"We Don′t Expect It Happened": On Mazursky and Ofir′s (1990) Purported Reversal of the Hindsight Bias

Mazursky and Ofir (1990) recently claimed to have shown a reversal of the hindsight bias. They presented three experiments which supposedly showed that, following unexpected and surprising events, judgments were biased in a direction opposite to that predicted by the hindsight bias. We argue that the Mazursky and Ofir results should not be interpreted as a reversal of the hindsight bias for three reasons: (1) Mazursky and Ofir′s supposed reversal effect is on a rating of the quality of a product, rather than on the sort of likelihood ratings on which the hindsight bias has been demonstrated; (2) their results can readily be interpreted in terms of a contrast effect, especially in the case of their Experiments 1 and 2; and (3) given the use of quality ratings, the supposed reversal effect could have resulted from subjects′ desire to rate one product as superior, in part by rating other similar products as inferior. Discussion focuses on other purported evidence for a reversal of the hindsight effect and on suggestions for future research.     

Hindsight bias in insight and mathematical problem solving: Evidence of different reconstruction mechanisms for metacognitive versus situational judgments

This article presents two experiments that used insight and mathematical problems to investigate whether different factors would affect hindsight bias on metacognitive and situational judgments. In both studies, participants initially rated their likelihood of solving each problem within a certain amount of time (metacognitive judgments) and rated the importance of each component of the problem for finding the solution (situational judgments). Next, participants attempted to solve each problem. In Experiment 1, all participants were given solution feedback information, but in Experiment 2, participants were not given any solution feedback. After 1 week, participants were asked to recall their original judgments. Hindsight bias was assessed by comparing the initial with the final ratings. Insight problems and math problems showed different patterns of hindsight bias effects on the metacognitive and situational judgments. The results suggest that two competing models of hindsight effects are actually complementary explanations for judgment reconstruction on different types of judgment tasks.     

The Importance of Item Selection in "Knew-It-All-Along" Studies of General Knowledge

This study was designed to investigate the effects of item sampling on hindsight bias in experiments using general knowledge material. The results show that the use of random versus traditional experimenter-selected item samples can have different effects on hindsight bias. In a within-subjects study almost twice as many items in a random sample were connected with a reversed effect rather than with a traditional hindsight bias. The same items that resulted in overconfidence in foresight lead to a higher degree of hindsight bias than others. The results suggest that earlier findings of unusually large hindsight effects with general knowledge tasks may be explained by the selection of items used. No hindsight effect was found on confidence scores in a within-subjects design, but was obtained in a between-subjects design. Results suggest that the use of a within-subjects design itself can moderate hindsight bias by familiarizing subjects with the task. The study shows the importance of two conditions for decreasing the hindsight bias: (1) The use of randomly sampled items, and (2) The use of a within-subjects procedure. When these conditions were met, the "knew-it-all-along effect" was completely eliminated.     

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.     

Considering the opposite: a corrective strategy for social judgment

It is proposed that several biases in social judgment result from a failure--first noted by Francis Bacon--to consider possibilities at odds with beliefs and perceptions of the moment. Individuals who are induced to consider the opposite, therefore, should display less bias in social judgment. In two separate but conceptually parallel experiments, this reasoning was applied to two domains--biased assimilation of new evidence on social issues and biased hypothesis testing of personality impressions. Subjects were induced to consider the opposite in two ways: through explicit instructions to do so and through stimulus materials that made opposite possibilities more salient. In both experiments the induction of a consider-the-opposite strategy had greater corrective effect than more demand-laden alternative instructions to be as fair and unbiased as possible. The results are viewed as consistent with previous research on perseverance, hindsight, and logical problem solving, and are thought to suggest an effective method of retraining social judgment.     

Negative affect and hindsight bias

The relationship between hindsight bias and individual differences in negative affect, or ‘dysphoria’, was investigated in a naturalistic study. In a first session, 76 undergraduates predicted their grades prior to a midterm exam. In a second session, after having received feedback from the exam, they attempted to recall their predictions and predicted their grades on a second exam. Dysphoria was associated with hindsight bias whether initial predictions were overly optimistic or pessimistic. In the former case, the standard hindsight bias was modal for the sample, whereas a ‘reverse hindsight’ bias was modal in the latter. This asymmetry suggests that hindsight bias is influenced by motivational or affective factors. The bias did not hinder the improvement of predictions between the first and second exams, and therefore could not have mediated a hypothesized adaptive learning impairment among dysphoric subjects.     

The halo effect revisited: Forewarned is not forearmed

The purpose of the present research was to determine if forewarning subjects about the halo effect eliminated the effect or made people aware of its impact. The research was a replication and extension of R. E. Nisbett and T. D. Wilson's (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1977, 35, 250–256) experiment on the halo effect. Subjects viewed an interview of a college instructor who was either warm or cold and then rated his physical appearance, mannerisms, and French accent. Some subjects were told to introspect about their cognitive processes while viewing the interview and were told that the purpose of the study was to see how aware they were of the determinants of their ratings. Other subjects were also told specifically what the halo effect was and given a motivation either to show it or not to show it. In addition, a measurement technique different from that used by Nisbett and Wilson was utilized to allow a more precise measurement of awareness, and a new cover story was used to make the task more involving and important to subjects. Despite these attempts to eliminate the halo effect (or, at a minimum, to make people aware of it), the results indicated that subjects in all conditions were very susceptible to it. That is, subjects who viewed the warm version of the interview rated the instructor's appearance, mannerisms, and accent significantly higher than did those who viewed the cold version, even when informed and forewarned about this effect. The forewarning and introspection instructions also had no impact on subject's awareness of the halo effect. Subjects in all conditions indicated that their liking for the instructor had had only a minimal effect on their ratings.     

