Hindsight bias meaning how to#
Hindsight bias meaning full#

People with low self-esteem may look at their accomplishments and see only what they didn’t achieve, while people with high self-esteem will focus on what they did accomplish Overcoming Hindsight Bias.

The same event can be perceived differently depending on how it is framed.

You may believe that you are more likely to make a mistake or do something wrong if you have already made mistakes in the past.

Someone who is in an unhappy marriage and says they never should have married that person.

Parents who regret not disciplining their children enough, but still discipline them now.

A good Hindsight bias example is people who buy a lottery ticket and then say “I should have bought more!”.

What are some examples of Hindsight Bias in real life?

The third level is foreseeability, which involves the belief that we personally could have foreseen the event (“I knew it would happen”).

The second level is inevitability, and it centers on our belief that the event was inevitable (“It had to happen”).

The first level of hindsight bias is memory distortion, which involves misremembering an earlier opinion or judgment (“I said it would happen”).

It’s free.ġ The three levels of hindsight bias, proposed by Roese & Vohs (2012) in their paper that was published by the Association for Psychological Science. Join below to get a summary of 20 useful mental models. Then you will love Life-Changing Concepts Newsletter. Things that have never happened before happen all the time. So whenever you find yourself making predictions about the future, remember:

Hindsight bias meaning full#

That’s why life is full of surprises - sometimes negative, sometimes positive. As nobody knew how this decade would start back in December 2019. Embrace the unpredictabilityĪnother way is to be aware of the unpredictability of the future. So if you made a significant career decision, you can look back, see your predictions about how things will turn out, and judge if it was the right decision. One way to avoid Hindsight Bias is to keep track of your decisions and reasoning at that time.

Hindsight bias meaning how to#

Hindsight Bias Meaning and Examples How to avoid hindsight bias 1. That’s how people make the wrong investment decisions and don’t learn from their mistakes. That’s how executives take uncalculated risks or stick to a strategy that worked once. It creates false confidence.Īfter all, if it’s so easy to explain all past events, if we knew it all, we can also predict the future. The danger with Hindsight Bias is its impact on your future decisions. I knew it would happen (Predictability).I said it would happen (Memory Distortion).You hear these sentences that represent three levels 1 of Hindsight Bias quite often for stock market crashes, match results, or business decisions: Tensions in Eastern Europe were so high in the last couple of years everybody knew that Putin would invade Ukraine.Īfter we know how things turned out, our minds ignore all other possibilities and explain the past as it was inevitable. The world was too connected a pandemic was inevitable. Looking back from today, everything feels obvious.

Who was expecting a war in Europe resembling the days of the Second World War?īut these did happen just in 27 months since December 2019. Who was expecting a pandemic that’d keep us under lockdown and change how we live for years? Hindsight bias is a fallacy where people feel they knew how things would turn out after the events occurred.