Overcoming the Outcome Bias: Making Intentions Matter

Ovul  Sezer; Ting  Zhang; Francesca  Gino; Max   Bazerman

Article | Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

Overcoming the Outcome Bias: Making Intentions Matter

by Ovul Sezer, Ting Zhang, Francesca Gino and Max Bazerman

Abstract

People often make the well-documented mistake of paying too much attention to the outcomes of others’ actions while neglecting information about the original intentions leading to those outcomes. In five experiments, we examine interventions aimed at reducing this outcome bias in situations where intentions and outcomes are misaligned. Participants evaluated an individual with fair intentions leading to unfavorable outcomes, an individual with selfish intentions leading to favorable outcomes, or both individuals jointly. Contrary to our initial predictions, participants weighed others’ outcomes more—not less—when these individuals were evaluated jointly rather than separately (Experiment 1). Consequently, separate evaluators were more intention-oriented than joint evaluators when rewarding and punishing others (Experiment 2a) and assessing the value of repeated interactions with these individuals in the future (Experiment 2b). Third-party recommenders were less outcome-biased in allocating funds to investment managers when making separate evaluations relative to joint evaluations (Experiment 3). Finally, raising the salience of intentions prior to discovering outcomes helped joint evaluators overcome the outcome bias, suggesting that joint evaluation made attending to information about intentions more difficult (Experiment 4). Our findings bridge decision-making research on the outcome bias and management research on organizational justice by investigating the role of intentions in evaluations.

Keywords: outcome bias; intentions; joint evaluation; judgment; separate evaluation; Goals and Objectives; Prejudice and Bias; Judgments; Performance Evaluation; Outcome or Result;

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Citation:

Sezer, Ovul, Ting Zhang, Francesca Gino, and Max Bazerman. "Overcoming the Outcome Bias: Making Intentions Matter." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 137 (November 2016): 13–26.

In six studies, we show that after experiencing a threat to their abilities, individuals who misrepresent their performance as better than it actually is boost their feelings of competence. We situate these findings in the literature on self-protection. We show that this “counterfeit competence” effect holds when threat is measured (Study 1), manipulated (Study 2), and when the opportunity to cheat is randomly assigned (Study 3). We extend our findings to a workplace context, showing that threatened individuals who lie on a job application feel more capable than those who report them honestly (Study 4). Finally, consistent with the argument that counterfeit competence is driven by self-protection, we find individuals do not predict they would experience such a boost (Study 5) and that cheating after threat offers benefits similar to those provided by other established methods of self-protection (Study 6). Together, our findings suggest that, after threat, misrepresenting one’s performance can function as a mechanism that helps to restore positive self-evaluations about one’s capabilities.

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Overcoming the Outcome Bias: Making Intentions Matter

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