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.