← all facts
memory
You rewrite history to make yourself seem clairvoyant.
Once an outcome is known, you experience hindsight bias, which makes you overestimate how predictable that event was.
Fischhoff found that when people are told the outcome of a historical event, they struggle to reconstruct their original uncertainty. You believe you knew it all along because your brain smooths out the narrative after the fact. You lose the ability to see how much you did not know.
You are perpetually convinced that past events were obvious results.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Fischhoff (1975)
- What the check found
- The claim accurately describes the hindsight bias as established in psychological literature and correctly identifies the primary 1975 study by Baruch Fischhoff.
- Confidence
- Solid, with limits
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.