However, now that they’ve started dating, it’s easy for you to say that you predicted it. Plenty of people have joked around with each other when they first met without the conversation leading to a relationship, so it is just as possible that Matt and Amanda would only become good friends or acquaintances. You tell both of them that you knew after that first night that they were going to get together.This is an example of a positive event involving hindsight bias. The first night they meet, they get along well and joke around with each other. They’ve been your friends for a couple of years, and they get to know each other through their friendship with you. Let’s say you have two good friends named Matt and Amanda. There are plenty of examples of positive events in which we might feel we knew the outcome ahead of time. Hindsight bias does not apply only to negative events. While it is true that we might sometimes predict events correctly, it’s interesting to note that we don’t always think about the events that we didn’t predict correctly. We often think we knew something was going to happen-after the fact. Shortly after learning this information, you tell yourself that you knew that was going to happen because the bookstore is not very busy during the summer and your friend has bad luck.Both of these events involve hindsight bias.

Two months later, he tells you that they decided to let him go because the store was not busy enough. He lets you know he just got hired as a cashier at the campus bookstore and you’re happy for him. Your roommate has been let go from his last two jobs after only a short period of time. It’s easy to think that you knew something was going to happen after it actually happens.Another example of hindsight bias might involve a new summer job your college roommate just got. It’s just as likely that the dish could have remained on the counter, undisturbed. You say to yourself, ‘Oh man! Of course that was going to happen!’ You might start to feel that you knew the platter was going to fall and break, even though there’s no way to be certain that you could’ve foreseen that happening. As you continue cleaning, you bump the counter and the platter falls to the ground, shattering into pieces. Let’s look at some examples of hindsight bias in action.Imagine that you’re cleaning out your kitchen cupboards, and you put a glass platter near the edge of the counter. This bias is a common occurrence for all of us. Hindsight bias is also sometimes called the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon. Hindsight bias is when, after an event occurs, we feel we already knew what was going to happen. This phenomenon is formally known as hindsight bias. Have you ever tried to stop something from happening, yet the very thing you tried to prevent happened anyway? In this instance, you might have said to yourself, ‘Ugh! I knew that was gonna happen!’ Once an event occurs, it’s easy for us to believe that we knew the outcome in advance. New technologies for visualizing and understanding data sets may have the unintended consequence of heightening hindsight bias, but an intervention that encourages people to consider alternative causal explanations for a given outcome can reduce hindsight bias.* All Partners were chosen among 50+ writing services by our Customer Satisfaction Team What Is Hindsight Bias? Consequences of hindsight bias include myopic attention to a single causal understanding of the past (to the neglect of other reasonable explanations) as well as general overconfidence in the certainty of one's judgments. Hindsight bias stems from (a) cognitive inputs (people selectively recall information consistent with what they now know to be true and engage in sensemaking to impose meaning on their own knowledge), (b) metacognitive inputs (the ease with which a past outcome is understood may be misattributed to its assumed prior likelihood), and (c) motivational inputs (people have a need to see the world as orderly and predictable and to avoid being blamed for problems). Hindsight bias embodies any combination of three aspects: memory distortion, beliefs about events' objective likelihoods, or subjective beliefs about one's own prediction abilities. Hindsight bias occurs when people feel that they 'knew it all along,' that is, when they believe that an event is more predictable after it becomes known than it was before it became known.

Hindsight bias definition psychology