The Effects of Feedback Source and Plausibility of Hindsight Bias

Whenever people try to recollect an earlier given estimate after they have received feedback about the true solution, they tend to overestimate what they had known in foresight. This phenomenon is known as “hindsight bias”. This paper reports three attempts to eliminate hindsight bias by labelling the feedback value as another person's estimate (instead of as the solution) and by providing extremely incorrect (instead of the true) values as feedback. Both variations, however alone and in combination failed to reduce hindsight bias. Only when the data were separated according to whether participants considered the feedback value plausible or not did cases of unbiased recollections emerge: Feedback values that were labelled as estimates of another person and found to be implausible did not lead to hindsight bias. This finding argues against the view that hindsight bias is an automatic and unavoidable effect of feedback presentation.     

We Knew It All Along: Hindsight Bias in Groups

Two studies investigated the occurrence of hindsight distortion in groups as compared to individuals. Competing predictions were derived from four theoretical positions: Memory impairment, response bias, self-presentation, and group polarization. In Experiment 1, small groups vs individuals made hypothetical predictions with or without outcome information. Both individuals and groups were found to distort their predictions in the direction of the alleged outcome. Experiment 2 employed a memory design in which individuals vs groups made a series of predictions for which they subsequently received outcome information which was either above or below their prediction or for which they received no outcome information. Subjects had to recall their initial prediction. Results indicated that (a) hindsight bias was slightly attenuated in groups compared to individuals, (b) groups were more likely to recall their original predictions correctly than individuals, (c) this recall advantage of groups disappeared when time taken to make the initial prediction was held constant, and (d) outcome information affected hindsight bias but not hit rates. Results were interpreted as supporting the response bias perspective.     

The Hindsight Bias: The Role of the Availability Heuristic and Perceived Risk

The influence of outcome knowledge (Fischhoff, 1975) and the availability heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974) on judgments of perceived risk was explored here. This study found that subjects were capable of making relatively appropriate probability estimates for disease, accident, and homicide in foresight, but they made relatively biased estimated in hindsight. The results suggest that hindsight information activates the use of the availability heuristic on peoples' probability estimates of certain misfortune.     

Hindsight Bias: A Primer for Motivational Researchers

Thirty‐five years since the publication of Fischhoff’s (1975) seminal article, we continue to be fascinated by the hindsight bias. Like a well‐developed character in a novel, the bias has something for everyone. Its basic tenet – that things seem less surprising in hindsight than they should – is instantly recognizable as a common human flaw. It is robust, often difficult to reduce, and appeals to researchers with a wide range of interests including history, business, law, medicine, and of course, psychology. This interest stems from the belief that failure to be surprised by an event prevents us from learning from it, and will likely cause us to judge others unfairly for not having been able to foresee it. But just how bad is it? Although guided by a cold cognitive mechanism that ‘creeps up’ on us, hindsight bias is complex, seemingly strengthened, and yet also reduced by self‐serving motives. In this article, I introduce the reader to the basic designs used to study the bias, key cognitive and motivational mechanisms, the major controversies, and some unstudied questions that I hope will guide future research.     

A Meta-Analysis of Research on Hindsight Bias

We conducted a meta-analysis of research on hindsight bias to gain an up-to-date summary of the overall strength of hindsight effects and to test hypotheses about potential moderators of hindsight distortion. A total of 95 studies (83 published and 12 unpublished) were included, and 252 independent effect sizes were coded for moderator variables in 3 broad categories involving characteristics of the study, of measurement, and of the experimental manipulation. When excluding missing effect sizes, the overall mean effect size was Md = .39 with a 95% confidence interval of .36 to .42. Five main findings emerged: (a) effect sizes calculated from objective probability estimates were larger than effect sizes calculated from subjective probability estimates; (b) effect sizes of studies that used almanac questions were larger than effect sizes of studies that used real-world events or case histories; (c) studies that included neutral outcomes resulted in larger effect sizes than studies that used positive or negative outcomes; (d) studies that included manipulations to increase hindsight bias resulted in significantly larger effect sizes than studies in which there were no manipulations to reduce or increase hindsight bias; and (e) studies that included manipulations to reduce hindsight bias did not produce lower effect sizes. These findings contribute to our understanding of hindsight bias by updating the state of knowledge, widening the range of known moderator variables, identifying factors that may activate different mediating processes, and highlighting critical gaps in the research literature.     

