von der Beck Ina, Cress Ulrike, Oeberst Aileen
Arbeitsgruppe Wissenskonstruktion.
J Exp Psychol Appl. 2019 Mar;25(1):88-99. doi: 10.1037/xap0000185. Epub 2018 Aug 16.
After learning about an event, people often mistakenly believe to have predicted what happened all along (hindsight bias). However, what if what has happened is not known, but subject to conjecture? Could conjectures, in the absence of knowledge about the event, elicit the same bias and make people believe they "conjectured it all along", too? We examined this question in 2 studies. Immediately after the disappearance of flight MH370 in March, 2014, we asked N = 432 individuals about the likelihood of a number of possible events. One year later, N = 100 of these individuals participated again and were randomly assigned to 2 experimental conditions. Participants in the current conjecture group answered the same questions from their current perspective, participants in the reproduced conjecture group were asked to reproduce their earlier estimates. Results show that conjectures had changed over time and affected participants' reproductions of their earlier estimates. We replicated this finding in a controlled lab experiment (N = 94) and found a comparable magnitude of conjecture-based and knowledge-based hindsight bias. These findings demonstrate hindsight distortions in the absence of definite knowledge and extend theoretical assumptions about the prerequisites of hindsight bias in the context of events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
在了解某一事件后，人们常常错误地认为自己一直都能预测到所发生的事情（后见之明偏差）。然而，如果所发生的事情并不为人所知，而是有待猜测呢？在对该事件一无所知的情况下，猜测是否会引发同样的偏差，让人们也觉得自己“一直都在这么猜测”呢？我们通过两项研究探讨了这个问题。2014年3月马航MH370失联后，我们立即询问了432名个体一系列可能事件发生的可能性。一年后，其中100名个体再次参与研究，并被随机分配到两个实验条件组。当前猜测组的参与者从他们当前的角度回答同样的问题，重现猜测组的参与者则被要求重现他们之前的估计。结果表明，猜测会随时间变化，并影响参与者对其早期估计的重现。我们在一项受控实验室实验（N = 94）中重复了这一发现，发现基于猜测和基于已知信息的后见之明偏差程度相当。这些发现证明了在缺乏明确信息的情况下也会出现后见之明偏差，并扩展了关于事件背景下后见之明偏差前提条件的理论假设。（PsycINFO数据库记录（c）2019美国心理学会，保留所有权利）
