Hindsight and Causality

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. When no causal attribution was provided or when a plausible "deterministic" cause (human skill or lack of skill) was cited, subjects' judgments showed sizable hindsight effects. These. findings are interpreted as supporting Fischhoff's "creeping determinism" hypothesis and as providing evidence that the hindsight effect is a by-product of adaptive learning from feedback.

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