Is It Better to Prevent Mistakes or Fix Them?

Is it more important to make efforts to prevent mistakes, particularly those that can have catastrophic effects, or correct the mistakes after they are made? Think about how you’ve approached this in your life?

Our daily lives are filled with situations where good behavior is rewarded, and bad behavior is punished. However, mistakes happen — sometimes innocent people are unjustly punished (“false positives”), while genuine wrongdoers go free (“false negatives”).

A similar issue occurs with rewards: a company might give bonuses to some employees who don’t deserve them (false positives) or do not reward those who do (false negatives).

So, which type of mistake is less tolerable — false negatives or false positives?

A series of studies in Psychological Science by Eitan D. Rude and Franklin Shaddy at UCLA, involving almost 3,500 US-based adults, found consistent biases in attitudes toward this question. These biases could influence our views on various real-world situations.

In their initial studies, participants were presented with scenarios involving punishment or reward and asked about the importance of preventing false positives or false negatives or fixing these mistakes after they occurred. One scenario involved pay schemes that either docked the pay of poorly…