Good evening everyone! Time for another Cognitive Bias Bootcamp, wherein I take a look at a cognitive bias we frail humans are prone to. Cognitive biases are errors that creep into our thinking as we process information coming into our brains.
So let’s look at this week’s offering: the Hindsight Bias.
This one is pretty simple: upon learning of the outcome of an event, we have a tendency to overestimate our ability to have predicted that event. It’s also known as the “I Knew It All Along” phenomenon or as creeping determinism.
Examples:
Prior to President Nixon’s trip to China, researchers asked a group of subjects to assign a probability to the likelihood of several possible outcomes of the trip. Some time after the trip’s conclusion, the subjects were asked to recall what probabilities they had assigned to the possible outcomes. The result was that many greatly exaggerated their assigned probability to the result that actually happened.
During the Senate hearings regarding Clarence Thomas’ appointment to the Supreme Court, researchers polled a group of subjects on what they thought the likelihood of Thomas successfully being seated on the court was. They were then polled again one month after the fact regarding how likely they had thought the appointment would be.
The result? Before the appointment 58% of the subjects thought Thomas would be successfully seated on the court. However, when the same subjects were polled after the fact on how likely they had thought the result was, 78% responded that they had known he would be seated. A full fifth of respondents changed their prediction after the fact.
In a third study, college students were given a story and also given four possible endings for it, one of which was true, and then asked to give probabilities to each ending happening. Some of the subjects were made aware of the true outcome, and those subject gave much higher probabilities to the true outcome than the other group who were unaware of which outcome was true.
A couple of other generic examples:
After a sports game (or any contest), someone saying “I knew X was going to win!”
After a test, seeing the answers you missed and thinking “damn, I knew that!” (sometimes we really didn’t).
There are a lot of theories as to causes of this phenomenon. Some of it undoubtedly simply has to do with the malleability of human memory, but that can’t account for all of it, because if that was random, we’d predict in the negative as much as the positive. No, it’s something different.
Another cause may be the human desire for predictability, and that desire causing us to adjust our memory accordingly.
Still yet another cause is “inevitability.” It’s easy, with hindsight, to see the causes that led up to a given result. And being able to see that cause-and-effect train of evidence up to the result may cause us to, again, unconsciously tweak our memory of events to the “inevitable” conclusion.
So, what’s the big deal if we adjust our memories after the fact so that our predictions are more “accurate?”
Well, the potential to mislead ourselves into thinking we’re better at predicting events than we really are. This could lead to poor decision making in the future as we succumb to overconfidence in our ability to predict outcomes.
This can even scale up to businesses and governments — if after-the-fact analysis of events makes events appear inevitable or more predictable than they really were, well — look at Russia right now in Ukraine, for example. Putin looked at how “easy” it was to install puppets in Belorus, Chechnya, etc., and so was overconfident of the results of invading Ukraine.
As with a lot of cognitive biases, this can be hard to combat, and fighting against our tendencies to fall victim to this, it takes a conscious effort. One way to combat it is to record your thinking before an event, including your reasoning behind any predictions. Of course, for most events, we aren’t going to have the foresight to do this.
Examine the data. What led up to the event? Was it really that predictable without the benefit of hindsight?
And just remember that we’re not psychic. We can’t reliably predict the future in most cases. Be humble as to your abilities in that respect.
Logical Fallacies Bootcamp:
The Strawman
The Slippery Slope
Begging the Question
Poisoning the Well
No True Scotsman!
Ad Hominem
False Dilemma
Non Sequitur
Red Herring
Gamblers Fallacy
Bandwagon Fallacy
Appeal to Fear
The Fallacy Fallacy
Appeal to Personal Incredulity
Appeal to Authority
Special Pleading
Texas Sharpshooter
Cognitive Bias Bootcamp:
Bystander Effect
Curse of Knowledge
Barnum Effect
Declinism
In-Group Bias