The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions

See also Omission Bias (ch. 44); Overthinking (ch. 90); Procrastination (ch. 85); The
It’ll-Get-Worse-Before-It-Gets-Better Fallacy (ch. 12); Inability to Close Doors (ch. 68)

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44
WHY YOU ARE EITHER THE SOLUTION – OR THE PROBLEM
Omission Bias
You are on a glacier with two climbers. The first slips and falls into a crevasse. He
might survive if you call for help, but you don’t, and he perishes. The second
climber you actively push into the ravine, and he dies shortly afterwards. Which
weighs more heavily on your conscience?
Considering the options rationally, it’s obvious that both are equally
reprehensible, resulting as they do in death for your companions. And yet
something makes us rate the first option, the passive option, as less horrible. This
feeling is called the 
omission bias
. It crops up where both action and inaction
lead to cruel consequences. In such cases, we tend to prefer inaction; its results
seem more anodyne.
Suppose you are the head of the Federal Drug Administration. You must
decide whether or not to approve a drug for the terminally ill. The pills can have
fatal side effects: they kill 20% of patients on the spot, but save the lives of the
other 80% within a short period of time. What do you decide?
Most would withhold approval. To them, waving through a drug that takes out
every fifth person is a worse act than failing to administer the cure to the other
80% of patients. It is an absurd decision, and a perfect example of the 
omission
bias
. Suppose that you are aware of the bias
 
and decide to approve the drug in
the name of reason and decency. Bravo. But what happens when the first patient
dies? A media storm ensues, and soon you find yourself out of a job. As a civil
servant or politician, you would do well to take the ubiquitous 
omission bias
seriously – and even foster it.
Case law shows how ingrained such ‘moral distortion’ is in our society. Active
euthanasia, even if it is the explicit wish of the dying, is punishable by law,
whereas deliberate refusal of life-saving measures is legal (for example, following
so-called DNR orders – do not resuscitate).
Such thinking also explains why parents feel it is perfectly acceptable not to
vaccinate their children, even though vaccination discernibly reduces the risk of

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catching the disease. Of course, there is also a very small risk of getting sick from
the vaccine. Overall, however, vaccination makes sense. Vaccination not only
protects the children, but society too. A person who is immune to the disease will
never infect others. Objectively, if non-vaccinated children ever contracted one of
these sicknesses, we could accuse the parents of actively harming them. But this
is exactly the point: Deliberate inaction somehow seems less grave than a
comparable action – say, if the parents intentionally infected them.
The 
omission bias
lies behind the following delusions: we wait until people
shoot themselves in the foot rather than taking aim ourselves. Investors and
business journalists are more lenient on companies that develop no new
products than they are on those that produce bad ones, even though both roads
lead to ruin. Sitting passively on a bunch of miserable shares feels better than
actively buying bad ones. Building no emission filter into a coal plant feels
superior to removing one for cost reasons. Failing to insulate your house is more
acceptable than burning the spared fuel for your own amusement. Neglecting to
declare income tax is less immoral than faking tax documents, even though the
state loses out either way.
In the previous chapter, we met the 
action bias
. Is it the opposite of the
omission bias
? Not quite. The action bias causes us to offset a lack of clarity with
futile hyperactivity, and comes into play when a situation is fuzzy, muddy or
contradictory The 
omission bias
, on the other hand, usually abounds where the
situation is intelligible: a future misfortune might be averted with direct action, but
this insight doesn’t motivate us as much as it should.
The 
omission bias
is very difficult to detect – after all, action is more noticeable
than inaction. In the 1960s student movements coined a punchy slogan to
condemn it: ‘If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.’