Metacognitive Experiences and Human Judgment

Theories of judgment have emphasized the influence of what comes to mind—the content of people's thoughts. But recent research shows that metacognitive experiences accompanying thinking, like a sense of the ease or difficulty with which information comes to mind, qualify the conclusions that people derive from thought content. The case of hindsight bias and attempts to remove that bias (debiasing) illustrate this. After an event outcome is known, people display hindsight bias by exaggerating its inevitability, believing they “knew it all along.” The magnitude of hindsight bias varies with the ease or difficulty that known or alternative outcomes come to mind; the usually observed hindsight bias may even reverse when outcomes are difficult to bring to mind or increase when alternatives are difficult to bring to mind. Implications of metacognitive experiences can extend to other biases and their debiasing, as well as to how people make sense of the past more generally.

[1]  Jay J.J. Christensen-Szalanski,et al.  The hindsight bias: A meta-analysis , 1991 .

[2]  M. Pezzo,et al.  Surprise, defence, or making sense: What removes hindsight bias? , 2003, Memory.

[3]  N. Schwarz Metacognitive Experiences in Consumer Judgment and Decision Making , 2004 .

[4]  R. Hastie,et al.  Hindsight: Biased judgments of past events after the outcomes are known. , 1990 .

[5]  B. Fischhoff,et al.  Hindsight is not equal to foresight: The effect of outcome knowledge on judgment under uncertainty. , 1975 .

[6]  Fred B. Bryant,et al.  A Meta-Analysis of Research on Hindsight Bias , 2004 .

[7]  Norbert Schwarz,et al.  Accessible Content and Accessibility Experiences: The Interplay of Declarative and Experiential Information in Judgment , 1998, Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

[8]  Norbert Schwarz,et al.  Integrating Temporal Biases , 2004, Psychological science.

[9]  F. Strack,et al.  An inferential approach to the knew-it-all-along phenomenon , 2003, Memory.

[10]  A. Tversky,et al.  Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases , 1974, Science.

[11]  F. Strack,et al.  Furrowing the Brow May Undermine Perceived Fame: The Role of Facial Feedback in Judgments of Celebrity , 2000 .

[12]  Baruch Fischhoff,et al.  Judgment under uncertainty: For those condemned to study the past: Heuristics and biases in hindsight , 1982 .

[13]  N. Schwarz,et al.  Accessibility experiences and the hindsight bias: I knew it all along versus it could never have happened , 2002, Memory & cognition.

[14]  Erin M. Harley,et al.  The "saw-it-all-along" effect: demonstrations of visual hindsight bias. , 2004, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[15]  David Mazursky,et al.  Does a surprising outcome reinforce or reverse the hindsight bias , 1997 .

[16]  N. Schwarz,et al.  Debiasing the hindsight bias: The role of accessibility experiences and (mis)attributions , 2003 .

[17]  Lawrence J. Sanna,et al.  Judgments over time : the interplay of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors , 2006 .

[18]  N. Schwarz,et al.  When debiasing backfires: accessible content and accessibility experiences in debiasing hindsight. , 2002, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.