Pennington D C, Rutter D R, McKenna K, Morley I E
Br J Soc Clin Psychol. 1980 Nov;19(Pt 4):317-24. doi: 10.1111/j.2044-8260.1980.tb00359.x.
Previous research on judgement under uncertainty has suggested that, when we know the outcome of some event, we perceive that outcome as more likely than when we do not have outcome knowledge. That is, in comparison with judgements made in foresight, judgements made in hindsight are biased in the direction of the outcome the judge believes to have happened. While the effect appears to be robust in the laboratory, it has very seldom been tested in real life. This experiment therefore went outside the laboratory, and examined women's estimates of the outcome of a pregnacy test. It was predicted that those who knew the result of their test (hindsight) would perceive that outcome as more likely than those asked to make the estimate before they knew the result (foresight). The prediction was supported only for women whose result was positive and, furthermore, the positive group made consistently higher estimates than the negative group, both in hindsight and foresight. The findings were therefore less marked and more complex than in previous laboratory research, and support the argument that experiments and materials must be constructed with salience for the subjects. The findings are interpreted in the light ot Tversky & Kahneman's (1974) work on heuristic rules of thinking.
先前关于不确定性判断的研究表明，当我们知道某一事件的结果时，我们会觉得这个结果比我们不知道结果时更有可能发生。也就是说，与前瞻性判断相比，后见之明的判断会朝着判断者认为已经发生的结果的方向产生偏差。虽然这种效应在实验室中似乎很显著，但在现实生活中很少得到检验。因此，本实验走出实验室，研究了女性对妊娠试验结果的估计。预计那些知道自己检测结果的人（后见之明）会比那些在知道结果之前被要求进行估计的人（前瞻性）觉得那个结果更有可能发生。这一预测仅在检测结果为阳性的女性中得到支持，此外，无论是后见之明还是前瞻性判断，阳性组的估计始终高于阴性组。因此，这些发现不如先前的实验室研究那么显著和简单，这支持了这样一种观点，即实验和材料的构建必须对受试者具有显著性。这些发现是根据特沃斯基和卡尼曼（1974年）关于思维启发式规则的研究来解释的。
