When You Dont Know an Outcome You Assume a Positive Outcome

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Have you always noticed that events seem more predictable after they have already happened? The results of an election, for example, often seem more obvious after the tallies have been counted. They say that retrospect is 20/xx. In other words, things always seem more obvious and predictable after they have already happened.

In psychology, this is what is referred to as the retrospect bias, and it tin can accept a major affect on non only your beliefs but also on your behaviors. Let's take a closer expect at how the hindsight bias works and how it might influence some of the beliefs you hold too as the decisions you make on a day-to-day footing.

What Is Hindsight Bias?

The term hindsight bias refers to the trend people have to view events every bit more predictable than they actually are. Before an consequence takes place, while you might be able to offer a guess every bit to the consequence, in that location is really no style to actually know what'due south going to happen.

Subsequently an result, people oft believe that they knew the outcome of the event before it actually happened. This is why it is often referred to as the "I knew it all forth" phenomenon.

Later on your favorite team loses the Super Bowl, you might feel convinced that you knew they were going to lose (even though you didn't feel that way earlier the game). The phenomenon has been demonstrated in a number of dissimilar situations, including politics and sporting events. In experiments, people oft recall their predictions before the event equally much stronger than they actually were.

Practical Examples

For instance, researchers Dorothee Dietrich and Matthew Olson (1993) asked higher students to predict how the U.Southward. Senate would vote on the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Prior to the Senate vote, 58% of the participants predicted that he would be confirmed. When students were polled again subsequently Thomas was confirmed, 78% of the participants said that they thought Thomas would be canonical.

The hindsight bias is often referred to as the "I-knew-it-all-forth phenomenon." It involves the tendency people have to assume that they knew the upshot of an event after the outcome has already been determined.

For instance, after attention a baseball game, you might insist that you knew that the winning team was going to win beforehand. High school and college students frequently feel hindsight bias during the course of their studies.

As they read their course texts, the information may seem easy. "Of grade," students often retrieve later reading the results of a study or experiment. "I knew that all along."

This tin be a unsafe habit for students to autumn into, all the same, particularly when examination time approaches. By assuming that they already knew the information, they might fail to adequately written report the test materials.

When it comes to testing time, however, the presence of many different answers on a multiple-choice test may make many students realize that they did not know the material quite besides as they thought they did. Past being aware of this potential problem, however, students can develop adept study habits to overcome the tendency to presume that they 'knew-it-all-forth.'

Explanations of Hindsight Bias

Then what exactly causes this bias to happen? Researchers suggest that three fundamental variables interact to contribute to this tendency to come across things as more than predictable than they actually are.

• Cerebral: People tend to misconstrue or even misremember their earlier predictions about an event. It may exist easier to recall information that is consequent with their electric current knowledge.
• Metacognitive: When we can easily understand how or why an upshot happened, that issue can seem similar information technology was easily foreseeable.
• Motivational: People like to think of the globe as a anticipated place. Assertive an event was "inevitable" tin can exist comforting for some people.

When all three of these factors occur readily in a situation, the hindsight bias is more than likely to occur.

When a movie reaches its stop and nosotros discover who the killer really was, we might look back on our retentivity of the film and misremember our initial impressions of the guilty character. We might also look at all the situations and secondary characters and believe that given these variables, information technology was clear what was going to happen. Y'all might walk away from the film thinking that you knew information technology all forth, but the reality is that you probably didn't.

One potential problem with this way of thinking is that it can lead to overconfidence. If we mistakenly believe that we have exceptional foresight or intuition, nosotros might get too confident and more likely to take unnecessary risks.

Such risks might be financial, such as placing too much of your nest egg in a risky stock portfolio. They might also be emotional, such every bit investing likewise much of yourself in a bad relationship.

So, is in that location annihilation that you tin can exercise to counteract the hindsight bias? Researchers Roese and Vohs suggest that i way to counteract this bias is to consider things that might have happened but didn't. By mentally reviewing potential outcomes, people might gain a more balanced view of an outcome'south apparent inevitability.

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Verywell Heed uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to acquire more about how we fact-check and proceed our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.

1. Pezzo One thousand. Hindsight bias: A primer for motivational researchers. Social and Personality Psychology Compass. 2011;5(9):665-678. doi:10.1111/j.1751-9004.2011.00381.x

2. Dietrich D, Olson M. A demonstration of retrospect bias using the Thomas confirmation vote. Psychological Reports. 1993;72(two):377-378. doi:10.2466/pr0.1993.72.2.377

3. Roese NJ, Vohs KD. Retrospect bias. Perspect Psychol Sci. 2012;7(5):411-426. doi:ten.1177/1745691612454303

Additional Reading

• Myers, David G.Social psychology (8 ed.). McGraw-Loma Education; 2005.

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Source: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-hindsight-bias-2795236

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