دانلود رایگان مقاله نتایج درک شده توسط نیروهای خارجی تعیین می شود: نقش رویداد محکم در کاهش ضعف نتایج

abstract

People view the same decision as better when it is followed by a positive outcome than by a negative outcome, a phenomenon called the outcome bias. Based on the idea that a key cause of the outcome bias is people’s failure to appreciate that outcomes are in part determined by external forces, three studies tested a novel method to reduce the outcome bias. Experiment 1 showed that people who construed a person’s interactions with the environment as events rather than as actions or choices were less susceptible to the outcome bias in a medical decision making task. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that people who recalled past events rather than actions or choices exhibited lower outcome bias in a risky decision making task and in an ethical judgment task. These findings indicate that an event construal helps people appreciate the role of external factors in causing outcomes.

5. General discussion

Across three experiments, we showed that inducing participants to construe person–environment interactions as events (rather than as actions or choices) significantly reduced the outcome bias, a persistent judgment error that occurs when people judge a decision as good or bad based on the outcome following the decision (Baron & Hershey, 1988). Experiment 1 showed that participants who watched a video and indicated when something happened to the actor (compared to when the actor touched an object or when the actor made a choice) were less influenced by whether a medical decision was followed by a positive outcome or a negative outcome when evaluating the quality of the decision. Experiment 2 demonstrated that participants who recalled things that happened to them during the previous day (compared to those who recalled things they did or the choices they made) were less influenced by whether a risky decision was followed by a positive outcome or a negative outcome when evaluating the quality of the decision. Experiment 3 found that participants who recalled events from the previous day (rather than recalling actions, recalling choices, or not recalling anything) were less influenced by whether an ethically laden decision was followed by a positive outcome or a negative outcome when evaluating the ethicality of the decision and the extent to which the decision maker should be punished. Experiment 3 further found that event construal led to harsher judgments of the ethically questionable decisions compared to action construal and choice construal, irrespective of the outcome.