Kathleen Vohs, a social scientist at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, found the bias’s consequences included “myopic attention to a single causal understanding of the past (to the neglect of other reasonable explanations) 4.
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One way this misinterpretation happens is in assuming the causes of past events were much simpler than they were. “It’s often hard to convince seasoned decision-makers that they might fall prey to hindsight bias.” “If you feel like you knew it all along, it means you won’t stop to examine why something really happened,” wrote Roese 3. In contorting the past to fit a narrative that he had known the market would crash all along, even when he didn’t, the investor might listen to his incorrect intuition and get burned yet again. I’m really good at figuring out what’s going to happen.’ You begin to see outcomes as inevitable that were not.”įor instance, once burned by not getting out of the stock market before a crash, investors might avoid getting back in the markets, even when they logically know it’s the right thing to do. “The important thing to know about hindsight bias is that it not only changes how you see the world, but also how you see yourself in it,” Neal Roese, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, told the New York Times.
![hindsight buas hindsight buas](https://www.metrotrekker.com/metro/australia/perth/images/_xl/erskine_perth_041_xl.jpg)
When we misinterpret our thinking that preceded an outcome, it can color our judgments for future predictions. Was the cancer as obvious and the radiologist as incompetent as they now seemed? Or did knowing the outcome make it impossible to blame the radiologist for making the wrong call? The jury had to decide whether to convict the radiologist based on how much they attributed to the benefit of hindsight. The other radiologists’ opinions couldn’t be trusted because they had succumbed to “hindsight bias.” It was only in hindsight that the cancer could be easily spotted. The radiologist was innocent, his lawyer claimed, because without knowing there was something to find in the scans, he had made a reasonable diagnosis. After all, why else would a lawyer ask doctors to give an x-ray a second look? The radiologist’s attorney defended his client by claiming that the other radiologists only spotted the cancer because they already knew what to look for. The doctors corroborated they could all see it.The doctors agreed the patient had suffered a clear case of medical malpractice. In the trial, the patient’s attorney showed the initial x-rays to other radiologists, who had no trouble identifying the tumor. The patient decided to sue the doctor who missed the tumor. Now, because of the bad test results, there was little time for treatment. The radiologist who did the original exam found nothing out of the ordinary. Three and a half years earlier, he’d had the same chest radiograph done as part of a routine examination. Shocked, the man struggled to understand how this could have happened. Though the tumor had been growing for years, if left untreated, the man would die of the disease within 16 months. A biopsy confirmed the worst: malignant thymoma, a cancer hiding between the lungs consuming the patient’s body from the inside out 1. His physician recommended a radiograph of his chest to identify the root of the issue, which revealed a large tumor. In 2000, a 69-year-old man began experiencing a persistent cough, chest discomfort, and weight loss.