Hindsight bias: why everything seems obvious once it has happened

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 hindsight bias, a psychological mechanism that we use more often than we think and that produces an effect that some people are more aware of than others. Next we will explore why this phenomenon happens.

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What is hindsight bias?

Hindsight bias or hindsight bias is a deviation in the cognitive process of the human being by which there is a tendency to consider an event, once it has occurred, to be much more predictable than it actually was. In other words, a person who falls for this bias will believe that a certain event, already happened, was predictable, when in reality it did not have to be.

This phenomenon is also called progressive determinism. Hindsight bias has a number of consequences. In the first place, the memories of a subject about the specific event can suffer a distortion, because to fit the effect of said bias, the person can unconsciously modify the data that he thought he knew about said event before he had place.

That is, the person will think that she knew better what was going to happen than he actually knew before. Not only is this a distortion problem from the past, but hindsight bias can also affect the future, as it can foster a confidence based on distorted facts in the face of events futures. Therefore, the person might think that he has greater control capacity than he actually has.

Discovery of retrospective bias in scientific research

Despite the fact that this concept began to be used in psychology studies since the 70s of the last century, the truth is that it was already a widely known phenomenon in popular culture, although it was not yet designated by that technical name. In fact, it had already been observed in different fields of study.

For example, there are studies that indicate that many doctors believe they have a greater capacity for diagnosis than they really have, because once it has been Once the ailment suffered by the patient was found, they seem to estimate, above the real percentage, the security with which they knew said diagnosis beforehand.

Retrospective bias has also been observed in numerous works by historians who, knowing in advance the outcome of certain events, seem to give them as obvious and unavoidable in their analysis, when they did not have to be so obvious to the people who lived these events directly at that particular moment of the story.

But It was in the 70s when it was taken to the academic field of psychology, by the hand of two Israeli researchers: Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. These authors tried to find the basis for the retrospective bias. They concluded that this phenomenon was supported by two others, which were the representativeness and availability heuristics.

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 in some way 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, said heuristic would imply the use of the most accessible examples for an individual about a certain topic in order to be able to assess that category as a whole. Namely, I would be taking the concrete in order to decide on the general.

In the Tversky and Kahneman studies, volunteers were asked to rate how likely they were to view a series of shares during an international tour by the president of the United States at the time, who was Richard Nixon. Some time later, they were summoned again so that, once the president's efforts were over.

This time what they were asked to estimate the probabilities that they believed they had considered in the first part of the study, this time already knowing the results of the acts carried out by Nixon. It was found that, indeed, when the event had actually happened, the subjects gave it a higher probability compared to those that did not happen.

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

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

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Factors Involved in Hindsight Bias

We already know what the retrospective bias consists of and what its development has been at a historical level. Now we will delve deeper into the factors that are involved in the functioning of this mental shortcut. These are the main ones.

1. Value and strength of the result

One of the factors that has to do with whether the retrospective bias occurs with greater or lesser intensity is the value that the outcome of events itself has for the subject, as well as the force with which it is produces. In that sense, if the result is negative for the person, it will tend to emit a stronger bias.

In other words, if an unfortunate event occurs for a certain individual, they will more likely believe that it was obvious that it was going to happen that way specifically that if there had been the event it would have been positive for that same person. It is not even necessary that the result affect this individual personally, it is enough that he can classify it as negative for this effect to occur.

2. Esperability

The surprise factor, that is, whether or not it is expected to be an event, also influences when it comes to enhancing or minimizing retrospective bias. Surprise always provokes in the individual the search for a congruence between past events and the final result. If this sense can be generated between the two, we will fall into a hindsight bias and we will think that the event was more likely than it actually was.

But if we have difficulty establishing a direct relationship between the information we had and the end of the event, The opposite effect to retrospective bias will be created in us, since we will conclude that there was no way to know 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 cognition trap. Studies have been done showing that individual differences affect the way people make inferences.

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

4. Subject's age

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 that were used with adult participants was difficult due to their complexity. But some researchers managed to develop nonverbal analog tests, simply by using fuzzy figures that corresponded to certain images.

When the participants knew in advance which was the object that represented the blurred image, because the researchers had made known, it seemed much more evident to them that it represented that image than when they were asked the same question before showing them the image final.

Once the relevant studies with young subjects have been carried out, hindsight bias was found to affect both children and adults, although they cannot be evaluated in the same way, since due to the level of cognitive development it is necessary to adapt the tests to children.

Bibliographic 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.