Certainty and Uncertainty: The Two Faces of the Hindsight Bias

“Hindsight Bias” is a person's tendency, after learning about the actual outcome of a situation or the correct answer to a question, to distort a previous judgment in the direction of this new information. In the literature, hindsight bias has been mostly discussed as an inevitable result of a “judgment under uncertainty.” We think that the hindsight bias is due to memorial as well as inferential processes: Whereas certainty about the recollection is memorial and concerns the recollective experience, certainty at the time of the judgment is inferential and concerns the individual's metaknowledge (“I know that I knew that”). In two experiments participants' feelings of certainty were measured indirectly (Koriat & Goldsmith, 1996) by giving participants the option of leaving those questions unanswered about which they felt uncertain. This free-report option was offered to half of the participants in the first estimate phase (concerning time of judgment) and to the second half in the memory phase (concerning the recollective experience). At the end of the session, participants were presented again with the questions they had skipped and were now required to answer them. This procedure allowed us to compare the amount of hindsight bias for the skipped, uncertain items to the spontaneously answered, certain ones. Both experiments demonstrated that the hindsight bias is a result of the interaction of both uncertainty and certainty.     

Age Differences in Processes Underlying Hindsight Bias: A Life-Span Study

Hindsight bias is the tendency to overestimate one’s prior knowledge of a fact or event after learning the actual fact. Recent research has suggested that age-related differences in hindsight bias may be based on age-related differences in inhibitory control. We tested whether this explanation held for 3 cognitive processes assumed to underlie hindsight bias: recollection bias, reconstruction bias, and the tendency to adopt newly acquired knowledge as old. We performed a typical hindsight-bias study with 9-year-olds, 12-year-olds, young adults, and older adults. Participants first gave numerical judgments to difficult almanac questions. They later received the correct judgments for some of the questions while trying to recall their own earlier judgments. To experimentally test the impact of inhibitory control, the correct judgment was presented either in a weak or in a strong manner that was difficult to ignore. Hindsight bias was larger in the strong condition than in the weak condition and followed a U-shaped life-span pattern with young adults showing the least hindsight bias in line with an inhibitory-control explanation. Yet, the mixture of underlying processes differed considerably between age groups, so inhibitory control did not suffice as a sole explanation of age differences.     

Hindsight Bias and Inferences in Choice: The Mediating Effect of Cognitive Effort

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether inferences about missing attribute information made in a choice context are susceptible to hindsight bias and, more importantly, whether an increase in the amount of cognitive effort expended during the choice process diminishes the hindsight bias effect. The results of two experiments confirm our expectation that the strength of the hindsight bias effect is related to the extent of processing during choice. Hindsight bias is weakest when the subjects work hardest, that is, when the attractiveness of the partially described option is uncertain, when the attribute with missing information is most important, and when the importance of the attribute with missing information is ambiguous.     

The Effects of Expertise on the Hindsight Bias

We present data from three experiments examining the effects of objective and subjective expertise on the hindsight bias. In Experiment 1, participants read an essay about baseball or dogs and then answered questions about the baseball essay to the best of their ability, as if they had not read the essay, or to the best of their ability, although they read about dogs. Participants also completed a quiz about baseball rules and terminology, which was an objective measure of expertise. Results demonstrated that as participants' baseball expertise increased, their inability to act as if they never read the essay also increased; expertise exacerbated the hindsight bias. To test the effects of subjective expertise on hindsight bias and investigate factors underlying the relationship, participants in Experiment 2 ranked five topics in order of expertise and gave feeling‐of‐knowing (FOK) ratings for questions from these topics. Foresight participants then saw each question again and answered the questions; hindsight participants saw the questions and answers and gave the probability they would have known the answers had they not been provided. Hindsight bias increased with subjective expertise as did average FOK ratings. In Experiment 3, we experimentally manipulated perceived expertise but found that neither average FOK ratings nor hindsight bias was affected by experimentally induced expertise. Taken together, the results demonstrate that expertise exacerbates both objective and subjective hindsight bias but that an FOK, which likely exists only when expertise is naturally acquired, is necessary to engender the detrimental effect of expertise on the hindsight bias. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

