After making decisions, we often get feedback concerning forgone outcomes (what would have happened had we chosen differently). Yet, many times, our exposure to such feedback is systematically biased. For example, your friends are more likely to tell you about a party you missed if it was fun than if it was boring. Despite its prevalence, the effects of biased exposure to forgone outcomes on future choice have not been directly studied. In three studies (five experiments) using a simplified learning task, we study the basic influence of biased exposure to forgone outcomes in the extreme case in which decision makers can easily infer the missing information such that the biased exposure carries almost no informational value. The results in all studies suggest that nevertheless, the biased exposure to forgone outcomes affected choice. Exposure to forgone outcomes only when they were better than the obtained outcomes (Only‐Better‐Forgone) increased selections of the forgone option compared with exposure to forgone outcomes only when they were worse than the obtained outcome (Only‐Worse‐Forgone). Moreover, relative to an unbiased exposure to all forgone outcomes, the effect of exposure to Only‐Worse‐Forgone was larger than the effect of exposure to Only‐Better‐Forgone feedback. However, these effects were not universal: In environments that include rare negative events (“disasters”), biased exposure to forgone outcomes had very little effect. We raise potential explanations and further discuss implications for marketing and risk awareness.

中文翻译：

---

偏见暴露于预后结果的影响

做出决定后，我们经常会收到有关放弃结果的反馈（如果我们选择不同的话将会发生什么）。但是，很多时候，我们对此类反馈的了解是系统性的。例如，您的朋友更有可能告诉您您错过了一个有趣的聚会而不是无聊的聚会。尽管它很普遍，但没有直接研究偏见暴露于偏见的结果对未来选择的影响。在使用简化学习任务的三项研究（五个实验）中，我们研究了在极端情况下决策者可以轻松推断出缺失的信息，使得有偏见的暴露几乎没有信息价值的极端情况下，有偏见的暴露对已放弃结果的基本影响。所有研究的结果表明，尽管如此，偏向暴露于预后的结果仍会影响选择。仅在结果优于获得的结果时（只有更好的-福尔戈涅）才有机会暴露于已放弃的结果，而只有在其结果比获得的结果差时才有暴露于已放弃的结果中（只有更差-弗尔戈内）。此外，相对于所有已放弃结局的无偏暴露，仅接触更差-福尔戈涅效应的影响要大于仅接触更佳-福尔戈涅反馈的效应。但是，这些影响并不普遍：在包括罕见的负面事件（“灾难”）的环境中，偏向暴露于已放弃结果的影响很小。我们提出潜在的解释，并进一步讨论对市场营销和风险意识的影响。