Hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along effect or creeping determinism, is the inclination to see events that have already occurred as being more predictable than they were before they took place.[1][2] It is a multifaceted phenomenon that can affect different stages of designs, processes, contexts, and situations.[3] Hindsight bias may cause memory distortion, where the recollection and reconstruction of content can lead to false theoretical outcomes. It has been suggested that the effect can cause extreme methodological problems while trying to analyze, understand, and interpret results in experimental studies. A basic example of the hindsight bias is when, after viewing the outcome of a potentially unforeseeable event, a person believes he or she "knew it all along". Such examples are present in the writings of historians describing outcomes of battles, physicians recalling clinical trials, and in judicial systems trying to attribute responsibility and predictability of accidents.[4]
Memory distortions
Hindsight bias has similarities to other memory distortions such as misinformation effect and false autobiographical memory.[11] Misinformation effect occurs after an event is witnessed; new information received after the fact influences how the person remembers the event, and can be called post-event misinformation. This is an important issue with eyewitness testimony. False autobiographical memory takes place when suggestions or additional outside information is provided to distort and change memory of events; this can also lead to false memory syndrome. At times this can lead to creation of new memories that are completely false and have not taken place. All three of these memory distortions contain a three-stage procedure.[11] The details of each procedure are different but can result in some psychological manipulation and alteration of memory. Stage one is different between the three paradigms although all involve an event, an event that has taken place (misinformation effect), an event that has not taken place (false autobiographical memory), and a judgment made by a person about an event that must be remembered (hindsight bias). Stage two consists of more information that is received by the person after the event has taken place. The new information given in hindsight bias is correct and presented up front to the person, while the extra information for the other two memory distortions is wrong and presented in an indirect and possibly manipulative way. The third stage consists of recalling the starting information. The person must recall the original information with hindsight bias and misinformation effect while a person that has a false autobiographical memory is expected to remember the incorrect information as a true memory.[11]
For a false autobiographical memory to be created, the person must believe a memory that is not real. To seem real, the information given must be influenced by their own personal judgments. There is no real episode of an event to remember, so this memory construction must be logical to that person's knowledge base. Hindsight bias and misinformation effect recall a specific time and event, this is called an episodic memory process.[11] These two memory distortions both use memory-based mechanisms that involve a memory trace that has been changed. Hippocampus activation takes place when an episodic memory is recalled.[22] The memory is then available for alteration by new information. The person believes that the remembered information is the original memory trace, not an altered memory. This new memory is made from accurate information and therefore the person does not have much motivation to admit they were wrong originally by remembering the original memory. This can lead to motivated forgetting.
Motivated forgetting
Following a negative outcome of a situation, people do not want to accept blame. Instead of accepting their role in the event, they view themselves as caught up in a situation that was unforeseeable and therefore they are not the culprit, which is referred to as defensive processing, or view the situation as inevitable and that there was nothing that could be done to prevent it, which is retroactive pessimism.[23] Defensive processing involves less hindsight bias as they are playing ignorant of the event. Retroactive pessimism makes use of hindsight bias after a negative, unwanted outcome. Events in life can be hard to control or predict. It is no surprise that people want to view themselves in a more positive light and do not want to take responsibility for situations they could have altered. This leads to hindsight bias in the form of retroactive pessimism to inhibit upward counterfactual thinking, instead interpreting the outcome as succumbing to an inevitable fate.[24] This memory inhibition, preventing a person from recalling what really happened, may lead to failure to accept one's mistakes and therefore to be unable to learn and grow to prevent a similar mistake from taking place in the future.[23] Hindsight bias can also lead to overconfidence in one's decisions without considering other options.[25] Such people see themselves as persons who remember correctly, even though they are just forgetting that they were wrong. Avoiding responsibility is common among the human population. Examples will be discussed below to show the regularity and severity of hindsight bias in society.
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