Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
122
result(s) for
"Hindsight bias (Psychology)"
Sort by:
Just Cognition: Scientific Research on Bias and Some Implications for Legal Procedure and Decision-Making
Common law judges have traditionally been concerned about bias and the appearance of bias. Bias is believed to threaten the administration of justice and the legitimacy of legal decisionmaking, particularly public confidence in the courts. This article contrasts legal approaches to bias with a range of biases, particularly cognitive biases, familiar to scientists who study human cognition and decision-making. Research reveals that judges have narrowly conceived the biases that threaten legal decision-making, insisting that some potential sources of bias are not open to review and that they are peculiarly resistant to bias through legal training and judicial experience. This article explains how, notwithstanding express concern with bias, there has been limited legal engagement with many risks known to actually bias decision-making. Through examples, and drawing upon scientific research, it questions legal approaches and discusses the implications of more empirically-based approaches to bias for decision making and institutional legitimacy.
Journal Article
Rethink. Series 1, episode 11
In a world where nothing is what it seems, sometimes you just need to take a step back and take a second look to discover the weird, quaint, and downright bizarre. It’s time to re-think!
Streaming Video
Debiasing the hindsight bias: A review
The hindsight bias is one of the most widely studied judgement biases in the literature (Christensen-Szalanski & Willham, 1991), and has been found to be quite robust across a variety of content domains and tasks. The present paper aimed to examine research that has been conducted on debiasing the hindsight bias. The focus of the review was to examine the three debiasing manipulations most commonly cited in the literature: instructional manipulation, counterfactual reasoning, and discrediting procedures (Pohl & Hell 1996). The second goal of the review was to determine the feasibility of conducting a meta-analysis on the collected literature. An analysis of the collected data revealed that counterfactual reasoning is the most reliable debiasing technique while instructional manipulation is the most unreliable. It was also concluded that the studies collected for the review did not meet the criteria for conducting a meta-analysis.
Dissertation
The role of perceptual difficulty in visual hindsight bias for emotional faces
Visual hindsight bias, also known as the “saw-it-all-along” effect, is the tendency to overestimate one’s perceptual abilities with the aid of outcome knowledge. Recently, Giroux et al. (
2022
,
Emotion,
https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001068
) reported robust visual hindsight bias for emotional faces except for happy. We examined whether the difficulty of emotional processing could explain their finding. As in Giroux et al., participants saw a blurred image of an emotional face (happy, angry, or neutral) that progressed to clear and were instructed to stop the clearing process when they were able to identify the emotion (foresight trials). They then were shown the clearest image of each face and determined the emotion, followed by a memory task where they were asked to adjust the blur levels to indicate the point at which they had identified the emotion earlier (hindsight trials). Experiment
1
replicated Giroux et al.’s finding, showing that participants stopped the image at a higher degree of blur during the hindsight trials than they had during the foresight trials (i.e., a visual hindsight bias) for the angry and neutral faces but not happy faces. Experiment
2
manipulated the perceptual difficulty of angry and happy faces. While the easy faces replicated the results of Experiment
1
, both angry and happy faces produced strong bias when made difficult. A multinomial processing tree model suggests that visual hindsight bias for emotional faces, while robust, is sensitive to perceptual processing difficulties across emotions.
Journal Article
Older and younger adults’ hindsight bias after positive and negative outcomes
After learning about facts or outcomes of events, people overestimate in hindsight what they knew in foresight. Prior research has shown that this
hindsight bias
is more pronounced in older than in younger adults. However, this robust finding is based primarily on a specific paradigm that requires generating and recalling numerical judgments to general knowledge questions that deal with emotionally neutral content. As older and younger adults tend to process positive and negative information differently, they might also show differences in hindsight bias after positive and negative outcomes. Furthermore, hindsight bias can manifest itself as a bias in memory for prior given judgments, but also as retrospective impressions of inevitability and foreseeability. Currently, there is no research on age differences in all three manifestations of hindsight bias. In this study, younger (
N
= 46, 18–30 years) and older adults (
N
= 45, 64–90 years) listened to everyday-life scenarios that ended positively or negatively, recalled the expectation they previously held about the outcome (to measure the memory component of hindsight bias), and rated each outcome’s foreseeability and inevitability. Compared with younger adults, older adults recalled their prior expectations as closer to the actual outcomes (i.e., they showed a larger memory component of hindsight bias), and this age difference was more pronounced for negative than for positive outcomes. Inevitability and foreseeability impressions, however, did not differ between the age groups. Thus, there are age differences in hindsight bias after positive and negative outcomes, but only with regard to memory for prior judgments.
