Evaluations of Action and Inaction Decision-makers in Risky Decisions Resulting in Negative Outcomes: Inaction Agents Are Preferred to and Perceived as More Competent and Normative Than Action Agents

Research on action and inaction in judgement and decision making has shown that for choices in risky situations resulting in negative outcomes, people tend to prefer inaction over action and regret actions more than inactions. We built on this idea to test whether the established norm preference for inaction over action affects evaluations of decision-makers, and results in stronger preference for an agent who favors inaction over action in risky decisions resulting in negative outcomes. We conducted three pre-registered experiments via the Prolific platform, replicating and further extending the classic action-effect paradigm (overall N = 1138, 355 male, 746 female, 37 others, Mage= 36.98, SDage= 12.34) to examine perceptions of competence and trustworthiness of action versus inaction agents. First, we successfully replicated action-effect (d = 0.58 to 0.96). We then found that participants indeed tended to evaluate an inaction protagonist as more competent, trustworthy, and inline with social norms than an action protagonist (d = 0.05 to d = 0.61). Results concerning our extensions examining perceived social norms and joy attributions over positive outcomes were less clear. Finally, we found that normality moderated the preference-inaction effect into a preference-action effect: Negative prior outcomes led participants to prefer action actors to inaction actors and to find those to be more competent and normative. Overall, we found that, in the context of negative outcomes, inaction is perceived as more trustworthy than action. We concluded that action and inaction seem to extend to social evaluations of agents and that trustworthiness can be affected by action and inaction, context, and norms. All materials, data, and code are available on: https://osf.io/a8e4d/