Abstract
What factors contribute to hindsight bias, the phenomenon whereby the known outcome of an event appears obvious only after the fact? The Causal Model Theory (CMT) of hindsight bias (Nestler et al. in Soc Psychol 39:182–188, 2008a; in J Expl Psychol: Learn Mem Cog 34:1043–1054, 2008b; Pezzo in Mem 11:421–441, 2003; Wasserman et al. in Pers Soc Psychol Bull 17:30–35, 1991) posits that hindsight bias can occur when people have the opportunity to identify potential causal antecedents and evaluate whether they could have led to the outcome. Two experiments incorporating highly controlled minimalist scenarios supported the CMT. As predicted by the CMT, hindsight bias occurred when the causal factor explained the actual outcome better than the alternative outcome, and reverse hindsight bias occurred when the causal factor explained the alternative outcome better than the actual outcome. Moreover, we found new evidence that outcome knowledge alone was insufficient to elicit hindsight bias in the absence of a potential causal antecedent. Implications for future directions in hindsight bias research are discussed.
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Notes
People rarely predict exactly 50–50 in foresight in the hindsight bias literature, most likely because of the incorporation of background knowledge into the task (see Hawkins and Hastie 1990 for a review).
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Acknowledgments
We thank Baruch Fischhoff and Reid Hastie for sharing their materials with us to adapt for use in this project, Woo-kyoung Ahn, John Coley, Rachel Litwin, Joanne Miller, Benjamin Rottman, and Brianna Sullivan for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript, and Shradha Khadge, Amanda Civiletto, Daniel Paulus, Daniel Noonan, Megan Alpert, and Anna Tang for help with data collection. This research was presented at the 2010 meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Las Vegas, NV. Support for this project came from National Institute of Mental Health Grants MH084047 and MH081291 to Nancy S. Kim. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
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Yopchick, J.E., Kim, N.S. Hindsight bias and causal reasoning: a minimalist approach. Cogn Process 13, 63–72 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-011-0414-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-011-0414-z