Journal Article
Hindsight Bias
Hindsight bias occurs when people feel that they \"knew it all along,\" that is, when they believe that an event is more predictable after it becomes known than it was before it became known. Hindsight bias embodies any combination of three aspects: memory distortion, beliefs about events' objective likelihoods, or subjective beliefs about one's own prediction abilities. Hindsight bias stems from (a) cognitive inputs (people selectively recall information consistent with what they now know to be true and engage in sensemaking to impose meaning on their own knowledge), (b) metacognitive inputs (the ease with which a past outcome is understood may be misattributed to its assumed prior likelihood), and (c) motivational inputs (people have a need to see the world as orderly and predictable and to avoid being blamed for problems). Consequences of hindsight bias include myopic attention to a single causal understanding of the past (to the neglect of other reasonable explanations) as well as general overconfidence in the certainty of one's judgments. New technologies for visualizing and understanding data sets may have the unintended consequence of heightening hindsight bias, but an intervention that encourages people to consider alternative causal explanations for a given outcome can reduce hindsight bias.
Journal Article
The Creativity-Verification Cycle in Psychological Science: New Methods to Combat Old Idols
Over the years, researchers in psychological science have documented and investigated a host of powerful cognitive fallacies, including hindsight bias and confirmation bias. Researchers themselves may not be immune to these fallacies and may unwittingly adjust their statistical analysis to produce an outcome that is more pleasant or better in line with prior expectations. To shield researchers from the impact of cognitive fallacies, several methodologists are now advocating preregistration—that is, the creation of a detailed analysis plan before data collection or data analysis. One may argue, however, that preregistration is out of touch with academic reality, hampering creativity and impeding scientific progress. We provide a historical overview to show that the interplay between creativity and verification has shaped theories of scientific inquiry throughout the centuries; in the currently dominant theory, creativity and verification operate in succession and enhance one another’s effectiveness. From this perspective, the use of preregistration to safeguard the verification stage will help rather than hinder the generation of fruitful new ideas.
Journal Article
Metacognitive hindsight bias
Hindsight bias (HB) is the tendency to see known information as obvious. We studied metacognitive hindsight bias (MC-HB)—a shift away from one’s original confidence regarding answers provided before learning the actual facts. In two experiments, participants answered general-knowledge questions in social scenarios and provided their confidence in each answer. Subsequently, they learned answers to half the questions and then recalled their initial answers and confidence. Finally, they reanswered, as a learning check. We measured confidence accuracy by calibration (over/underconfidence) and resolution (discrimination between incorrect and correct answers), expecting them to improve in hindsight. In both experiments, participants displayed robust HB and MC-HB for resolution despite attempts to recall the initial confidence in one’s answer. In Experiment
2
, promising anonymity to participants eliminated MC-HB, while social scenarios produced MC-HB for both resolution and calibration—indicative of overconfidence. Overall, our findings highlight that in social contexts, recall of confidence in hindsight is more consistent with answers’ accuracy than confidence initially was. Social scenarios differently affect HB and MC-HB, thus dissociating these two biases.
Journal Article
Cheaters claim they knew the answers all along
Cheating has become commonplace in academia and beyond. Yet, almost everyone views themselves favorably, believing that they are honest, trustworthy, and of high integrity. We investigate one possible explanation for this apparent discrepancy between people’s actions and their favorable self-concepts: People who cheat on tests believe that they knew the answers all along. We found consistent correlational evidence across three studies that, for those particular cases in which participants likely cheated, they were more likely to report that they knew the answers all along. Experimentally, we then found that participants were more likely to later claim that they knew the answers all along after having the opportunity to cheat to find the correct answers – relative to exposure to the correct answers without the opportunity to cheat. These findings provide new insights into relationships between memory, metacognition, and the self-concept.
Journal Article