Hindsight bias
Hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along phenomenon[1] or creeping determinism,[2] is the common tendency for people to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they were.
[2] In 1973, Baruch Fischhoff attended a seminar where Paul E. Meehl stated an observation: clinicians often overestimate their ability to have foreseen the outcome of a particular case, claiming they knew it all along.
[8] In the early 70s, the investigation of heuristics and biases was a large area of study in psychology, led by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.
[10] They asked participants to judge the likelihood of several outcomes of US president Richard Nixon's upcoming visit to Beijing and Moscow.
Having evolved from the heuristics of Tversky and Kahneman into the creeping determinism hypothesis and finally into the hindsight bias as we now know it, the concept has many practical applications and is still at the forefront of research today.
[citation needed] For example, in 1996, LaBine proposed a scenario where a psychiatric patient told a therapist that he was contemplating harming another individual.
If the sense-making process is not complete and the sensory information is not detected or coded [by the individual], the sensation is experienced as a surprise and the hindsight bias has a gradual reduction.
[21] To understand how a person can so easily change the foundation of knowledge and belief for events after receiving new information, three cognitive models of hindsight bias have been reviewed.
The SARA model, created by Rüdiger Pohl and associates, explains hindsight bias for descriptive information in memory and hypothetical situations.
Basically, people only remember small, select amounts of information—and when asked to recall it later, use that biased image to support their opinions about the situation.
CMT is a non-formal theory based on work by many researchers to create a collaborative process model for hindsight bias that involves event outcomes.
[28] Distortions of autobiographical memory produced by hindsight bias have also been used as a tool to study changes in students' beliefs about paranormal phenomena after taking a university level skepticism course.
Hindsight bias and the misinformation effect recall a specific time and event; this is called an episodic memory process.
This leads to hindsight bias in the form of retroactive pessimism to inhibit upward counterfactual thinking, instead interpreting the outcome as succumbing to an inevitable fate.
Medical decision support systems are designed to assist physicians in diagnosis and treatment, and have been suggested as a way to counteract hindsight bias.
[36] Hindsight bias has also been found to affect judgments regarding the perception of visual stimuli, an effect referred to as the "I saw it all along" phenomenon.
The phenomenon of visual hindsight bias has important implications for a form of malpractice litigation that occurs in the field of radiology.
Given that researchers' attempts to eliminate hindsight bias have failed, some believe there is a possible combination of motivational and automatic processes in cognitive reconstruction.
Despite a similar pattern of effects in young adults, cognitive covariates did not significantly predict the underlying HB process in this age group.
[44] The hindsight bias effect is a paradigm that demonstrates how recently acquired knowledge influences the recollection of past information.
Recently acquired knowledge has a strange but strong influence on schizophrenic individuals in relation to information previously learned.
New information combined with rejection of memories can disconfirm behavior and delusional belief, which is typically found in patients with schizophrenia.
[45] In numerous studies, cognitive functional deficits in schizophrenic individuals impair their ability to represent and uphold contextual processing.
Dysfunctions of cognitive processing of context and abnormalities that PTSD patients often have can affect hindsight thinking, such as in combat soldiers perceiving they could have altered outcomes of events in war.
[48] The PFC and dopamine systems are parts of the brain that can be responsible for the impairment in cognitive control processing of context information.
[49] Cognitive flashbacks and other associated features from a traumatic event can trigger severe stress and negative emotions such as unpardonable guilt.
In cases that there is an assumption of risk, hindsight bias may contribute to the jurors perceiving the event as riskier because of the poor outcome.
[54] In other words, people became less attached to the actual outcome and were more open to consider alternative lines of reasoning prior to the event.
After the worldwide dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and the Great Recession of 2008, many economists have suggested that conditions that seemed insignificant at the time were harbingers of future financial collapse.
The process of writing down the investment approach still leads to overconfidence, but the study found that it does not have an overall negative effect on current returns.
