ABSTRACT
The hindsight bias has proven to be robust; it has been demonstrated for different types of knowledge: episodes, world facts and in some real-world settings. In general, most traces of causality will begin with the outcome and work backwards in time until they encounter a human whose actions seem to be, in hindsight, inappropriate or sub-optimal. Fischhoff originally demonstrated the hindsight bias in a set of experiments that compared foresight and hindsight judgments concerning the likelihood of particular socio-historical events. Experiments on the hindsight bias have shown that: people overestimate what they would have known in foresight, they also overestimate what others knew in foresight and they actually misremember what they themselves knew in foresight. They found that people exhibit more of a hindsight bias when they are given a causal explanation for the outcome than when the outcome provided is due to a chance event.
