The Bias of Hindsite

A good friend of mine referred to this in a conversation a little while ago, and it made me think. My initial reaction was, "yeah, I guess it's there," until further reflection made me realize how obviously it fits into everyday life.

I would be willing to be that this is one of the most used biases. Let's look at some situations:

First, you've got movies. You sit there watching the movie, and trying to figure out what's going to happen in the end. You make a few guesses, and then, when the end comes, there's almost always at least one of your guesses that fit the ending, and so you get to proclaim yourself the most intelligent being ever, and then tell about your ability to predict movies. Sure, you may have been leaning towards a different ending first, and you may notice all the clues AFTER you see the movie, and know what they're leading to...but what do we do? We attribute it all to the predictability of Hollywood, and the intelligence of ourselves.

Secondly, you've got situations. I can't count the number of times that I've been reading the scriptures, or studying about the pioneers, and then thought, "that was really dumb, if they'd have just tried to do things like this, then that wouldn't have happened." What happens to me later? I end up in a situation where I do something stupid, and people turn around and ask me why I did what I did. Usually, I don't have a good answer for it, but I can think of a million things that I could have done instead, and even should have done instead, as can almost anyone else that I talk to. In the end we get about 4 million different solutions to a problem that's already gone. Yeah, hindsite is 20/20.

There are times when this Bias isn't a bad thing though. It's what you've got to use to learn and progress in life. Though it, you start to see patterns and such, and then you end up (in theory) learning from those patterns what went wrong, so that you can improve your foresite...not a bad concept. I sure do wish I was better at it though...