Omission bias is the moral judgement in which people prefer omission (inaction) over commission (action), and tend to believe harm as a result of commission more negatively than harm as a result of omission. It works in three forms. First, when omissions and commissions have the same bad outcomes, people find the former more favorable. Secondly, within the same choice set, the bad actions are regarded as morally worse than the factually worse inactions. Thirdly, subjects often find omissions more acceptable, compared to actions that bring an equally favorable result but with positive and negative tradeoffs. It can occur due to a number of processes, including psychological inertia, the perception of transaction costs, and the perception that commissions are more causal than omissions. In social political terms the Universal Declaration of Human Rights establishes how basic human rights are to be assessed in article 2, as "without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status." criteria that are often subject to one or another form of omission bias. It is controversial as to whether omission bias is a cognitive bias or is often rational. The bias is often showcased through the trolley problem and has also been described as an explanation for the endowment effect and status quo bias.
Academic Evidence Baron and Ritov (1990) reported the omission bias in the scenario of vaccination. Although the outcome of disease is even worse, participants were reluctant to vaccinate if it showed a bad outcome (a potential death caused by side effect). Specifically, the minimum death rate of disease that encouraged participants to vaccinate was approximately ten times more than the death rate of vaccination. Spranca et al. further tested this phenomenon in scenarios including strategies for tennis tournament and trolley problem in 1991. Confronting the same negative outcomes, participants rated omissions as less bad than the corresponding commissions, while the deprecation of harmful actions was not accompanied with the same level of recommendation of the helpful ones. Overall, the negative part of active decisions is exaggerated, compared to that of omissions. Several studies have successfully replicated this finding. Recent replication also suggested the temporal-spatial generalization of omission bias. Children aged 7-8 and 11-12 reported similar moral judgement with adults: considering a behavior to obtain a self-directed benefit, participants from different ages showed a similar preference to the omission and often regarded commission as morally worse one. Except Western population, East-Asian sample also largely shared the pattern of omission bias, though nuances existed: Chinese participants reported a stronger tendency to deprecate a harmful action compared to American, probably because of Chinese traditional concept of Taoism which encourages ‘wuwei’ (inaction).
Mechanism Norm theory and reference point. Kahneman and Miller pointed that people tended to regard omissions as a norm, a neutral reference point, and actions as an abnormal activity. This distinction stemmed from people's easier imagination of behaviors they didn't adapt (or the omission situation) than what they carried out. For the abnormal, they demonstrated more sensitive feelings, targeting the benefits that should be there and thus resulting in the amplification of the loss and foregone benefits from commissions. Loss aversion. The comparison between omission and commission interacts with loss aversion, the principle that gains are weighed less heavily than losses of the same magnitude. Subjects perceived omissions as a normal situation. As a result, even if the outcomes of both actions and inactions are negative, the loss from omission can still be seen as a 'forgone gain', which is better than a pure loss; similarly, when the outcomes are all positive, the gain from omission turns to be a 'forgone loss', which is better than a pure gain. Therefore, inactions are always more acceptable than actions. Heuristic of asymmetric attribution. Heuristic is considered to be another reason of omission bias. A biased belief states that, compared to omissions, actions are considered to be tighter involved in the causes of outcomes because, also, they are more abnormal, and abnormal events are more likely to be seen as causes. From the perspective of actors, this can be translated into a blame that actors need to be responsible for the negative outcomes of commissions. However, the drawbacks caused by choosing to do nothing is not seen as actors' responsibility. This may root from an overgeneralization that the easy excuse of negative results caused by unintended omission (usually the absence of actors) also works to forgive the pitfalls of omission when no or a little evidence was left to prove whether actors have the choice to decide act or not to act. Therefore, when actors do not want to take charge of potential risks, omissions are largely favored. This explanation is believed to be irrational, because people fail to recognize the omissions that enact after decision-makers' consideration of the alternative as another kind of action (that is, act to do nothing), instead of the absence of actions.
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