Results showed a robust hindsight bias in all perspectives, and sporadic success at eliminating the bias. They were also asked to judge when they thought a naïve peer (Experiments 1 and 2), or a naïve child (Experiment 2) could identify the objects. Adult participants were given blurry-to-clear images incrementally until they were able to identify the object and were then re-presented with the same sequence of images and asked to make a judgment about when they had identified the item correctly the first time. Also known as the “knew it all along” bias, we aimed to diminish the bias by having individuals take the perspective of a naïve other, as a way of encouraging acceptance that they had, in fact, not known it all along. Hindsight bias is a phenomenon that occurs when outcome knowledge interferes with the ability to accurately recall judgments made in a previous, naïve state. This work was completed with the support of National Science Foundation Grant 817674, awarded to Neal Roese. We thank Fritz Drasgow, Chris Fraley, Justin Kruger, Wolfgang Viechtbauer, and Gregory Webster for their suggestions regarding this research. Yet because of the relative simplicity of past research designs and stimulus materials, the importance of time was never captured Acknowledgments Hindsight bias is a widely studied judgment phenomenon involving the exaggeration of the earlier predictability of outcomes. How an initiative or strategy is unfolding may appear radically different when viewed early on rather than later on. Many of the predictive and retrospective judgments made in everyday life involve events that are ongoing, unfolding, evolving. This resulted in a pairwise contrast (i.e., t-test), performed for each experiment and tabulated in Table 1 as “global HSB.” Using this definition, hindsight bias was significant in Experiments 1, 3, and 4 ( ps < .01), but was only marginally significant Discussion This video was a ResultsĪlthough we assessed multiple foresight and hindsight judgments, a global index of hindsight bias could be summarized in a manner analogous to prior research, by comparing the mean of all foresight judgments to the mean of all hindsight judgments. In Experiments 1 and 2, the event sequence was a video depiction of an automobile collision (duration = 11.5 s), taken from Roese et al. In all experiments, participants watched or read about an unfolding event sequence, during which they were prompted repeatedly to make likelihood judgments about three possible outcomes. Participants in all experiments were undergraduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, participating for course credit. The current research therefore points to one way in which retrospective judgments can be considered biased, yet simultaneously suggests that considerable accuracy exists when people render such judgments. The oft-used catchphrase “knew it all along effect” was found to be a misnomer, in that participants were well aware in hindsight that their earlier foresight judgments reflected uncertainty. Results demonstrated that hindsight judgments showed linear and rate accuracy, but were biased only in terms of lack of temporal accuracy. Taking timing into account, we defined three new indicators of accuracy: linear accuracy (how well hindsight judgments capture the linear trend of foresight judgments over time), rate accuracy (how well hindsight judgments reflect the slope of foresight judgments over time), and temporal accuracy (how well hindsight judgments specify the overall timing of the full envelope of foresight judgments). By examining likelihood estimates rooted to specific time points during an unfolding event sequence (videos and short text stories), judged both in foresight and hindsight, we conceptualized hindsight bias as a contrast between two “inevitability curves,” which plotted likelihood against time. Four experiments introduced a new conceptual and methodological approach to hindsight bias, traditionally defined as the tendency to exaggerate the a priori predictability of outcomes after they become known.
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