Strategic processes in false recognition memory

In two experiments, the response signal technique (Reed, 1973) was combined with the DRM paradigm (e.g., McDermott & Roediger, 1998) to investigate the time course of false recognition memory— in particular, how this effect varies along the time course of generating a recognition judgment. Across the experiments, in addition to standard instructions, there were forewarning instructions encouraging the participants to avoid this effect, as well as inclusion instructions intended to enhance this tendency. It was found that the false memory effect was at its strongest at earlier response signals, diminishing when more time was given to make a recognition judgment. The forewarning instructions led to a more conservative overall response bias, rather than to a reduction of the effect. However, the participants were able to exaggerate this effect in the inclusion condition. The results are discussed in terms of the role of strategic processing in recognition memory. Part of this research was presented at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Orlando, in November 2001. It was supported by a grant from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council of the United Kingdom.     

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.     

后见之明研究综述

后见之明指后见判断(可得益于事件结果反馈的判断)与先见判断(不知晓事件结果时的判断)的系统差异,其研究范式大体可分为两类,假定型设计和记忆型设计。后见效应的研究,具有重大的理论价值和应用价值。文章对后见效应的研究范式、研究结果、及其有关理论进行了简要综述,并对其应用价值加以评述。     

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.     

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.     

Hindsight bias: how knowledge and heuristics affect our reconstruction of the past

Once people know the outcome of an event, they tend to overestimate what could have been anticipated in foresight. Although typically considered to be a robust phenomenon, this hindsight bias is subject to moderating circumstances. In their meta-analysis, Christensen-Szalanski and Willham (1991) observed that the more experience people have with the task under consideration, the smaller is the resulting hindsight bias. This observation is one benchmark against which the explanatory power of process models of hindsight bias can be measured. Therefore, we used it to put the recently proposed RAFT model (Hoffrage, Hertwig, & Gigerenzer, 2000) to another test. Our findings were consistent with the "expertise effect." Specifically, we observed-using computer simulations of the RAFT model-that the more comprehensive people's knowledge is in foresight, the smaller is their hindsight bias. In addition, we made two counterintuitive observations: First, the relation between foresight knowledge and hindsight bias appears to be independent of how knowledge is processed. Second, even if foresight knowledge is false, it can reduce hindsight bias. We conclude with a discussion of the functional value of hindsight bias.     

Hindsight bias: How knowledge and heuristics affect our reconstruction of the past

Once people know the outcome of an event, they tend to overestimate what could have been anticipated in foresight. Although typically considered to be a robust phenomenon, this hindsight bias is subject to moderating circumstances. In their meta-analysis, Christensen-Szalanski and Willham (1991) observed that the more experience people have with the task under consideration, the smaller is the resulting hindsight bias. This observation is one benchmark against which the explanatory power of process models of hindsight bias can be measured. Therefore, we used it to put the recently proposed RAFT model (Hoffrage, Hertwig, & Gigerenzer, 2000) to another test. Our findings were consistent with the "expertise effect." Specifically, we observed--using computer simulations of the RAFT model--that the more comprehensive people's knowledge is in foresight, the smaller is their hindsight bias. In addition, we made two counterintuitive observations: First, the relation between foresight knowledge and hindsight bias appears to be independent of how knowledge is processed. Second, even if foresight knowledge is false, it can reduce hindsight bias. We conclude with a discussion of the functional value of hindsight bias.     

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.     

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.     

Hindsight bias after receiving self-relevant health risk information: a motivational perspective

The phenomenon of hindsight bias was explored in the context of self-relevant health risk information. Participants in a community screening estimated their cholesterol level (foresight measure) before receiving positive or negative feedback based on their actual cholesterol level. Hindsight estimations were then assessed twice: once immediately after the feedback, and again several weeks later. While the unexpected positive feedback group showed no systematic recall bias, hindsight estimations of individuals receiving unexpectedly negative feedback showed a dynamic change over time. Immediately after the feedback, participants' recollection of their expected cholesterol level were shifted towards their actual cholesterol level (hindsight bias). In contrast, several weeks later, foresight estimations were recalled as less accurate than they had been (reversed hindsight bias). These data might reflect a change of the motivational focus from "hot affect" and fear control, which occur immediately after receiving negative feedback, to danger control, which occurs some time after the feedback, as proposed by the dual process model.     

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.     

The "saw-it-all-along" effect: demonstrations of visual hindsight bias

The authors address whether a hindsight bias exists for visual perception tasks. In 3 experiments, participants identified degraded celebrity faces as they resolved to full clarity (Phase 1). Following Phase 1, participants either recalled the level of blur present at the time of Phase 1 identification or predicted the level of blur at which a peer would make an accurate identification. In all experiments, participants overestimated identification performance of naive observers. Visual hindsight bias was greater for more familiar faces--those shown in both phases of the experiment--and was not reduced following instructions to participants to avoid the bias. The authors propose a fluency-misattribution theory to account for the bias and discuss implications for medical malpractice litigation and eyewitness testimony.     

Accessibility experiences and the hindsight bias: I knew it all along versus it could never have happened

In two experiments, we tested accessibility experiences versus accessible content in influencing the hindsight bias when participants generated either thoughts about alternative outcomes or thoughts about known outcomes. Participants who had listed many thoughts (Experiment 1) and those who had contracted their brow muscles (Experiment 2) when considering alternate outcomes rated the known outcome as more likely than did than those who had listed two thoughts or who had not contracted their brows--a "backfire" effect. In contrast, but no less ironically, participants who had listed many thoughts and those who contracted their brows when considering known outcomes rated those outcomes as less likely--an "it could never have happened" effect. Both effects are due to subjective accessibility experiences, and their role in influencing and debiasing the hindsight bias is discussed.