事后聪明式偏差的理论模型及影响因素

事后聪明式偏差是指人们在得知事件结果后,会因记忆扭曲、对自身预测能力或事件发生必然性的需要的诱发,而表现出过高估计自己在事前预测能力的现象。许多研究表明,该偏差普遍存在于实验和真实情境中,很难通过实施策略而减小。该现象的理论模型主要基于认知过程和社会性动机,影响因素有研究方法、个人特质、能力变量、年龄因素、个人相关度和事件效价,在未来研究中应注重对理论的整合以及校正策略在应用中的探索     

Reversibility of the Hindsight Bias: Manipulation of Experimental Demands

A hindsight bias is found when ratings made after outcome feedback differ from ratings made before feedback. Cognitive processes, motivational factors, and demand characteristics have all been identified as possible mediators of the effect. In the first of two experiments, providing subjects with a forewarning with or without a passage that was predicted to have caused it to be ineffective in previous research failed to reduce the bias. Subsequent instructions to produce the bias inflated the effect, whereas instructions to not produce the bias did not alter ratings. In the second experiment, experimental demands were altered by forewarning subjects about a "never-knew-that" effect. The results from Experiment 2 replicated the failure of the forewarning instructions. However, the hindsight bias was removed by instructions to produce a "never-knew-that" effect. The implications of these two experiments for research into the hindsight bias were discussed.     

Metacognitive Experiences and Human Judgment: The Case of Hindsight Bias and Its Debiasing

ABSTRACT— Theories of judgment have emphasized the influence of what comes to mind—the content of people's thoughts. But recent research shows that metacognitive experiences accompanying thinking, like a sense of the ease or difficulty with which information comes to mind, qualify the conclusions that people derive from thought content. The case of hindsight bias and attempts to remove that bias (debiasing) illustrate this. After an event outcome is known, people display hindsight bias by exaggerating its inevitability, believing they "knew it all along." The magnitude of hindsight bias varies with the ease or difficulty that known or alternative outcomes come to mind; the usually observed hindsight bias may even reverse when outcomes are difficult to bring to mind or increase when alternatives are difficult to bring to mind. Implications of metacognitive experiences can extend to other biases and their debiasing, as well as to how people make sense of the past more generally.     

Individual Differences in Susceptibility to Misinformation Effects and Hindsight Bias

The present study examined individual differences in susceptibility to two similar forms of memory distortion: the misinformation effect and hindsight bias. The misinformation effect occurs when individuals witness an event, are provided with misinformation, and recall the original event as containing elements of the misinformation. Hindsight bias occurs when individuals make judgments, are provided with feedback, and recall their original judgments as being more similar to the feedback than they actually were. Seventy-five participants completed a misinformation task, a hindsight bias task, and several individual difference measures related to memory distortions. Working memory capacity was negatively correlated with the misinformation effect and hindsight bias, and the misinformation effect and hindsight bias were negatively correlated with one another. Although the misinformation effect and hindsight bias are measured with similar designs, and both are predicted by working memory capacity, the negative correlation between them suggests these phenomena result from somewhat different processes.     

No Reduction in Hindsight Bias after Complete Information and Repeated Testing

In hindsight, people often claim to have known more than they actually did. This finding has been termed hindsight bias. We report two hindsight-bias experiments which yielded converging results with different methods. All participants first estimated numerical values as answers to difficult knowledge questions, were later given the solutions, and were finally asked to recall their first estimates. In an attempt to reduce the typically found bias, the participants of one group in Experiment 1 were informed in advance about the experimental design and the bias phenomenon, while the participants of another group were not. In Experiment 2 all participants received at the end individual feedback about their recall performance and were then subjected to the same experimental procedure again, twice in succession. The amount of hindsight bias, however, remained unaffected by either of these two manipulations. These findings support automatic processes as explanation for the observed bias and dismiss motivational accounts.     

