Hindsight Bias
Definition
Hindsight bias is the tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that one would have foreseen or predicted it.
Analogy
It's like watching a recorded football game and saying you knew all along which team was going to win. Once you know the outcome, it seems obvious - but before knowing, predicting accurately would have been much harder.
Related terms
Confirmation Bias: The tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories.
Overconfidence Effect: When someone's subjective confidence in their judgments is greater than their objective accuracy.
Availability Heuristic: A mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision.
"Hindsight Bias" appears in:
Study guides (3)
Practice Questions (7)
Which of the following best describes the hindsight bias?
Which of these describes the hindsight bias?
How does the hindsight bias contribute to overconfidence in our judgments?
How does the hindsight bias contribute to victim-blaming attitudes in society?
What inventive experiment could be developed to examine the impact of hindsight bias on jury decisions?
What type of novel experiment could examine the effect of hindsight bias on memory reconstruction?
What does hindsight bias refer to?
Resources
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