ABSTRACT
When musing over past events, how inevitable do they seem? A sizeable literature on the hindsight bias tells us that we are disposed to believe we “knew it all along” that such events would occur. In his seminal article, Fischhoff (1975) argued that this inclination is caused by a relatively automatic and unconscious sense-making process (creeping determinism) that focuses attention on outcome-consistent information and away from outcome-inconsistent information. More than two decades of research, and over 120 published articles1 pro vide a wealth of evidence for the ubiquity of the hindsight bias-it has been shown in medical diagnoses, presidential elections, legal decisions, accounting, sporting events, and myriad other domains (see Christensen-Szalanski & Willham, 1991, and Hawkins & Hastie, 1990, for reviews). This paper, however, addresses those instances in which the hindsight bias does not occur. Consider a stockbroker who advises her clients, in good faith, to purchase many shares of a certain stock, but then learns that the stock has “crashed”. Will the stockbroker later believe that she knew that this would happen? Or did voters supporting President Clinton respond that they “knew it all along” that he was having an affair with Monica Lewinsky? Surely there are times when we don’t think that we knew it all along. With few exceptions, however, the extant literature has not addressed the conditions under which we do not exhibit the hindsight bias.
