Pragmatic, constructive, and reconstructive memory influences on the hindsight bias

In hindsight, when the outcome of an uncertain scenario is already known, we typically feel that this outcome was always likely; hindsight judgments of outcome probabilities exceed foresight judgments of the same probabilities without outcome knowledge. We extend prior accounts of hindsight bias with the influence of pragmatic communication inherent in the task and the consolidation of self-generated responses across time. In a novel 3 × 2 within-participants design, with three sequential judgments of outcome probabilities in two scenarios, we replicated the within-participants hindsight bias observed in the classic memory design and the between-participants hindsight bias in a hypothetical design simultaneously. Moreover, we reversed the classic memory design and showed that subjective probabilities also decreased when participants encountered foresight instructions after hindsight instructions, demonstrating that previously induced outcome knowledge did not prevent unbiased judgments. The constructive impact of self-generated and communicated judgments ("saying is believing") was apparent after a 2-week consolidation period: Not outcome knowledge, but rather the last pragmatic response (either biased or unbiased) determined judgments at the third measurement. These findings highlight the short-term malleability of hindsight influences in response to task pragmatics and has major implications for debiasing.

Memory load of information encoded amplifies the magnitude of hindsight bias

Our recollections tend to become more similar to the correct information when we recollect an initial response using the correct information, known as the hindsight bias. This study investigated the effect of memory load of information encoded on the hindsight bias's magnitude. We assigned participants (N = 63) to either LOW or HIGH conditions, in which they answered 20 or 50 questions, which were their initial responses. Then, they memorized and remembered the correct information. They finally recollected the initial responses. Twenty of the fifty questions in the HIGH condition were identical to those in the LOW condition. We used the answers to these 20 common questions in LOW and HIGH conditions to examine the effect of the memory load of information encoded, defined as the number of correct answers to remember (i.e., 20 or 50) on the hindsight bias. Results indicated that the magnitude of the hindsight bias was more prominent in the HIGH than the LOW condition, suggesting that the memory load amplifies the hindsight bias's magnitude. This finding also implies that controlling the memory load of information encoded when learning correct information could mitigate the hindsight bias. We expect these findings to have practical implications in occupational settings where hindsight bias could lead to critical errors such as financial losses or medical problems.

Hindsight Bias and Electoral Outcomes: Satisfaction Counts More Than Winner-Loser Status

The tendency to perceive outcomes as more foreseeable once they are available is a well-known phenomenon. However, research on the cognitive and motivational factors that induce individuals to overestimate the foreseeability of an electoral outcome has yielded inconsistent findings. In three studies based on large-scale electoral surveys (ITANES, Italian National Election Studies), we argued that the tendency to perceive an electoral outcome as foreseeable is positively and consistently associated with satisfaction with the outcome. Across all studies, satisfaction with the outcome was significantly and positively associated with retrospective foreseeability, above and beyond voters’ preference for a “winning” or “losing” party. In Study 3, a measure of memory distortion of pre-electoral forecasts was included, which was only weakly associated with retrospective foreseeability, but not with satisfaction for the outcome, supporting the notion of different levels of hindsight bias associated with different cognitive and motivational factors.

Can knowledge of election results change recall of our predictions? Neural correlates of political hindsight bias

Hindsight bias (HB) is the tendency to retrospectively exaggerate one’s foresight knowledge about the outcome of an event. Cognitive processes influenced by newly obtained outcome information are used to explain the HB phenomenon, but the neural correlates remain unknown. This study investigated HB in the context of election results using a memory design and functional magnetic resonance imaging for the first time. Participants were asked to predict and recall the percentage of votes obtained by (pairs of) candidates before and after an election. The results revealed that 88% of participants showed HB by recalling that their predictions were closer to the actual outcomes than they really were; and participants had HB for 38% of the events. The HB effect was associated with activation in the medial superior frontal gyrus and bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), which have been implicated in updating an old belief due to new information and is similar to the process of reconstruction bias. Furthermore, participants with a greater HB effect showed greater activation of the left IFG. In conclusion, we successfully observed the HB phenomenon in election results, and our imaging results suggested that the HB phenomenon might involve reconstruction bias.

