No matter what your level of confidence is in the outcome of the Super Bowl, chances are that after the big game, your
confidence that the winner was actually going to win will be
higher than it is now. Psychologists
call this tendency hindsight bias,
though you can think of it as the belief that you knew it all along.
A nice new review paper in the September, 2012 issue of Perspectives in Psychological Science by
Neal Roese and Kathleen Vohs summarizes the research on hindsight bias.
When they review the research, they identify two kinds of factors
that promote hindsight bias.
First, there are influences on memory and knowledge. After an event has happened, you know the
outcome, and so that outcome is easier to think about than the
alternative. In 2008, Barack Obama won
the election, and so that alternative is easier to think about than one in
which John McCain won. This ease (or
fluency) makes the outcome feel more certain.
In addition, your memory for the uncertainty you felt initially tends to
fade over time, and that makes it harder to remember that you once were not
sure what was going to happen. Finally,
after an event like an election, there is a lot of discussion about why it
happened. These explanations also
increase your belief that the outcome was inevitable.
The second influence on hindsight bias is motivational. In general, our cognitive system tries to
resolve inconsistencies. The familiar
“cognitive dissonance” effects occur when people hold inconsistent
beliefs. This inconsistency often
results in people changing their beliefs in subtle ways to make them more
compatible with each other. These
mechanisms kick in after an event occurs as well. The world as it is now often matters more
than the world as it might have been. As
a result, your beliefs tend to shift to make the past feel more like the world
as it is today. That shift can make you
feel as if you knew what was going to happen.
Why does this matter?
Your beliefs about why an event happened affects how you
react to it in the future. If you believe
that something was inevitable, then you may not spend much time thinking about
how things could have come out differently.
As a result, you may not uncover factors that might influence future
outcomes.
For example, most new businesses do not succeed. There are many factors that contribute to the
success or failure of any new venture.
If you start a business and it fails, you may ultimately come to believe
that there were clear reasons that doomed the business to failure. As a result, you may not see all of the
things you did that nearly made it succeed.
In this way, you may not take away valuable lessons that will help you
to succeed in the future.
One suggestion that the authors make for counteracting
hindsight bias is to spend some time thinking explicitly about how things could
have turned out otherwise. For example,
after the next Presidential election, spend some time thinking about all of the
reasons why the other candidate might have won.
This exercise will have two benefits.
First, it will help you to hold on to the uncertainty you are feeling
right now about the outcome. Second, it
will help you to think about all of the reasons why the world could be
different than it is. And these reasons
may help you to deal with new situations in the future.
