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Hindsight bias meaning7/5/2023 ![]() ![]() In a recent meta-analysis, Groß and Pachur ( 2019) found that older adults show worse memory for their own original judgments than young adults do, and-as a consequence-must reconstruct their judgments more often. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that in such numerical-estimation tasks, older adults are more prone to the described memory distortion (e.g., Bayen et al., 2006 Bernstein et al., 2011 Coolin et al., 2015 Groß & Bayen, 2015). We will refer to the bias measured in the memory paradigm as the memory component of hindsight bias. Hindsight bias occurs when recalled judgments are shifted toward presented correct answers. ![]() Finally, they are asked to recall their own original judgments. They then receive the correct answer for some or all of the questions (e.g., The Arabic alphabet contains 28 letters). ![]() In one of the most common types of task to study hindsight bias, the memory paradigm, participants are first asked to provide judgments for example, numerical judgments to a set of difficult knowledge questions (e.g., How many letters does the Arabic alphabet contain?). It is also robust across a wide range of materials and different tasks (Pohl, 2007). This cognitive illusion has been termed hindsight bias (for reviews, see Blank et al., 2007 Roese & Vohs, 2012) and is pervasive in a variety of everyday situations, such as in political elections, medical diagnoses, or scientific experiments (e.g., Arkes et al., 1981 Blank et al., 2003 Slovic & Fischhoff, 1977). In hindsight, we think that we “knew it all along” (Wood, 1978), we assign higher a priori probabilities to facts or outcomes (Fischhoff, 1975), and we misremember our prior predictions as closer to facts or actual outcomes (e.g., Erdfelder & Buchner, 1998). When we look back on what we knew previously, we are often biased by what we know now. Thus, there are age differences in hindsight bias after positive and negative outcomes, but only with regard to memory for prior judgments. Inevitability and foreseeability impressions, however, did not differ between the age groups. 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. 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. Currently, there is no research on age differences in all three manifestations of hindsight bias. Furthermore, hindsight bias can manifest itself as a bias in memory for prior given judgments, but also as retrospective impressions of inevitability and foreseeability. 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. 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. Prior research has shown that this hindsight bias is more pronounced in older than in younger adults. After learning about facts or outcomes of events, people overestimate in hindsight what they knew in foresight. ![]()
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