Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Hindsight And Causality, David Wasserman, Richard O. Lempert, Reid Hastie

Articles

When people know how an event turned out, they are usually unable to reproduce the judgments they would have made without outcome knowledge. Furthermore, they are unaware of their inability to recapture their pre-outcome state of mind. This tendency to overestimate what they would have known without the outcome knowledge is called "hindsight." An experiment explored the moderating effects of the type of cause to which the outcome was attributed on the magnitude of the hindsight effect. When the outcome was attributed to unforeseeable "chance" factors, such as an unexpected storm or an earthquake, the hindsight effect was virtually eliminated. …