Good decisions, bad decisions: the interaction of process and outcome in evaluations of decision quality

Process-based considerations are generally accepted by experts and analysts as being the fundamental drivers of decision quality. However, little work has been done to account for the role of a risk management decision's outcome as a key driver of the public judgments about decision quality. To this end, the objective of the research reported here was straightforward to determine - via an experiment - the relative importance of decision-making process and the associated outcome in lay evaluations of decision quality. Our results demonstrate that people seem to have a difficult time unpacking decision-making processes, even ones they strongly prefer, from their associated outcomes when evaluating decision quality. From a practical standpoint, our results cast doubt on the generally accepted belief that participatory and deliberative decision-making processes (e.g., for risk management) will - on their own - contribute to positive evaluations of decision quality.