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.[3][4]
"Hindsight" redirects here. For other uses, see Hindsight (disambiguation).
After an event has occurred, people often believe that they could have predicted or perhaps even known with a high degree of certainty what the outcome of the event would be before it occurred. Hindsight bias may cause distortions of memories of what was known or believed before an event occurred and is a significant source of overconfidence in one’s ability to predict the outcomes of future events.[5] Examples of hindsight bias can be seen in the writings of historians describing the outcomes of battles, in physicians’ recall of clinical trials, and in criminal or civil trials as people tend to assign responsibility on the basis of the supposed predictability of accidents.[6][7][2]
In some countries, 20/20 indicates normal visual acuity at 20 feet, from which derives the idiom "hindsight is 20/20".
Factors[edit]
Outcome valence and intensity[edit]
Hindsight bias is more likely to occur when the outcome of an event is negative rather than positive.[14] This is a phenomenon consistent with the general tendency for people to pay more attention to negative outcomes of events than positive outcomes.[15]
In addition, hindsight bias is affected by the severity of the negative outcome. In malpractice lawsuits, it has been found that the more severe a negative outcome is, the juror's hindsight bias is more dramatic. In a perfectly objective case, the verdict would be based on the physician's standard of care instead of the outcome of the treatment; however, studies show that cases ending in severe negative outcomes (such as death) result in a higher level of hindsight bias.
For example, in 1996, LaBine proposed a scenario where a psychiatric patient told a therapist that he was contemplating harming another individual. The therapist did not warn the other individual of the possible danger. Participants were each given one of three possible outcomes; the threatened individual either received no injuries, minor injuries, or serious injuries. Participants were then asked to determine if the physician should be considered negligent. Participants in the "serious injuries" condition were not only more likely to rate the therapist as negligent but also rated the attack as more foreseeable. Participants in the no injuries and minor injury categories were more likely to see the therapist's actions as reasonable.[16]
Surprise[edit]
The role of surprise can help explain the malleability of hindsight bias. Surprise influences how the mind reconstructs pre-outcome predictions in three ways:
1. Surprise is a direct metacognitive heuristic to estimate the distance between outcome and prediction.
2. Surprise triggers a deliberate sense-making process.
3. Surprise biases this process ( the malleability of hindsight bias) by enhancing the recall of surprise-congruent information and expectancy-based hypothesis testing.[17]
Pezzo's sense-making model supports two contradicting ideas of a surprising outcome. The results can show a lesser hindsight bias or possibly a reversed effect, where the individual believes the outcome was not a possibility at all. The outcome can also lead to the hindsight bias being magnified to have a stronger effect. The sense-making process is triggered by an initial surprise. If the sense-making process does 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. When the sense-making process is lacking, the phenomena of reversed hindsight bias is created. Without the sense-making process being present, there is no remnant of thought about the surprise. This can lead to a sensation of not believing the outcome as a possibility.[17]
Personality[edit]
Along with the emotion of surprise, the personality traits of an individual affect hindsight bias. A new C model is an approach to figure out the bias and accuracy in human inferences because of their individual personality traits. This model integrates accurate personality judgments and hindsight effects as a by-product of knowledge updating.
During the study, three processes showed potential to explain the occurrence of hindsight effects in personality judgments:
1. Changes in an individual's cue perceptions,
2. Changes in the use of more valid cues, and
3. Changes in the consistency with which an individual applies cue knowledge.
After two studies, it was clear that there were hindsight effects for each of the Big Five personality dimensions. Evidence was found that both the utilization of more valid cues and changes in cue perceptions of the individual, but not changes in the consistency with which cue knowledge is applied, account for the hindsight effects. During both of these studies, participants were presented with target pictures and were asked to judge each target's levels of the Big Five personality traits.[18]
In a study of 75 participants, researchers tested 10 personalities about hindsight bias. This study conducted three comparisons of hindsight estimation with foresight estimation (memory conditioning), hindsight estimation with forward estimation with other participants, and hindsight estimation with foresight estimation. The participants in these comparisons all Demonstrated hindsight bias. Personality measures cannot account for memory hindsight in multiple regression analysis. Hindsight in individual differences is present but must be accounted for in the full effect model.[19]
Age[edit]
It is more difficult to test for hindsight bias in children than adults because the verbal methods used in experiments on adults are too complex for children to understand, let alone measure bias. Some experimental procedures have been created with visual identification to test children about their hindsight bias in a way they can grasp. Methods with visual images start by presenting a blurry image to the child that becomes clearer over time. In some conditions, the subjects know what the final object is and in others they do not. In cases where the subject knows what the object shape will become when the image is clear, they are asked to estimate the amount of time other participants of similar age will take to guess what the object is. Due to hindsight bias, the estimated times are often much lower than the actual times. This is because the participant is using their personal knowledge while making their estimate.[20]
These types of studies show that children are also affected by hindsight bias. Adults and children with hindsight bias share the core cognitive constraint of being biased to one's current knowledge while, at the same time, attempting to recall or reason about a more naïve cognitive state—regardless of whether the more naïve state is one's earlier naïve state or someone else's.
