Perceiving events as both inevitable and unforeseeable in hindsight: The Leipzig candidacy for the Olympics

How Will the Occupation End? A Real-World Exploration of Hindsight Bias and Retroactive Pessimism Concerning Antigovernment Protests in Bulgaria

We explored hindsight bias and retroactive pessimism related to the occupation of Sofia University in 2013–2014, using a memory design. We found partial evidence for hindsight bias for predictions of whether the occupation would achieve its goal (the government's resignation) but not for specific events related to the occupation, which were deemed unlikely from the start and later perceived not to have occurred. We did not find evidence for retroactive pessimism: Hindsight bias indices for the prediction of the government's resignation were not reliably associated with support for the occupation and disappointment with its outcome. We propose using a recall/reconstruct measure as a more rigorous test for retroactive pessimism, which has so far been demonstrated through reassessment.

Older and younger adults' hindsight bias after positive and negative outcomes

After learning about facts or outcomes of events, people overestimate in hindsight what they knew in foresight. Prior research has shown that this hindsight bias is more pronounced in older than in younger adults. However, this robust finding is based primarily on a specific paradigm that requires generating and recalling numerical judgments to general knowledge questions that deal with emotionally neutral content. As older and younger adults tend to process positive and negative information differently, they might also show differences in hindsight bias after positive and negative outcomes. Furthermore, hindsight bias can manifest itself as a bias in memory for prior given judgments, but also as retrospective impressions of inevitability and foreseeability. Currently, there is no research on age differences in all three manifestations of hindsight bias. In this study, younger (N = 46, 18-30 years) and older adults (N = 45, 64-90 years) listened to everyday-life scenarios that ended positively or negatively, recalled the expectation they previously held about the outcome (to measure the memory component of hindsight bias), and rated each outcome's foreseeability and inevitability. Compared with younger adults, older adults recalled their prior expectations as closer to the actual outcomes (i.e., they showed a larger memory component of hindsight bias), and this age difference was more pronounced for negative than for positive outcomes. Inevitability and foreseeability impressions, however, did not differ between the age groups. Thus, there are age differences in hindsight bias after positive and negative outcomes, but only with regard to memory for prior judgments.

Use of Retroactive Pessimism as a Method of Coping with Identity Threat: The Impact of Group Identification

Retroactive pessimism involves retrospectively lowering one's evaluations of a group's chances for success after a failed competition. Although past research has substantiated the existence of this strategy, investigators have yet to examine how level of group identification might impact the use of retroactive pessimism. Given that coping with group threat is most prominent among persons with high levels of group identification, we hypothesized that displays of retroactive pessimism would be magnified in persons with strong allegiances to a group. This hypothesis was tested by having supporters of two college basketball teams evaluate the chances for victory for each team both prior to the game between the teams and subsequent to the contest. Regression analyses confirmed expectations (the greatest magnitude of retroactive pessimism was reported by highly identified supporters of the losing team in their evaluations of the winning team). Subsequent analyses revealed that this effect was not mediated by level of disappointment in the outcome.

Self-Enhancement: Food for Thought

Self-enhancement denotes a class of psychological phenomena that involve taking a tendentiously positive view of oneself. We distinguish between four levels of self-enhancement—an observed effect, an ongoing process, a personality trait, and an underlying motive—and then use these distinctions to organize the wealth of relevant research. Furthermore, to render these distinctions intuitive, we draw an extended analogy between self-enhancement and the phenomenon of eating. Among the topics we address are (a) manifestations of self-enhancement, both obvious and subtle, and rival interpretations; (b) experimentally documented dynamics of affirming and threatening the ego; and (c) primacy of self-enhancement, considered alongside other intrapsychic phenomena, and across different cultures. Self-enhancement, like eating, is a fundamental part of human nature.

How many hindsight biases are there?

The answer is three: questioning a conceptual default assumption in hindsight bias research, we argue that the hindsight bias is not a unitary phenomenon but consists of three separable and partially independent subphenomena or components, namely, memory distortions, impressions of foreseeability and impressions of necessity. Following a detailed conceptual analysis including a systematic survey of hindsight characterizations in the published literature, we investigated these hindsight components in the context of political elections. We present evidence from three empirical studies that impressions of foreseeability and memory distortions (1) show hindsight effects that typically differ in magnitude and sometimes even in direction, (2) are essentially uncorrelated, and (3) are differentially influenced by extraneous variables. A fourth study found similar dissociations between memory distortions and impressions of necessity. All four studies thus provide support for a separate components view of the hindsight bias. An important consequence of such a view is that apparent contradictions in research findings as well as in theoretical explanations (e.g., cognitive vs. social-motivational) might be alleviated by taking differences between components into account. We also suggest conditions under which the components diverge or converge.

Hindsight Bias and the Activation of Counterfactual Mind-Sets

Previous research has shown that conditional counterfactuals are positively related to the magnitude of creeping determinism. Unlike previous experiments which show this increased hindsight bias to occur after exceptional antecedents, we investigated another possible factor, namely a prior activation of a counterfactual mind-set. We investigated our prediction using a hypothetical scenario. Prior to reading the hindsight scenario some participants were asked to solve a scrambled-sentence test including conditional counterfactual sentences. Results of two experiments were consistent with our predictions: Participants that solved the scrambled-sentence test perceived the outcome to be more inevitable than participants in a no-outcome control condition and participants in a no-prime control condition. Furthermore, we found that this increase in creeping determinism was mediated by the perceived causal strength of the target antecedent for the occurrence of the outcome, and that the priming-effect did not occur when an unconditional counterfactual mind-set was activated before. The results are interpreted as supporting a causal-model theory of the hindsight bias.

Hindsight Bias and Causal Attribution

Hindsight bias describes characteristic changes in the perceptions of events or facts once their outcomes are known. This article focuses on one important facet of this, named creeping determinism, denoting enhanced hindsight perceptions of the inevitability of event outcomes. We suggest a systematic link between the literatures on causal attribution and hindsight bias/creeping determinism and introduce a comprehensive causal model theory (CMT) of creeping determinism. We then distinguish between two alternative versions of CMT, which reflect recent debates in the causal attribution literature. These versions assume, respectively, that individuals make causal attributions by means of covariation analysis or via the discovery of some underlying mechanism. In order to contrast these assumptions, we introduce a new hypothesis concerning the magnitude of creeping determinism, based on the conjunction effect in causal attribution, and we present empirical evidence concerning this hypothesis.