AN EARLY HISTORY OF HINDSIGHT RESEARCH

The first studies of hindsight bias reflected the confluence of two desires. One arose from being part of the heady early days of Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman’s heuristics–and–biases research program. As the paradigm evolved, the challenge for the participating graduate students was to find a heuristic to call one’s own or to find a way to elaborate one of the three “classics” (availability, representativeness, anchoring, and adjustment). Maya Bar Hillel and Ruth Beyth–Marom chose the latter route. However, I was still struggling to reconcile the political motives that had brought me to Israel, planning to live in a kibbutz for the rest of my life, with academic life—and its more realistic view of the pace of change in human affairs. For one meeting of the seminar, we read Paul Meehl’s (1973) “Why I Do Not Attend Case Conferences.” One of his many insights concerned clinicians’ exaggerated feeling of having known all along how cases were going to turn out. To me, this sounded a lot like the exaggerated claims of understanding political processes that permeated the political discussions to which I had long subjected myself. Those discussions often left me wondering, “If we’re so prescient, why aren’t we running the world?” Psychological research provided an opportunity (and an obligation) to discipline such observations with systematically collected evidence, interpreted in the context of evolving theory. It occurred to me that I might have my bias, if I could provide the evidence and theory. The evidence came first. The research group was very sensitive to the need for normative analysis, establishing the standard for evaluating performance. The task that provided the clearest demonstration of hindsight bias came in the initial study. President Nixon was about to leave for his historic trips to China and the Soviet Union. Ruth and I asked people to assess the probabilities of various possible outcomes (e.g., Pres. Nixon will meet Chairman Mao; Pres. Nixon will announce that the trip was a success). After the trips were over, we asked subjects to recall their predictions. Fortunately, we had the foresight to ask them what they thought had happened, so that we