Untilt/Doxa

The operation

A 55-year-old man has a heart condition. The pain has forced him to stop work he enjoyed, and it gets in the way of travel and leisure. An operation would relieve the pain and raise his life expectancy from 65 to 70, but 8% of the people who have it die from the operation itself. His doctor decides to operate. The man dies during the operation. Judged on the thinking behind it, how do you rate the doctor’s decision?

Clearly correct
Correct, all things considered
As good as not operating
Incorrect, all things considered
Clearly incorrect

The two decisions carry the same 8% risk and the same five years at stake; what the doctors could not know when deciding was how each operation would end. Baron and Hershey (1988) gave 20 University of Pennsylvania students 15 medical decisions to rate, including pairs identical except for the outcome, placed as far apart in the list as possible. Across the 140 such pairs, the case that ended well was rated higher in 44.3% of them, the case that ended badly in 9.3%, and the two the same in 46.4%. Many said they remembered their earlier answer and repeated it. Here, your first rating stayed on screen while you gave the second.

Baron, J., & Hershey, J. C. (1988). Outcome bias in decision evaluation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(4), 569-579.

Outcome Bias

Judging decisions by their results, not their quality

Read about this bias

How these experiments are built

Methodology Privacy

Made with care by William