Hindsight Bias: Understanding the Psychology Behind Our 20/20 Vision

Have you ever looked back on a decision you made and thought, “I should have seen that coming”? If so, you may have fallen victim to hindsight bias, a common cognitive bias that affects our ability to accurately judge the likelihood of events after they’ve already happened.

hindsight bias is the tendency to overestimate how predictable an event was, once you know the outcome. For example, if you correctly guess the winner of a sporting event, you might later believe that the outcome was more obvious than it actually was. Similarly, if you make a bad investment and lose money, you might think that you should have seen the warning signs all along, even if those signs were not clear at the time.

While hindsight bias might seem like a harmless quirk of human psychology, it can actually have serious consequences in many different domains, from personal finance to healthcare. By assuming that we should have known the outcome of an event, we might overlook important information or fail to learn from our mistakes.

In this article, I am going to explore the psychology of hindsight bias, the different types of hindsight…