Hindsight Bias
After knowing the outcome, we believe we would have predicted it.
Hindsight bias (also known as the knew-it-all-along effect or creeping determinism) is the common tendency for people to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they actually were. After a result is known, we reconstruct our memory of what we thought would happen, typically in the direction of the actual outcome. This makes it very difficult to evaluate the quality of past decisions.
What it looks like in the wild.
- Everyday life Sports Prediction After a match, fans confidently claim they 'knew' their team would lose, even when they were predicting a win beforehand.
- Everyday life Financial Crisis Afterthought After the 2008 crash, almost everyone claimed to have 'seen it coming', while very few actually predicted it beforehand.
Recognising a definition is not the same skill as spotting it.
Two scenarios from the app, with distractors drawn from the same family of biases — which is what makes them hard.
When his flight is canceled, Sam says, 'I had a bad feeling about this weather. I was actually going to book an earlier flight.'
After a company goes bankrupt, an analyst claims the failure was predictable, citing warning signs that were actually impossible to identify before the collapse happened.
Biases rarely arrive alone.
Understand more. Assume less.
188 biases, 18,869 scenarios, and a record of how you actually decide.
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