hindsight bias
Predictable only afterward
Hindsight bias is the tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that you would have predicted it all along.
Once you know how something turned out, it seems obvious—even inevitable: Looking back, the signs of the company's collapse were everywhere.
The bias distorts memory and inflates confidence in one's judgment.
Also called the "I knew it all along" effect.
- retrospectReflection on past events
- looking backRecalling what happened before
- 20/20Normal visual sharpness
- after the factFollowing an event's occurrence
- regretSorrow over past actions
shoulda · predictable · obvious · clear as day · inevitable · I told you so · armchair · second-guessing · wisdom · afterthought · memory · distortion · judgment · overconfidence · certainty · blame · revision · coulda
- memory errorsmemory leak, false memory, memory distortion, misattribution, confabulation
- cognitionthinking, reasoning, thought, cognition, remembering
- psychologypsychology, psychologist, therapist, psychiatrist, clinical psychology
- human flawsmistake, error, flaw, fault, failing
- behavioral economicsloss aversion, nudge, anchoring, heuristics, mental accounting
- Psychology ResearchStanford prison experiment, Pavlov's dogs, marshmallow test, classical conditioning, operant conditioning
hindsight, bias, hind, sight, biased, biases, biasing, sighted, sighting