Some Good News About Tough Decisions
Decision-makers consistently overestimate how negatively others will judge them.
- By
- September 21, 2026
- CBR - Behavioral Science
It can be painful to lay off a low-performing employee, redistribute budgets, or deliver other upsetting news. Even when intended to produce broader benefits, these acts may cause managers—or people in similarly difficult situations—to worry about the harm they’ve caused and how they’ll be perceived as a result.
But such decisions may actually bolster reputations, finds research by University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Michael W. White, Stanford PhD student Stacia King, and Chicago Booth’s Emma Levine. Their study suggests that many people view hard choices as “necessary evils.”
Across a series of experiments, the researchers studied how people making difficult decisions thought they would be perceived by those on the receiving end versus actual perceptions.
In one experiment, the team had 400 participants act as decision-makers alongside “targets,” who were given $2, and passive “partners,” who received no money. Each decision-maker was randomly assigned to imagine either redistributing $1 from a target to a partner or keeping the original allocation. Decision-makers predicted what the target, who was informed about the options, would think of the imagined decision—and then made an actual choice to redistribute the money or not. Separately, targets reported their actual perceptions of decision-makers’ actions.
Hard choices, unexpected rewards
In a study, some participants (“decision-makers”) were asked to take $1 from one person (a “target,” who had $2) and give it to another person who had no money. The decision-makers overestimated how much this redistribution would hurt their reputation. They also overestimated the emotional harm it would cause and underestimated how much value targets would see in it.
The predictions were systematically wrong. Decision-makers expected that targets would judge them harshly for redistributing money and favorably for maintaining the allocation. But when asked to rate the decision-makers’ reputations on a 7-point scale, targets gave redistributors an average score of 5.7, higher than both the 4.1 score decision-makers had expected and the 4.4 that targets rated decision-makers who maintained the original allocation.
Decision-makers’ predictions and targets’ perceptions were similarly far apart in other areas. Decision-makers predicted that redistribution would take a significantly greater emotional toll than targets reported experiencing. The decision-makers also underestimated how much value targets would see in the redistribution. Targets who had money taken away from them rated the decision as more valuable than those whose original allocation was maintained.
Among the decision-makers assigned to imagine redistributing the money, those who had expected greater reputational harm were actually more likely to maintain the original allocation, suggesting that concerns about the aftermath can influence whether people take action.
In a final experiment, the researchers tested whether they could reduce decision-makers’ tendency to overestimate how negatively targets would judge them. Before considering a hypothetical difficult decision—in this case, whether to give an employee a pay cut to save the company—some decision-makers were told that people, in general, usually recognize the value of tough decisions. Others heard that this employee, specifically, usually recognized the value of tough decisions. The latter was more effective at bringing decision-makers’ predictions closer to targets’ responses.
However, the researchers also asked decision-makers how willing they would be to give the pay cut, and neither intervention made decision-makers more willing to do so, which suggests that shifting expectations may not be enough to change behavior.
For those who must make difficult decisions, the findings suggest that the fallout may not be as bad as feared. “These expectations and resulting decisions may be misguided,” the researchers conclude. “Necessary evils in everyday life are not as emotionally harmful and are more instrumentally valuable than they initially seem, and in fact, can even enhance a decision-maker’s reputation. There may be quite a deal of good in everyday necessary evils, at least more than decision-makers often believe.”
Michael W. White, Stacia King, and Emma Levine, “Decision-Makers Overestimate the Reputational Costs of Necessary Evils,” Working paper, April 2026.
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