Auditory hindsight bias[edit]
Hindsight bias also affects human communications. To test auditory hindsight bias, four experiments were completed.
Experiment one included plain words, in which low-pass filters were used to reduce the amplitude for sounds of consonants; thus making the words more degraded. In the naïve-identification task, participants were presented a warning tone before hearing the degraded words. In the hindsight estimation task, a warning tone was presented before the clear word followed by the degraded version of the word.
Experiment two included words with explicit warnings of the hindsight bias. It followed the same procedure as experiment one. However, the participants were informed and asked not to complete the same error.
Experiment three included full sentences of degraded words rather than individual words. Experiment four included less-degraded words in order to make the words easier to understand and identify to the participants.
By using these different techniques, this offered a different range of detection and also evaluated the ecological validity of the experiment's effect. In each experiment, the hindsight estimates of the percentage that their naïve peers can correctly identify the words, all exceed the actual percentages. Therefore, knowing the identities of words caused people to overestimate others' naïve ability to identify moderately to highly degraded spoken versions of those words. People who know the outcome of an event tend to overestimate their prior knowledge or others' naïve knowledge of the event. As a result, speakers—knowing what is being communicated—tend to overestimate the clarity of their message while listeners—hearing what they want to hear—tend to overestimate their understanding of ambiguous messages. This miscommunication stems from hindsight bias which then creates a feeling of inevitability. Overall, this auditory hindsight bias occurs despite people's effort to avoid it.[21]
Visual hindsight bias[edit]
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.[37] This effect has been demonstrated experimentally [38] by presenting participants with initially very blurry images of celebrities. Participants then viewed the images as the images resolved to full clarity (Phase 1). Following Phase 1, participants predicted the level of blur at which a peer would be able to make an accurate identification of each celebrity. It was found that, now that the identity of the celebrities in each image was known, participants significantly overestimated the ease with which others would be able to identify the celebrities when the images were blurry.
The phenomenon of visual hindsight bias has important implications for a form of malpractice litigation that occurs in the field of radiology.[39][38] Typically, in these cases, a radiologist is charged with having failed to detect the presence of an abnormality that was present in a radiology image. During litigation, a different radiologist – who now knows that the image contains an abnormality – is asked to judge how likely it would be for a naive radiologist to have detected the abnormality during the initial reading of the image. This kind of judgment directly parallels the judgments made in hindsight bias studies. Consistent with the hindsight bias literature, it has been found that abnormalities are, in fact, more easily detected in hindsight than foresight.[40] In the absence of controls for hindsight bias, testifying radiologists may overestimate the ease with which the abnormality would have been detected in foresight.[38]
Attempts to reduce hindsight bias[edit]
Research suggests that people still exhibit the hindsight bias even when they are aware of it or possess the intention of eradicating it.[41] There is no solution to eliminate hindsight bias in its totality, but only ways to reduce it.[7] Some of these include considering alternative explanations or opening one's mind to different perspectives.[22] The only observable way to decrease hindsight bias in testing is to have the participant think about how alternative hypotheses could be correct. As a result, the participant would doubt the correct hypothesis and report not having chosen it.
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.[42] Incentive prompts participants to use more effort to recover even the weak memory traces. This idea supports the causal model theory and the use of sense-making to understand event outcomes.[22]
Individual differences[edit]
A multinomial processing tree (MPT) model was used to identify processes underlying the phenomenon of hindsight bias (HB). A 2015 study extended HB by incorporating individual differences in cognitive function into estimates of core parameters of the model for older and younger adults the MPT model. The findings suggest that (1) in the absence of outcome knowledge, better episodic memory is associated with higher recall, (2) Better episodic memory and inhibitory control and higher working memory abilities were associated with higher recall abilities in the presence of knowledge of the outcome, (3) Better inhibitory control is associated with less reconstruction bias. Despite a similar pattern of effects in young adults, cognitive covariates did not significantly predict the underlying HB process in this age group. Overall, the findings of this study suggest that working memory capacity and inhibitory control contribute to individual differences in recall bias and reconstruction bias, respectively, especially in older adults.[43]
Mental illness[edit]
Schizophrenia[edit]
Schizophrenia is an example of a disorder that directly affects the hindsight bias. Individuals with schizophrenia are more strongly affected by the hindsight bias than are individuals from the general public.[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.[44] This can cause faulty memory, which can lead to hindsight thinking and believing in knowing something they do not.[44] Delusion-prone individuals with schizophrenia can falsely jump to conclusions.[45] Jumping to conclusions can lead to hindsight, which strongly influences the delusional conviction in individuals with schizophrenia.[45] In numerous studies, cognitive functional deficits in schizophrenic individuals impair their ability to represent and uphold contextual processing.[46]
Post-traumatic stress disorder[edit]
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the re-experiencing and avoidance of trauma-related stressors, emotions, and memories from a past event or events that has cognitive dramatizing impact on an individual.[47] PTSD can be attributed to the functional impairment of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) structure. 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. The PFC is well known for controlling the thought process in hindsight bias that something will happen when it evidently does not. Brain impairment in certain brain regions can also affect the thought process of an individual who may engage in hindsight thinking.[49]
Cognitive flashbacks and other associated features from a traumatic event can trigger severe stress and negative emotions such as unpardonable guilt. For example, studies were done on trauma-related guilt characteristics of war veterans with chronic PTSD.[50] Although there has been limited research, significant data suggests that hindsight bias has an effect on war veterans' personal perception of wrongdoing, in terms of guilt and responsibility from traumatic events of war. They blame themselves, and, in hindsight, perceive that they could have prevented what happened.
