Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
University of Minnesota.
Perspect Psychol Sci. 2012 Sep;7(5):411-26. doi: 10.1177/1745691612454303.
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 embodies any combination of three aspects: memory distortion, beliefs about events' objective likelihoods, or subjective beliefs about one's own prediction abilities. 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). 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. 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.
后视偏差是指人们觉得自己“早就知道了”，也就是说，当他们认为一个事件在已知之后比在已知之前更具有可预测性时，就会出现后视偏差。后视偏差包含了三个方面的任意组合：记忆扭曲、对事件客观可能性的信念，或对自己预测能力的主观信念。后视偏差源于（a）认知输入（人们选择性地回忆与他们现在所知道的真实情况一致的信息，并进行意义建构，以使自己的知识具有意义）、（b）元认知输入（对过去结果的理解容易被错误地归因于其假设的先前可能性）和（c）动机输入（人们需要看到世界是有序和可预测的，并避免因问题而受到指责）。后视偏差的后果包括对过去单一因果关系的短视关注（忽视其他合理的解释），以及对自己判断的确定性的普遍过度自信。可视化和理解数据集的新技术可能会产生增强后视偏差的意外后果，但鼓励人们考虑给定结果的替代因果解释的干预措施可以减少后视偏差。
