Hindsight bias, sometimes called the knew-it-all-along effect, is the tendency for people to see a past event as having been more predictable than it actually was before it happened. After learning an outcome, people systematically overestimate what they would have predicted in advance, which distorts their memory of their own prior knowledge and can make chance or unforeseeable events feel obvious in retrospect. The psychologist Baruch Fischhoff gave the effect its formal experimental description in 1975, building on his own earlier observations from 1973.
Facts
Core ClaimOnce people know how an event turned out, they overestimate how predictable that outcome was beforehand, and misremember their own prior uncertainty. 1 First Described Year Classification
Type of Phenomenon Connections
Associated With
Wikipedia distinguishes the two directly: outcome bias weighs the outcome of a decision itself, while hindsight bias is a memory distortion favoring the actor.
Source Wikipedia: Outcome bias
In Branch
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Hindsight Bias
Wikimedia FoundationLead section
After an event has occurred, people often believe that they could have predicted or perhaps even known with a high degree of certainty what the outcome of the event would be before it occurred.
History section
In 1973, Baruch Fischhoff attended a seminar where Paul E. Meehl stated an observation: clinicians often overestimate their ability to have foreseen the outcome of a particular case, claiming they knew it all along.
lead section, phenomenon-kind classification
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.
Wikipedia: Outcome bias
Wikimedia FoundationAssociated With: Outcome Bias, lead sectionQuote, Associated With: Outcome Bias, lead section
While similar to the hindsight bias, the two phenomena are markedly different.
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