Omission bias: why not acting feels safer.
Omission bias means you react more strongly to harm you caused than to identical harm you merely allowed. In fact, Ilana Ritov and Jonathan Baron showed this in 1992. So when a job decision could go wrong loudly or quietly, the quiet path wins.
The pull that skips the trivia.
For instance, in 2021 a team led by Xiao and Feldman re-tested four original scenarios with more than six hundred people. The effect held in three, at odds ratios between 2.16 and 4.83. However, it failed in the fourth, which was the colour of a wagon. After all, nobody clings to a colour, but people do cling to budgets, portfolios and jobs.
How omission bias shapes regret.
When you act and it goes wrong, your body can replay the moment. For example, you pressed send at eleven minutes past four. As a result, that counterfactual is sharp, and it has a timestamp.
When you fail to act, however, there is nothing to replay. Instead, the regret arrives cold and slow, spread across years. Because it never becomes a scene, it costs nothing to keep paying it.
Staying is invisible, not cheaper.
Your body weighs the loud risk carefully, while it never weighs the quiet one at all. As a result, staying never presents itself as a decision. In short, staying is not cheaper than leaving, it is simply invisible.
Name your omission bias before bed.
First, write one decision you have made this year by not making it.
Then describe in two lines how you would feel if it went wrong.
From the book.
When you fail to act and it goes wrong, there is nothing to replay. No moment, no timestamp, no hand moving. Things simply carried on, the way they had the month before. The regret still arrives, but it arrives cold and slow and spread across years, and it never once condenses into a scene you could apologise for, which is exactly why it costs you nothing to keep paying it.
I Want to Start a Business but I Can't Quit My Job, chapter 7: Why you have not decided already
Questions about omission bias.
Why does omission bias affect career decisions?
It appears in consequential, hard to reverse choices like jobs. Because acting leaves a moment to replay, inaction feels safer.
Did the effect replicate?
It held in three of four scenarios in a 2021 replication. However, it failed for the colour of a wagon.
Is staying actually the safer option?
Not necessarily. Instead, the chapter argues staying is not cheaper than leaving, it simply never feels like a decision.
Read the whole chapter.
This lesson covers one section of chapter 7, “Why you have not decided already”. The book goes further, with the full evidence, the stories and every exercise.
Lessons in this chapter.
- 01 Status quo bias examples: why your job never ends.
- 02 Omission bias: why not acting feels safer.
- 03 Career inaction: when staying is just a default.
- 04 Reversal test: would you take your job again.
- 05 When to kill a side project: the day you knew.
- 06 Parents chose my career: the first step was theirs.
- 07 Should I quit my job test: reading your answer.