I knew it! A guest post by Tabatha Candido.

            You thought you knew the outcome of that sports game didn’t you? You also thought you knew many another things after it happened but truth is, you really did not. Hindsight bias is very common in many domains. In many situations people believe that they already know what was going to happen, or they already knew something before it happened but we never actually do.

            Hindsight bias refers to the tendency people have to view events as more predictable than they really are. This means that before an event actually, happens we believe that we already know the outcome.

            Scientists Neal Poese and Kathleen Vohns, two psychology researchers, proposed that there are three levels of hindsight bias. Memory distortion is the first level; this level involves misremembering an earlier judgment. The second level, inevitability, centers us to believe that whatever the outcome was just had to happen. Last but not least, the third level would be foreseeability, which involves the fact that we could tell what the outcome was.

            These researchers have shown that we selectively recall information that we already know is true and we connect it to information that we knew before the event and make sense of them together, which causes us to believe we already knew. If we believe we knew it all along, we never truly examine why something really happened.

            This happens in real life on a daily basis in many of our lives when we actually stop and think about the concept. Even though this is hard to admit, I will have to admit personally that this happened to me not too long ago. I attended a soccer game recently at Gillette Stadium between Brazil and Portugal’s teams. One of the two best players on Portugal’s team was injured and it is common sense (to soccer fans) that every time one of their good players does not play, they lose their confidence and they lose the game. Knowing this while attending the game, the outcome was exactly what I thought it was going to be and Brazil won. Of course since I felt I knew the exact outcome I told everyone that I already knew this was going to be the outcome of the event and no one really believed me.

            As I am sure this has not been the only time this has happened to me as I feel like hindsight bias is a lot like me and my personality, it is unbelievable how we have almost no idea this happens in our heads.

            Not only have I experienced this myself but I have also seen this in my classrooms, in my household, and at my job. Hindsight bias is not set to happen in any specific location and can really happen with anyone and for any event that ever happened. Now that you know more about the concept, does this sound like you too?