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Concept
Hindsight bias
Summary
Hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along phenomenon or creeping determinism, is the common tendency for people to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they were.
People often believe that after an event has occurred, they would have predicted or perhaps even would have known with a high degree of certainty what the outcome of the event would have been before the event occurred. Hindsight bias may cause distortions of memories of what was known or believed before an event occurred, and is a significant source of overconfidence regarding an individual's ability to predict the outcomes of future events. Examples of hindsight bias can be seen in the writings of historians describing outcomes of battles, physicians recalling clinical trials, and in judicial systems as individuals attribute responsibility on the basis of the supposed predictability of accidents.
In some countries, 20/20 indicates normal visual acuity at 20 feet, from which derives the idiom "hindsight is 20/20".
The hindsight bias, although it was not yet named, was not a new concept when it emerged in psychological research in the 1970s. In fact, it had been indirectly described numerous times by historians, philosophers, and physicians. In 1973, Baruch Fischhoff attended a seminar where Paul E. Meehl stated an observation that clinicians often overestimate their ability to have foreseen the outcome of a particular case, as they claim to have known it all along. Baruch, a psychology graduate student at the time, saw an opportunity in psychological research to explain these observations.
In the early 70s, the investigation of heuristics and biases was a large area of study in psychology, led by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Two heuristics identified by Tversky and Kahneman were of immediate importance in the development of the hindsight bias; these were the availability heuristic and the representativeness heuristic.
In an elaboration of these heuristics, Beyth and Fischhoff devised the first experiment directly testing the hindsight bias.
Official source
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