Examples[edit]
Healthcare system[edit]
Accidents are prone to happen in any human undertaking, but accidents occurring within the healthcare system seem more salient and severe because of their profound effect on the lives of those involved and sometimes result in the death of a patient. In the healthcare system, there are a number of methods in which specific cases of accidents that happened being reviewed by others who already know the outcome of the case. Those methods include morbidity and mortality conferences, autopsies, case analysis, medical malpractice claims analysis, staff interviews, and even patient observation. Hindsight bias has been shown to cause difficulties in measuring errors in these cases.[51] Many of the errors are considered preventable after the fact, which clearly indicates the presence and the importance of a hindsight bias in this field. There are two sides in the debate in how these case reviews should be approached to best evaluate past cases: the error elimination strategy and the safety management strategy.[2] The error elimination strategy aims to find the cause of errors, relying heavily on hindsight (therefore more subject to the hindsight bias).[2] The safety management strategy relies less on hindsight (less subject to hindsight bias) and identifies possible constraints during the decision-making process of that case. However, it is not immune to error.[2]
Judicial system[edit]
Hindsight bias results in being held to a higher standard in court. The defense is particularly susceptible to these effects since their actions are the ones being scrutinized by the jury. The hindsight bias causes defendants to be judged as capable of preventing the bad outcome.[52] Although much stronger for the defendants, hindsight bias also affects the plaintiffs. 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. That may lead the jury to feel that the plaintiff should have exercised greater caution in the situation. Both effects can be minimized if attorneys put the jury in a position of foresight, rather than hindsight, through the use of language and timelines. Judges and juries are likely to mistakenly view negative events as being more foreseeable than what it was in the moment when they look at the situation after the fact in court.[53] Encouraging people to explicitly think about the counterfactuals was an effective means of reducing the hindsight bias.[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. Judges involved in fraudulent transfer litigation cases were subject to the hindsight bias as well and result in an unfair advantage for the plaintiff,[55] showing that jurors are not the only ones sensitive to the effects of the hindsight bias in the courtroom.
Wikipedia[edit]
Since hindsight leads people to focus on information that is consistent with what happened while inconsistent information is ignored or regarded as less relevant,[56][57] it is likely included in representations about the past as well. In a study of Wikipedia articles[58] the latest article versions before the event (foresight article versions) were compared to two hindsight article versions: the first online after the event took place and another one eight weeks later. To be able to investigate various types of events, even including disasters (such as the nuclear disaster at Fukushima), for which foresight articles do not exist, the authors made use of articles about the structure that suffered damage in those instances (such as the article about the nuclear power plant of Fukushima). When analyzing to what extent the articles were suggestive of a particular event, they found only articles about disasters to be much more suggestive of the disaster in hindsight than in foresight, which indicated hindsight bias. For the remaining event categories, however, Wikipedia articles did not show any hindsight bias. In an attempt to compare individuals' and Wikipedia's hindsight bias more directly, another study[59] came to the conclusion that Wikipedia articles are less susceptible to hindsight bias than individuals' representations.
Economy and business[edit]
Financial bubbles are often heavily biased with hindsight after they burst. 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. According to economist Richard Thaler, executives and entrepreneurs are particularly prone to hindsight bias. For example, in one study, more than 75% of entrepreneurs whose startups eventually failed predicted that their businesses would succeed. However, when asked again after their startup failed, only 58% said they had originally believed their startup would be a success.[60] Hindsight bias can also contribute to startup failure through biased performance evaluations and overentry into competition.[35] Hindsight-biased performance evaluation is also related to inefficient delegation.[61]
Investment industry[edit]
Hindsight bias influences the decisions of investors in the investment sector. Investors tend to be overconfident in predicting the future because we mistakenly believe that we have predicted the present in the past, so we assume that the future will follow our predictions. Overconfidence is the killer for investment returns. Biais et al. show that hindsight bias allows people to underestimate the magnitude of volatility and that investment agents with hindsight bias have worse investment return performance.[62] Research suggests that the main cause of hindsight bias is that no investor can remember how they made their decisions at the time. Therefore, in order to invest more rationally and safely, investors should keep a diary of the influences, outcomes and show why those outcomes were achieved when making their investment decisions.[63] However, although the diary approach largely prevents investors from forgetting conditions that have led to insight bias and overconfidence. 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.[64]