Computer Animation of Traffic Accidents: Hindsight Bias and Judgments of Blame

Computer animation that vividly portrays traffic accidents are increasingly used as analytical and persuasive tools in the American tort system. As this technology continues to develop and its costs further decrease, animations are expected to attract a more diverse audience in areas such as driver education, collision avoidance training, motor carrier preventable accident reviews, reckless homicide investigations and preventable accident countermeasure research. Although impressive and intuitively useful, computer animation is still an emerging technology with benefits as well as pitfalls that are yet to be fully realized. While computer animation may clarify fast-unfolding events, such as traffic accidents, they may also exacerbate hindsight bias, defined as an increased certainty for the predictability of past events, after the events become known. In an experiment that compared judgments of drivers involved in traffic accidents presented via computer animation or text plus diagrams, computer animation was found to increase hindsight bias and make blame judgments more punitive toward the reactive but not the active driver. The impact of computer animation on hindsight bias is also discussed in light of earlier work on counterfactual thinking, point of view, actor-observer effects, and debiasing.

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