Hindsight bias: why everything seems obvious once it has happened

Let's look at what the hindsight bias is and how it leads us to take certain mental shortcuts.

Human thinking is constantly driven by a whole series of biases, some easier to identify than others.

This time we are going to focus on the hindsight biasa psychological mechanism that we use more often than we think and which produces an effect that some people are more aware of than others. We will then explore why this phenomenon occurs.

What is hindsight bias?

Hindsight bias or hindsight bias is a deviation in the cognitive process of human beings by which one experiences a tendency to consider that an event, once it has taken place, was much more predictable than it actually was..... In other words, a person who indulges in this bias will believe that a certain event, once it has happened, was predictable, when in fact it need not have been.

This phenomenon is also called forward determinism. Hindsight bias has a number of consequences. First of all, a subject's memories of the particular event may be distorted, because in order to fit the effect of the hindsight bias, the person may unconsciously modify the data he thought he knew about the event before it took place.

That is, the person will think that he/she knew better what was going to happen than what he/she actually knew beforehand. Not only is it a problem of distortion of the past, but hindsight bias can also affect the future, as it can foster confidence based on distorted facts about future events. Thus, the person may think that he or she has more control than he or she actually does.

Discovery of Hindsight Bias in Scientific Research

Although this concept began to be used in psychology studies in the 1970s, it was already a widely known phenomenon in scientific research. was already a widely known phenomenon in popular culture, although it was not yet designated by this technical name.. In fact, it had already been observed in different fields of study.

For example, there are studies that indicate that many physicians believe they have a greater diagnostic capacity than they actually have, because once the ailment suffered by the patient has been found, they seem to estimate above the real percentage the certainty with which they knew the diagnosis beforehand.

The retrospective bias has also been observed in numerous works carried out by historians who, knowing beforehand the outcome of certain events, seem to take them as obvious and inevitable in their analysis, when they did not have to be so obvious to the people who lived through those events at that particular moment in history.

But it was in the 1970s that it was brought into the academic field of psychology by two Israeli researchers, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.. These authors tried to find the basis of hindsight bias. They concluded that this phenomenon was supported by two others, which were the representativeness heuristic and the availability heuristic.

The representativeness heuristic is used when we want to estimate the probability of a certain event happening knowing that another event has occurred that is somehow related. Therefore, the key is to assess how much of that first event could represent the occurrence of the second.

In the case of the availability heuristic, this is another mechanism that has to do with hindsight bias. In this case, such a heuristic would involve the use of the most accessible examples for an individual about a given topic in order to assess that category as a whole. In other words, would be taking the concrete in order to be able to decide on the general..

In Tversky and Kahneman's studies, they asked volunteers to evaluate how likely they saw a series of actions during an international tour by the US president at the time, who was Richard Nixon. Some time later, they were again called upon, after the president's remarks were over, to assess the likelihood of a series of actions during an international tour by the U.S. president at the time, who was Richard Nixon.

On this occasion, they were asked to They were asked to estimate what they thought were the probabilities that they themselves had considered in the first part of the study, this time knowing the results of the study.This time they were asked to estimate the probabilities that they themselves had considered in the first part of the study, this time knowing the results of Nixon's actions. It was found that, indeed, when the event had actually happened, the subjects gave it a higher probability than those that did not happen.

Another study, in this case carried out by Baruch Fischhoff, presented participants with a situation in which they were exposed to a certain story with four possible outcomes, all of them plausible. Each group was told that one of the outcomes was real and the others were fictitious. They were then asked to estimate the probabilities of occurrence of each.

Indeed, all groups estimated as much more likely exactly the outcome that they had been told was the real one. The conclusion is clear: when something has happened (or we believe it has happened, as in this study), it seems obvious to us that it happened in this particular way and not in any other way.

Factors involved in hindsight bias.

We already know what hindsight bias consists of and what its development has been historically. Now We will now take a closer look at the factors involved in the functioning of this mental shortcut.. These are the main ones.

Value and strength of the result

One of the factors that has a bearing on whether the retrospective bias is produced with greater or lesser intensity is the value that the outcome of the events themselves has for the subject, as well as the strength with which it is produced. In this sense, if the outcome is of a negative nature for the person, he or she will tend to emit a stronger bias.

In other words, if an unfortunate event occurs for a given individual, he or she will more likely believe that it was obvious that it was going to happen in that particular way than if there had been the unfortunate event in the first place. than if the event had been positive for that same person. It is not even necessary for the outcome to affect this individual personally; it is enough that he or she can categorize it as negative for this effect to occur.

2. Expectability

The surprise factor, i.e., how expected an event is or is not expectedalso plays a role in enhancing or minimizing the hindsight bias. Surprise always provokes in the individual the search for a congruence between past events and the final result. If we manage to generate this sense between both, we will fall into the retrospective bias and we will think that the event was more probable than it actually was.

But if we have difficulties in establishing a direct relationship between the information we had and the end of the event, the opposite effect will be created in us, the opposite effect of the hindsight bias will be created in us, as we will conclude that there was no way of knowing the result obtained..

3. Personality traits

Obviously, hindsight bias, like so many other psychological phenomena, does not affect all people equally. There are certain personality traits that make a subject more or less vulnerable to falling into this trap of cognition. Studies have shown that individual differences affect the way people make inferences.

This, of course, directly affects the use of hindsight bias. There will be certain people who will be more likely to fall into this mechanism while others will do so to a lesser extentin a situation of similar conditions.

4. Age of the subject

Estimating whether age has been a factor affecting hindsight bias has been problematic for some time. This has been because posing the same problems to children as were used with adult participants was difficult because of the complexity of the problems. But some researchers were able to develop analogous nonverbal tests, simply by using fuzzy figures that corresponded to certain images.

When the participants knew in advance which object the blurred image represented, because the researchers had let them know, it seemed much more obvious to them that it represented the blurred image than when they were asked the same question before being shown the final image.

Once the relevant studies had been carried out with young subjects, it was found that the hindsight bias affected both children and adults, although they cannot be assessed in the same way as adults.Although they cannot be evaluated in the same way, because of the level of cognitive development it is necessary to adapt the tests to children.

Bibliographical references:

• Fischhoff, B. (2007). An early history of hindsight research. Social cognition. Guilford Press.
• Guilbault, R.L., Bryant, F.B., Brockway, J.H., Posavac, E.J. (2004). A meta-analysis of research on hindsight bias. Basic and applied Social Psychology. Taylor & Francis.
• Nestler, S., Egloff, B., Küfner, A.C.P., Back, M.D. (2012). An integrative lens model approach to bias and accuracy in human inferences: Hindsight effects and knowledge updating in personality judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
• Roese, N.J., Vohs, K.D. (2012). Hindsight bias. Perspectives on psychological science.
• Tversky, A., Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science.