Hindsight Bias In Times of Crisis [Covid-19 Edition]
Channel: Brains Applied
Date: 2020-04-04

Why will so many people criticize their government because of how they handled Covid-19? Are these criticisms justified? In this video, I discuss the hindsight bias (A.K.A. The knew-it-all-along bias) and how it affects our perception of events.

No matter how your government will handle the current Corona crisis, according to some people on social media and in the press, it will never be good enough. Many will say that they should have acted already months ago. Some of these comments might be justified (because some governments are handling the crisis very bad), while for others it isn't that simple. From a psychological perspective, the corona crisis will be a great example of the hindsight bias.

The hindsight bias was discover in the seventies of the last century when researchers of the University of Jerusalem conducted an experiment. The results showed that participants' estimations of the probability that an event would occur was significantly different before the event, in comparison to the estimation as remembered after the event. Depending on whether the event happened or not, the remembered probability estimation became higher or lower.

But the hindsight bias didn't just occur there. It occurs in many different scenarios and one study found that the hindsight bias is very prevalent on Wikipedia pages about disasters. This is especially bad as the bias can make people suffer from psychological myopia. Psychological myopia causes one to see only the most obvious explanation while missing other potential explanations. On top of that, people can become overconfident in their skills to predict similar scenarios because, in hindsight, their predictions were always right.

The question remains: Why does it happen?
How did you feel about Covid-19 back in January? Do you remember? Probably not, because back then, it was a virus in some faraway country and it didn't have an influence on our life at all. So instead, people tend to rely on the information (and emotions) that they currently have available. And if we manage to remember such old information, we have a tendency to remember only the information that is consistent with what we know right now while neglecting other information.

On top of that, humans really dislike random events. We try to find an explanation for everything. As such, we often sometimes find simple and incorrect cause-consequence relations that do not consider luck. And the easier your explanation seems to be, the less open you are for other explanations.

The last factor is people's ego: it's a pity, but most of them are very fragile. As such we often try to protect ourselves while blaming others. Studies have shown when something went wrong in a situation where we are in control (e.g. Work, our relationships), we are more likely claim that the things which happened couldn't be predicted and that we wouldn't have been handle them in another way. However, when we are mere bystanders, like during the corona crisis or during elections, we all of a sudden tend to claim that the outcome could be foreseen and that every dumbass could have expected the things that happened. Even though we probably would have made exactly the same mistakes.

Check out the video, I hope you like it and of course:
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Music by Bensound.com
University of Jerusalem picture by Avraham Graicer, Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_University_of_Jerusalem#/media/File:HADASSA_HOSPITAL_MT._SCOPUS_JERUSALEM.jpg
World Trade Center picture by Robert (on Flickr), Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks#/media/File:North_face_south_tower_after_plane_strike_9-11.jpg

References:
Carli, L. L. (1999). Cognitive reconstruction, hindsight, and reactions to victims and perpetrators. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25(8), 966-979.
Fischhoff, B., & Beyth, R. (1975). I knew it would happen: Remembered probabilities of once—future things. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 13(1), 1-16.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow.
Oeberst, A., von der Beck, I., Back, M. D., Cress, U., & Nestler, S. (2018). Biases in the production and reception of collective knowledge: the case of hindsight bias in Wikipedia. Psychological research, 82(5), 1010-1026.
Roese, N. J., & Vohs, K. D. (2012). Hindsight bias. Perspectives on psychological science, 7(5), 411-426.