Hindsight bias: the knew-it-all-along phenomenon
Historians and physicians alike are constantly fighting an invisible beast: the hindsight bias, also known as creeping determinism, which is the tendency for people to perceive past outcomes as having been more predictable than they actually were.
Linked to distortions of our memories, the hindsight bias causes us to think we knew how an event would unfold, even before the event happened. It’s the typical “I knew it!” we hear so often in conversations. Very often, we actually didn’t know.
The hindsight bias is likely to be caused by many connected processes rather than one single factor. To understand the cognitive processes behind the hindsight bias, researchers have created three separate models.