Moral Hindsight

Abstract. How are judgments in moral dilemmas affected by uncertainty, as opposed to certainty? We tested the predictions of a consequentialist and deontological account using a hindsight paradigm. The key result is a hindsight effect in moral judgment. Participants in foresight, for whom the occurrence of negative side effects was uncertain, judged actions to be morally more permissible than participants in hindsight, who knew that negative side effects occurred. Conversely, when hindsight participants knew that no negative side effects occurred, they judged actions to be more permissible than participants in foresight. The second finding was a classical hindsight effect in probability estimates and a systematic relation between moral judgments and probability estimates. Importantly, while the hindsight effect in probability estimates was always present, a corresponding hindsight effect in moral judgments was only observed among “consequentialist” participants who indicated a cost-benefit trade-off as most important for their moral evaluation.

A retrieval-based approach to eliminating hindsight bias

Individuals exhibit hindsight bias when they are unable to recall their original responses to novel questions after correct answers are provided to them. Prior studies have eliminated hindsight bias by modifying the conditions under which original judgments or correct answers are encoded. Here, we explored whether hindsight bias can be eliminated by manipulating the conditions that hold at retrieval. Our retrieval-based approach predicts that if the conditions at retrieval enable sufficient discrimination of memory representations of original judgments from memory representations of correct answers, then hindsight bias will be reduced or eliminated. Experiment 1 used the standard memory design to replicate the hindsight bias effect in middle-school students. Experiments 2 and 3 modified the retrieval phase of this design, instructing participants beforehand that they would be recalling both their original judgments and the correct answers. As predicted, this enabled participants to form compound retrieval cues that discriminated original judgment traces from correct answer traces, and eliminated hindsight bias. Experiment 4 found that when participants were not instructed beforehand that they would be making both recalls, they did not form discriminating retrieval cues, and hindsight bias returned. These experiments delineate the retrieval conditions that produce-and fail to produce-hindsight bias.

Complexity in simulation-based education: exploring the role of hindsight bias

Simulation-based education (SBE) has the potential to misrepresent clinical practice as relatively simplistic, and as being made safer through simplistic behavioural explanations. This review provides an overview of a well-documented and robust psychological construct - hindsight bias in the context of learning in healthcare simulations. Motivating this review are our observations that post-simulation debriefings may be oversimplified and biased by knowledge of scenario outcomes. Sometimes only limited consideration is given to issues that might be relevant to management in the complexity and uncertainty of real clinical practice. We use literature on hindsight bias to define the concept, inputs and implications. We offer examples from SBE where hindsight bias may occur and propose suggestions for mitigation. Influences of hindsight biases on SBE should be addressed by future studies.

Hindsight Bias

Hindsight bias occurs when people feel that they "knew it all along," that is, when they believe that an event is more predictable after it becomes known than it was before it became known. Hindsight bias embodies any combination of three aspects: memory distortion, beliefs about events' objective likelihoods, or subjective beliefs about one's own prediction abilities. Hindsight bias stems from (a) cognitive inputs (people selectively recall information consistent with what they now know to be true and engage in sensemaking to impose meaning on their own knowledge), (b) metacognitive inputs (the ease with which a past outcome is understood may be misattributed to its assumed prior likelihood), and (c) motivational inputs (people have a need to see the world as orderly and predictable and to avoid being blamed for problems). Consequences of hindsight bias include myopic attention to a single causal understanding of the past (to the neglect of other reasonable explanations) as well as general overconfidence in the certainty of one's judgments. New technologies for visualizing and understanding data sets may have the unintended consequence of heightening hindsight bias, but an intervention that encourages people to consider alternative causal explanations for a given outcome can reduce hindsight bias.

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.