Hindsight bias
After learning an outcome, believing it was more predictable than it was and misremembering what you predicted. The uncertainty that existed at the time drops out of memory.
What drives it
Makes the world feel orderly and makes you feel perceptive. It also supplies someone to blame: if it was obvious, somebody should have seen it.
How it shows
Work
'The writing was on the wall' about a hire who flamed out, said by the people who approved the hire. Incident reviews that judge decisions by outcome rather than by what was knowable at the time. Reasonable bets that lost are punished and reckless ones that won are rewarded. 'I always said he wasn't right for the role.'
Relationships
After a break-up, friends and the person themselves rewrite the relationship as doomed from the first date. 'I should have known he was like that.' Blaming a relative for not seeing a crisis nobody saw coming.
Self
Ask what you actually predicted before you knew, and whether you wrote it down. The tell is 'obviously' applied to something you did not act on. In judging people, it shows as harshness toward someone for missing what only became clear later.
What tells it apart
Self-serving bias: Self-serving bias flips with whether the outcome was good for you; hindsight makes any outcome feel foreseeable, including ones that make you look bad, as in 'I should have seen it'.
Confirmation bias: Confirmation bias filters evidence before the outcome is known; hindsight rewrites memory of uncertainty after it is known, detectable by comparing a person's written forecast with their later recollection.
A test
Compare the person's recorded forecast or decision memo with their current account; if the current account is more certain than the record, hindsight has done its work.
Questions to carry
- What was actually written or said before the outcome, and how does it compare with how certain it sounds now?
- Looking back at a call I got wrong, who am I blaming for missing what only looks obvious now?
How strong the research is
strong
Where it comes from
Baruch Fischhoff, 1975
Sources
- Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)