Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Outcome bias describes the tendency of people to alter theirrating of a decision’s quality according to whether theoutcome is good or bad – despite equivalencies in availableinformation and decision processes – which has the potentialto undermine learning about causal structures and diagnosticinformation in many fields, including medicine. Herein, asample of 181 doctors and medical students is shown todisplay outcome bias in medical and non-medical scenarios –with their susceptibility correlating across the domains, r =0.38. Analyses showed that rational and intuitive decisionstyles and a medical risk tolerance measure offered littlepredictive power. Instead, the strongest drivers of biassusceptibility were the Age and professional Level ofparticipants, with more senior personnel showing lessoutcome bias. We argue that this could reflect improvedlearning across a doctor’s career or result from increasingconfidence making them less likely to change their initialjudgement of decision quality.