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memory
You rewrite your history to suit your present.
After learning an outcome, you shift your past confidence to make the result seem inevitable.
Your brain has trouble reconstructing what you did not know at the time. You integrate new information into your memory so seamlessly that you lose access to your previous uncertainty. The past feels like a clear trajectory rather than a series of probabilities.
You are an expert at predicting what has already occurred.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Fischhoff, 1975
- What the check found
- Baruch Fischhoff's 1975 paper, 'Hindsight ≠ foresight', is the seminal work that identified and named the hindsight bias, establishing the phenomenon described in the claim.
- Confidence
- Well replicated
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.