Things Make Sense in Retrospect - The Hindsight Bias

Depiction of Nostradamus

'I knew it all along!' How many times a day you tell that to yourself?

We humans tend to be very good at predicting events - after they had already occurred. We can even be called experts for that. Let me provide two examples:

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1. You receive a letter in the mail informing you that you have just been accepted to this illustrious college. You tell that to your mother and she replies: 'Of course, I had a strong feeling you were going to be accepted', when in fact she had expressed doubts about it to your father earlier this week - she doesn't remember that though.

2. While preparing to go camping, your father tells your mother he feels someone is going to forget something at home. As it turns out, you forget to take mosquito protection spray. While camping when this issue is brought up, your father replies: 'I was sure this would happen!'. If nothing was forgotten, he would not have said that - fake hunch.

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Think about it, if you go camping and you are to take, say, 60 items with you, what are the chances that you're going to forget something of use, anything? Unless you do very careful written planning, chances are you're going to forget something.

This is the third part of the series on human irrationality. Previously in this series:

1. Our Irrational Selves - The Priming Effect
2. Our Irrational Selves - The Confirmation Bias

The Hindsight Bias

Okay, let me give you another example. Remember Nostradamus? The famous French prophet of The Middle Ages?

He made numerous predictions about the future. I couldn't find one for which he was right. But you know there are people who truly believe in his prophecies and explain to you how right Nostradamus was, how enlighten he was, how far ahead he was of his time...

They seek and take passages out of context and fit in with their personal interpretations - after de facto.

For example, 'two big birds crashing into two tall statues'.

Did he even write this? Or is it just another hoax cooked by 9/11 conspiracy theorists?

Of course, even if the passage was actually written by him, it's meaningless. You can interpret it in hundreds of ways because it is not specific.

If Nostradamus would have written:

'In the day of September 11, 2001, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York are going to be hit by two airplanes', I would have converted myself into one his fanatics.

But none of his so called predictions were specific. They were wild concoctions of his trouble mind.

But, of course, it all makes sense in retrospect for the gullible human brain...

So, what is then the Hindsight Bias?

"Hindsight bias is the effect whereby people think that past events were predictable, or at least more predictable than they actually were. This is because after an event, the probability of it happening is, naturally, 100%.

The bias arises because people ignore the things that didn't happen or the things that didn't cause the event—known as the "availability heuristic". This allows people to point to specific causes of an event (such as a catastrophe) and ask, "Why wasn't something done about it?"*

Thanks to our human nature, we look for patterns and give them meaning once we find them. More often than not, we find patterns where there are none (see the face in the full moon?). We employ mental shortcuts, called heuristics, when dealing with patterns and when we're making judgments and decisions in the face of uncertainty.

In his book The Drunkard's Walk, Leonard Mlodinow points out:

"In general, heuristics are useful, but just as our manner of processing optical information sometimes leads to optical illusions, so heuristics sometimes lead to systematic error."

The hindsight bias leads to systematic error as well.

How to deal with it?

1. Adopt skepticism and pragmatism, even to your own thoughts

2. Learn to react to events, instead of trying to predict them

Instead of predicting a fixated scenario about the future, embrace uncertainty (very few people can do it - we hate uncertainty), and develop flexibility. This is how you prepare yourself to respond to a multitude of different future scenarios.

3. In dealing with people, give more importance to direct impression instead of past accomplishments

As Mlodinow points out:

"In these ways we can resist forming judgments in our automatic deterministic framework."

Ending Thoughts

I'll leave you in a positive note, with a great quote from The Drunkard's Walk:

"It is easy to see fine qualities in successful books or to see unpublished manuscripts, inexpensive vodkas, or people struggling in any field as somehow lacking. It is easy to believe that ideas that worked were good ideas, that plans that succeeded were well designed, and that ideas and plans that did not were ill conceived.

And it is easy to make heroes out of the most successful and to glance with disdain at the least. But ability does not guarantee achievement, nor is achievement proportional to ability."

It is then common-sense to think that in any complex undertaking, no matter how much you try and fail, if you keep trying, chances are you will eventually succeed.

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Image Credit

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Cristi Vlad, Self-Experimenter and Author