large companies and the loss of thousands of jobs, but the state assessed the result, not the situation itself: yes, there were violations, but nothing terrible happened!

People often make this mistake. When they turn a blind eye to negligence, spit on safety precautions, do not worry about bad habits, because while everything is fine …

Because blame yourself for good decisions

Gendir believes that the firing of the commercial director was the worst decision in recent years. Finding something new is not working, sales are falling, managers are confused.

It all started when the CEO began to look for the cause of the company's low sales. He appreciated the work of the commercial director and saw his weak points. At first, there was an idea to share responsibilities: let the director do what he is good at, and for the rest, you can take another person. But then managers could lose confidence in such a leader, and they had to pay twice as much. It was logical to assume that there is someone who can do all the duties of a commercial director well, and the past was fired.

But everything went wrong: a worthy candidate was not found, and sales began to fall. The boss blamed himself for the bad tactics, but was it true? Considering everything he knew at the time, the decision was balanced and well thought out. The specialist does not cope, which means that you need to find someone who will be able to do it. At that moment, the decision was correct: the owner could not know if there would be a person to replace the director until he started looking for him.

Decisions should be judged not by whether they succeeded or failed, but by what you did to make everything work out.

We often make this mistake: we blame ourselves for “bad” decisions, when in fact they were good, but by chance led to negative results. When you know the bottom line, another cognitive bias occurs - the hindsight bias. This is when you exclaim bitterly: “I knew it! I just felt it was going to happen. But this is only an illusion. Nobody knows how to predict the future, and it is impossible to calculate all the options.

Because you choose a bad model of behavior

Blaming yourself for an allegedly bad decision is not so bad. It is much worse to consider a bad strategy to be a winning one because you got lucky once and everything ended well.

For example, if an athlete has tried doping once, passed the test and won the competition, he may admit that the decision was good and continue to run. But one day he will be caught and all his achievements will be taken away.

How to overcome the mistake

In order not to fall into this trap of thinking, it is necessary first of all to evaluate the decision-making process, and not the final result. To do this, it is worth asking yourself a few questions:

What led me to this decision?
What information was known at that time?
Could I find more information on the topic?
Could I have chosen another solution, did I have a choice in those circumstances?
What did other people tell me, what did they rely on in their judgments?
Was there a need to make a decision at that moment?

And perhaps you will see that in those circumstances you had no choice and from the point of view of that experience, your decision was the only correct one.