法律决策中案件相关性及消减策略对后见偏差的影响

考察法律决策中案件自我相关对后见偏差的影响以及减少后见效应的策略.实验采用3(有无策略:后见组、分散注意组、指导组)×3(间接相关:无相关、积极相关、消极相关)两因素被试间实验设计,采用自编两个案例及问卷测查法律决策中的后见效应.实验结果发现,与积极相关和无相关的决策结果相比,在消极相关情境下更多的模拟法官认为法律案件中被告的行为存在过错,且所评定的过错严重程度更高.在法律决策中,案件的间接自我相关性会使后见效应对于被告过错的认定产生不同的影响.同时,两种策略都能够有效减少法律决策中的后见偏差.     

法律决策中消极程度及消除策略对后见偏差的影响

该研究考察法律决策中消极结果严重程度及消除策略对后见偏差的影响。实验采用3(严重程度:轻微损害、中度损害、严重损害)×3(有无策略:后见组、分散注意组、指导组)两因素被试间设计。采用自编两个案例及问卷测查法律决策中后见效应的差异,实验结果发现,后见偏差的强度随着事件消极结果严重程度的增加而显著增强。在消极结果的严重损害程度下,产生出最大的后见偏差。同时,两种策略指导都能够有效减少法律决策中的后见偏差。     

Hindsight Bias Demonstrated in the Prediction of a Sporting Event

Abstract

The authors examined hindsight bias in the context of a sporting event (Super Bowl XXXIII) with individuals who had previous knowledge of the hindsight bias–42 students who were currently enrolled in psychology classes that had previously covered hindsight bias. To control for extraneous variables, the authors analyzed how often the participants watched football, their gender, and whom they predicted to win; they found no differences between how often the participants watched football and whom they predicted to win. The hindsight bias existed for the prediction of the outcome for the Super Bowl, and the participants with previous knowledge were not immune to its effect. Results are discussed in relation to attribution theory, the reconstructionist view, and response bias view.     

女大学生同性竞争与社交网站发布美化自拍行为的关系：外貌比较的调节作用

为探究女大学生同性竞争与社交网站发布美化自拍行为之间的关系及外貌比较在其中的调节作用,采用同性竞争量表、身体外貌比较问卷和美化自拍量表对463名女大学生进行问卷调查。结果发现：在控制年龄后,女大学生同性竞争可以显著正向预测社交网站美化自拍行为,且这一预测作用受到外貌比较的调节,即只有低外貌比较的女大学生其同性竞争水平可显著预测其美化自拍行为。该结果对理解和干预女大学生的社交网站行为具有一定理论意义和实践意义。     

社交网站使用与妒忌:向上社会比较的中介作用及自尊的调节作用

采用方便抽样法对630名具有社交网站使用经验的大学生进行问卷调查,探讨社交网站使用对妒忌的影响,以及向上社会比较、自尊在其中的作用机制。结果表明:(1)社交网站使用显著正向预测妒忌;(2)向上社会比较在社交网站使用与妒忌之间起部分中介作用;(3)该中介效应受到自尊的调节。具体来说,相对于高自尊大学生,低自尊大学生的向上社会比较产生更多妒忌。     

The Effects of Hindsight Bias and Causal Attribution on Human Response to Environmental Events1

This research examined the influence of hindsight bias and causal attribution on perceptions of a technological disaster. After reading a fictitious account of a toxic substance spill near a populated area, subjects were provided with information that disease rates had either increased or had remained stable (hindsight conditions), or were presented with no outcome information (control condition). Subjects were then asked to predict the likelihood of increases in disease rates and to make causal attributions regarding the target company and residents of the disaster community. When compared to subjects provided with either no outcome information or with information that disease rates remained stable (positive-outcome condition), subjects told that disease rates had increased (negative-outcome condition) showed elevated predictions regarding future disease rates, ascribed greater responsibility for the accident to the target company, and reported more anger toward the company and greater sympathy for the residents. Subjects receiving positive outcome information and no outcome information did not significantly differ on these measures. In addition, results from a path analysis supported the efficacy of attribution theory to account for the cognitive, affective, and behavioral consequences resulting from hindsight bias following a negative environmental event.