Outcome bias in decision evaluation
Five studies showing that knowledge of an outcome can change how people evaluate the quality of a prior decision even when the decision maker had the same information at the time.
Also known as Baron and Hershey outcome bias
The experiments found that favorable outcomes led participants to evaluate prior decision thinking more positively, despite being told the information available to the decision maker had not changed.
This is direct evidence for outcome bias. It does not imply outcomes are irrelevant. Outcomes provide new information for future decisions; the narrower point is that they can distort retrospective evaluation of what was knowable beforehand.