YAĞMUR ÇINAR (PSYC/II)
y.cinar@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
I’m pretty sure that most of us have said, “I knew that was going to happen,” at one point or another in our lives. After seeing the result or the ending of something, we sometimes say,
“Oh, I knew that she was going to act this way” or “I already saw that my team was going to win.” As we don’t really have the ability to see or predict the future, how can we believe that we already knew it beforehand?
During my Social Psychology class last week, we were given an in-class activity that was intended to elicit our opinions about an experiment. After we had read about the experiment, our professor asked who was not surprised by the result. We all raised our hands; in other words, everyone indicated that they had predicted the result of the experiment as the professor presented it. You would naturally think that this outcome would be expected, because everyone was given the same experiment scenario and the result was easily predictable. However, we were surprised to learn that in fact half of the class had been given a totally different result for the experiment – one that refuted the result given to the other half of the class.
So, even though we were looking at opposite results, we all stated that we were expecting the result we had been given. In reality, everyone had agreed with what they read not because they had really known the results, but because they were informed about them. This is an example of a decision trap called “hindsight bias”: overestimating the ability to predict a result that could not have been easily predicted. Simply put, hindsight bias is like saying “I knew it” when an expected or unexpected result takes place, in association with the belief that it was correctly predicted.
Imagine that you’re in a rush and you put your phone near the edge of your pocket. Then, because of your hurry, it falls to the ground and the screen cracks. I can hear your words. “I knew this was going to happen, I should’ve put it in my bag,” you say, and get mad at yourself. Please relax. You did not and probably could not have known what was going to happen, so there’s no reason to blame yourself. I’ve come to realize that most of us come down on ourselves too hard after unfortunate events. Instead of blaming yourself, you should know that the “I knew it” feeling is a little game your mind plays, and it’s actually impossible to know the outcome of an event in advance. Even if we know a lot about something, there’s always a bit of uncertainty as well. For example, we can predict that we’ll get an A on an exam – but we can’t be sure until the results come in.
So, now that you know what hindsight bias is, you can approach unpleasant situations from a different perspective by taking its effects into consideration.