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AFTER CERTAINTY

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Outcome Bias in Decision

Baron, Jonathan, and John C. Hershey. "Outcome Bias in Decision Evaluation." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54, no. 4 (1988): 569–579.

Why this matters here

Baron and Hershey show that people judge decisions by outcomes even when those outcomes were not foreseeable. When Authority Outlives Accountability asks what that bias does to leadership evaluation: visible harm looks like failure, while delayed or diluted harm looks like inevitability.