Hindsight Bias
Published in
3 min readFeb 6, 2017
Hindsight bias is the inclination of seeing an event (after it has occurred) as having been predictable all along despite there being few evidence indicating its predictability.
- Personal real life :
Once, I was a party and had an intuitive feeling that my phone was going to be stolen. I knew all along that it would have been robbed — yet, I didn’t do much about it. It is strange to say this but I kind of accepted that it was going to be stolen and even left my purse open during the party.
The next thing I know, my phone was long gone. My first thought was: “I KNEW IT! If only I had closed my purse and been a little bit more careful.”
- Examples in History:
- I believe that Donald Trump’s election was an example of a hindsight bias. Although there was little evidence in favor of Trump’s election, a lot of people, after he was elected, claimed that they knew all along that he would be elected.
- 9/11 was somewhat predictable seeing as the airplane control was very lenient and did not have strict regulations or x-rays before going aboard.
- Berlin trick accident. In 2016, I believe that, due to the refugee crisis and the recurring terrorist threats and attacks, I believe that it was an example of hindsight bias as people said that they knew all along that it would happen.
AOKs involved: History // Human Sciences // Natural Sciences
WOKs involved: reason, intuition, imagination, memory
- Roberta Mary Morgan & her work Pear Harbor: Warning and Decision
- The Pearl Harbor attack was an “extraordinary” and “supremely ordinary blunder”.
- It was a mistake of a very well-informed government
- It essentially defends that it was a failure of the intelligence agency and could have been prevented
- “”If our intelligence systems and all our other channels of information failed to produce an accurate image of Japanese intentions and capabilities, it was not for want of the relevant materials. Never before have we had so complete an intelligence picture of the enemy.”
- Source:
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